What appealed most as I wandered around the city was the beckoning short mountains surrounding the town - I imagined the view from the crest to be a pretty good reason to attempt one of the more manageable ones. Zhang Yi and I set out after lunch. It was a splendidly bright day - the mountain (called 'Chimney Mountain') wasn't too difficult to climb, and after a few minutes it became clear just how rewarding a view it was going to be. The tall grass was yellowy straw, the wind blew the cold off the snow up to the summit where we sat chewing long stems and looking out over the city. There seemed to be several centres over the plain in addition to ours at the railside, long roads around the bases of the mountains connected them a steep taxi fare away. The soil was poor from centuries of mineral extraction and millennia of agriculture, deep pits of eroded soil slid away from distant roadsides. 

Dominating the horizon was another mountain around three times the elevation of ours, which was named by the famous Dowager Ci Xi during her flight from the Nationalist takeover of Beijing. Zhangjiakou was the terminating station of the first railway from Beijing, and provided a natural escape route as popular revolution forced closure on the centuries of Manchurian dynastic rule. She was a notorious nasty, having surrendered Chinese lands to foreigners without significant resistance, and diverting money for her own vainglorious projects at a time when the military forces were struggling with foreign onslaught. After staying the night in Zhangjiakou, she apparently walked out to a view of the mountain which seemed to her to resemble a crowing rooster (a connection I failed to make myself) and thus named it Ji Ming Shan which means 'Crowing Mountain'. It was a challenge that seemed difficult to meet, but I resolved to discover more about it once we returned home.

We were late, having taken a detour around the river behind the coal factory, shallow and thinly iced over. Zhang Yi was in trouble with her father, apparently wolves roam these parts, although attacks are reportedly rare, and so our excursion was a little dangerous. Furthermore, her uncle had organised my temporary accommodation in a nearby luxury hotel via a friend of a friend. My stay was to be free, the reward appeared to be the acquisition of face by all involved in being seen to be helping a foreign friend. I shook hands with a few official looking businessmen who arrived to escort me there. The hotel was hardly first-class, but it was a marked improvement on Lan Ting in Shenyang, with three rooms and several beds. 

Oddly, I appeared to be the only occupant of the hotel. I asked how such a business could possibly sustain itself - the idiom in Chinese that was given by way of reply meant 'falsely ostentatious state-owned enterprise'. The whole business was itself an exercise in face for the Government, who supported it in the hope of impressing the scarce VIP who chanced upon it.

Fortunately, someone else had had the same idea as I'd had when looking out towards Ji Ming Shan - climbing it - only they'd had the idea a thousand or so years beforehand and had gone to the trouble of making it a little bit easier by carving rough pathways along the side. It was still a terribly dangerous climb for a layman, but soon became an attraction not to be missed once I'd heard that there were various Buddhist structures near and on the summit. Apparently, the mountain had been a favourite holy resort for an earlier Dowager in Chinese history, and the structures built on the side date back to the Ming Dynasty several hundred years ago.

Zhang Yi and her uncle joined me on the climb. A lower point of ascent was punctuated by a few smaller halls for prayer and rest; after almost an hour we reached a large temple on a crest halfway to the peak. There were two plain clothed devotees present who showed us around the temple grounds, which presented a cold view of the coal dust blanket cloaking Zhang Jia Kou. Here, above the smoke, the air was relatively pure and cold. Life at the temple is not without some luxuries though - we were invited into the quarters of the resident monks who were absent at that time, shopping in the town at the base. Equipped with prayer gong, thermos, telephone and colour TV, prayers were evidently interspersed with the watching of soap operas and the eating of sunflower seeds.

The ascent to the summit took more than an hour, slippery with untouched snow and sharp drops, breathing was careful and cold, steps were hesitant and slow. One cavern contained red rubble believed to cure any disease. Signs printed in Chinese and mangled English reminded travellers to take care on the climb, one encouraged us to be 'fumily happy'.

At the top, a bridge carefully connected two neighbouring peaks, one of which was once a smaller residence for monks. Simple huts, now locked, sided small prayer areas. The complex dates back for centuries, now loudspeakers have been fixed to a post to send out blessings over Zhangjiakou. Tablets bore carved comments from Emperors past, carved by their own hand, many still legible with the thoughts and writings of these earlier rulers of China.

Most of the buildings are recent reconstructions, however; the original bridge and temples were destroyed by, with no surprise, the Red Guard. It was during the Cultural Revolution that it was decided that traditional temples were symbolic enemies of modern Communist China, throughout the country zealous teenagers under official sanction steadily razed China's cultural treasures, making the same difficult climb we'd made to desecrate the extraordinary and the sacred.

We wandered down carefully, the descent being just as difficult as the climb. A welcome rest at the monastery gave us the chance to meet one of the monks who'd returned; he opened the small store to sell us some trinkets before heading off to his warm television.

Back at the base of the mountain, evening blued the rubble and dirt, small shacks smoked out their coal like old men's pipes, and their occupants filled old kettles for weak tea and washing water. We passed a sole old gravestone with the Zhang family name on it; this turned out to mark the place of rest for Zhang Yi's grandfather's older brother. The night passed quietly before Zhang Yi and I headed back for Beijing on an early train the next morning, leaving behind us a small city of little note still withheld from the forces which have changed the country's capital and which have begun to transform Shenyang. Zhangjiakou is seldom the destination of tourists or even the hardiest travellers, still a world unto itself in which new generations continue to trace over the life lines of the old.