Hohhot

The plain below the Daqing Mountains has been a frontier for two thousand years. The Han empire kept garrisons here against the Xiongnu, and the tomb mound honouring Wang Zhaojun, the court lady sent north in 33 BC to marry a Xiongnu ruler, stands on the southern edge of the modern city. Later the Tuoba Xianbei ruled from Shengle nearby before moving their Northern Wei capital to Datong, and the Liao left the White Pagoda east of town.

The city itself grew from 1557, when Altan Khan, ruler of the Tümed Mongols, began building the Dazhao temple on the Tümed plain; a walled town of blue-grey brick — Kökeqota, the blue city — rose around it, and Tibetan Buddhist teachers were invited in. The monastery was finished in 1579, and in 1578 Altan Khan gave the Gelug leader Sonam Gyatso the title Dalai, binding the Mongols to Tibetan Buddhism. After he came to terms with the Ming in 1570 they renamed the town Guihua in 1575. Under the Qing a second walled garrison town, Suiyuan, was built two kilometres to the north-east from the 1730s, and in 1913 the Republic joined the two as Guisui.

Trade with the caravan routes to Mongolia and Russia, and later the railway from Beijing in the early 20th century, made the city a commercial centre for wool, hides and tea. It changed hands during the Japanese occupation, when it briefly served a Mongol puppet administration, it was chosen as the seat of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1952, and in 1954 it took the Mongolian form of its name, Hohhot. Since the 1990s dairy processing, coal money from the west of the region and a cluster of universities have expanded it far beyond the old walls.

Hohhot is the administrative and cultural centre of Mongol life in China, though Mongols are a minority here and Mandarin is the language of the street. The traditional vertical script appears on every official sign, schools and a university teach in Mongolian, and the regional broadcaster, publishing houses and song and dance ensemble are based in the city. The morin khuur, the horse-head fiddle, and the long song are performed at official occasions and in restaurants, and urban Mongol families keep the summer festival calendar even when they no longer herd.

Tibetan Buddhism gives the old town its character. The Dazhao and Xilitu monasteries hold services, masked dances and crowds of worshippers at New Year, and monks in maroon robes are a common sight in the lanes. The Hui Muslim quarter north-west of the centre is equally established, with a mosque founded in the Qing period, halal butchers and restaurants, and a community descended from traders who came with the caravans.

Hospitality follows steppe rules even in the city: guests are pressed to eat, milk tea arrives before anything else, and a toast may be preceded by a song and by flicking a little spirit towards the sky and the ground. Blue silk scarves, the khadag, are given as a greeting gift. Wrestling is the popular sport, and the city takes pride in a dairy industry that supplies much of the country's milk.

About 3.4 million people live in the prefecture-level city, just under two million of them in its four urban districts and nearly three million across the wider built-up area. The population is largely Han Chinese, with substantial Mongol and Hui minorities, and the city has grown eastwards and southwards into districts of new tower blocks around the university campuses and the high-speed station.

Dairy is the signature industry. Yili and Mengniu, China's two largest milk companies, are both headquartered here and draw on farms across the plain, with processing plants, logistics yards and advertising visible throughout the city. Government, higher education — Inner Mongolia University among a dozen institutions — coal and rare-earth money from further west, chemicals and, more recently, data centres exploiting the cold and cheap power fill out the economy.

The day begins early with shaomai and milk tea, and ends late in the Muslim quarter's grill restaurants, where families eat outside through the short summer. Winter dominates the calendar: heating runs from October to April, cars are left plugged in, and outdoor life shrinks to the shops and the metro. Water is the long-term worry on this dry plain, along with dust storms in spring and the drift of young people towards Beijing for work.

Hohhot eats the two great Mongol food groups — the red foods of meat and the white foods of milk — alongside northern Chinese wheat cooking and Hui Muslim grilling. The local emblem is shaomai, steamed dumplings with frilled open tops, filled with minced mutton and spring onion and ordered by the weight of the dough, eaten for breakfast with brick tea and a dish of vinegar.

Mutton is the staple meat. Shouba rou is a plain boiled shoulder or rib eaten with a knife and a little salt; whole roast lamb is the banquet dish; and hotpots of thinly sliced lamb are winter food. Milk tea, suutei tsai, is salty, sometimes buttered and thickened with fried millet, and stands in for both drink and soup. The dairy shops of the old town sell milk skin, dried curd, milk tofu and milk sweets in blocks and knots, all of them keeping for weeks on the road.

The Hui quarter adds hand-pulled beef noodles, lamb skewers dusted with cumin and chilli, baked sesame breads and syrupy pastries. Shanxi's influence shows in oat-flour noodles and potato dishes brought by farming migrants, and the Hetao plain to the west supplies wheat flour, sunflower seeds and melons. Airag, lightly fermented mare's milk, and milk spirits belong to the grassland rather than the city, while beer accompanies a barbecue and baijiu the toasts at a formal dinner.