Marco Polo's favourite city withstands the tests of time

WHEN Venetian traveller Marco Polo passed through Kinsai in the 13th century, he praised the Celestial City as ''pre-eminent, among all others in the world, in point of grandeur and beauty.'' Today the name of the city has changed to Hangzhou, but the beauty has remained. Post-war city planning didn't bury the city in grey concrete as it did in so many other cities, and Hangzhou preserved some of the charm and splendour from the days when it was the capital of the southern Song dynasty.

Marco Polo travelled four days to Hangzhou from nearby Suzhou by land. I took the plane from Guangzhou and landed in less than two hours on the sparsely lit landing strip.

After claiming baggage in the arrival hall, a little dilapidated aluminium shack with a modern conveyor belt built into it, I squeezed into a bus to the city.

Hangzhou is a prime holiday destination for mainland Chinese, on par with Guilin; this doesn't mean, however, that there is also a developed tourism infrastructure.

In the hotel where I had made bookings, a curt employee brushed me off with ''meiyou''. I did not know what she meant, but I certainly wasn't welcome. After getting the same treatment at a couple of nice, colonial-style hotels, I gave up trying to stay somewhere with character and checked into the faceless Overseas Chinese Hotel.

A student and part-time travel guide told me later that it was off-season and that most hotels were empty. ''Meiyou'' in this situation translated something like: ''I am state-employed and don't feel like working right now''.