The main downtown area is around the T-junction where Jinguyuan Lu meets Zhongzhou Zhong Lu. Here you'll find the Department Store, six storeys of shopping with a café in the basement, next door to the Xuangong Hotel. Head west down tree-lined Zhongzhou Zhong Lu for a kilometre, or take bus #9, #2, or trolleybus #102, and you come to Wancheng Park (daily 8am-6pm; ¥4), at its best in April when the peonies are blooming. Luoyang's peonies have been intensively cultivated and collected so that the city now boasts over 150 varieties, which have found their way on to every available patch or scrap of ground - a splendid sight. The peony motif is also everywhere in the city, from trellises to rubbish bins.

Out of season, Wancheng is just another park, with a melancholy zoo, and the river dries up and smells in winter. However, excavations undertaken in the park have revealed much of the Zhou capital of 771 BC including walls, palaces, temples and a marketplace, though none of this can be seen by the public. Across the suspension bridge in the northwest corner of the park there are also two Han tombs , which have yet to open to the public, apparently with some good early murals. Otherwise, almost all that has been left of the ancient cities has been gathered into the museum (Tues-Sun 8am-noon & 2-5.30pm; ¥12), just east of the park. There are five halls arranged chronologically, which at first, with no English captions and a surfeit of the bronze vessels that seem to characterize all provincial museum collections, look uninspiring, but get much better as you go on. Look in Hall 2 for the Shang bronzes and an endearing jade tiger from the Zhou; Hall 4 has some Indian-influenced Wei statuary , as well as a model farm from a Han tomb with a sow and her row of piglets; and in Hall 5 you'll find some comical Tang polychrome figures , including camels and a travelling merchant keeling over under the weight of his pack. Upstairs is an excellent new hall, in which well-presented relics, copiously captioned in English, are grouped by material - bronze, silver and jade - rather than by dynasty, an unusual system that here works very well, allowing direct comparisons across the centuries. As usual, the Tang wins hands down in the pottery section with their expressive camels and a hooknosed, pointy-chinned foreigner, and in gold and silver , where their ornate decorative objects show the influence of Persian and Roman styles. There are some strange little animal sculptures in the jade section that belong to the Xia and Shang, and in the bronze section, particularly extensive as the area around Luoyang entered the Bronze Age before the rest of China, a horse's harness from a Shang chariot.

Turn off the glossy main boulevards and you'll find the rutted streets lined with piles of rubble and stacks of identical brown apartment buildings, a marked contrast that illustrates how rapid and uneven the city's development has been. Head east from the train station along Dao Nan Lu and you pass a huge wholesale produce market selling apples, oranges and nuts, which enlivens a gritty street whose other main feature seems to be coke factories. South of here, and east of Xiguan roundabout, the alleyways of the old city are a rewarding area to browse around, preferably by bicycle as it's fairly spread out. The best alleys are those south of Zhongzhou Dong Lu, where whitewashed, half-timbered buildings house small family shops whose wares include seals (engraved with your name while you wait), tea and art materials.