Hohhot Municipality Overview
Hohhot, sometimes spelled Huhehot or Huhhot. Hohhot, with the meaning of the green city in Mongolian, is also named as the Green City. It is a city in North-central China and the capital of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, serving as the region's administrative, economic, and cultural centre. Located in the middle-south of Inner Mongolia, south to the Yellow River and north to the Yinshan Mountain, which is a well-known city with distinctive ethnic features and numerous places of interest.
Located in the south central part of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot is encircled by the Daqing Shan. The climate is arid, with a cold winter, a hot summer, and strong winds, especially in spring. Winter temperatures generally go as low as -20 Celsius while summer temperatures can sometimes rise above 30 degrees Celsius in July and August. Hohhot is a popular destination for tourists during the summer months because of the nearby Zhaohe grasslands. More recently, due to desertification, the city sees sandstorms on almost an annual basis.
As of 2005, 87.3% is Han Chinese, 9.6% of the city's registered population is of ethnic Mongol origin, 1.6% is Hui, 1.2% is Manchu, and the rest belong to smaller minorities, including Korean and Uyghur. Most Han in Hohhot are descendants of people from Shanxi who have settled in the area over the past several decades, or those who have migrated from Northeastern China and Hebei province after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, supported by government initiatives at the time to promote the development of border regions. Having been integrated into mainstream urban society, most Mongolians in the city speak fluent standard Mandarin in addition to Mongolian. However, younger speakers are moving towards speaking Mandarin amongst themselves as well. A significant portion of the population is of mixed ethnic origin.
The majority of Hohhot residents can converse fluently in Mandarin, but there exists a linguistic divide between "old-town" folk (comprising today's Huimin District), with a large Muslim Hui minority, who tend to converse in raw Hohhot dialect, a branch of the Jin language from neighboring Shanxi province. This spoken form can be difficult to understand for a standard Mandarin speaker or even Mandarin speakers from the other side of the city. The newer and more educated residents, mostly concentrated in Xincheng and Saihan Districts, speak Hohhot-based Mandarin Chinese, the majority also with a noticeable accent and some unique vocabulary.
Kinds of historic sites and religious temples can be found in the city, thus it was called the "Zhao City" in the Ming-Qing Dynasty since it gathers many temples. The Tomb of Wang Zhaojun, which is the cenotaph for Wang Zhaojun, one of the Four Beauties in Ancient China, is widely known by the people. Moreover, Hohhot is a vast melting-pot of different nationalities, and the national religious places of interest, such as the Dazhao Temple, Xilituzhao Temple, the Five Pagoda Temple and the Grand Mosque, are all worth visiting.
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