Taicheng, the county seat, has a modest collection of early twentieth-century buildings that reflect the overseas Chinese money that flowed back from North America. Arcaded shophouses with Western ornamental details — columns, pilasters, and geometric friezes applied to Cantonese building forms — line the older commercial streets, a vernacular version of the same hybrid architecture seen more elaborately in the diaolou towers of the surrounding countryside.
The streets are not preserved as a heritage zone; they are simply the old part of town, still in use, with the buildings in varying states of maintenance. Walking them in the morning, when the market stalls are set up and the bakeries are selling pineapple cakes and egg tarts to schoolchildren, gives a better sense of contemporary Taicheng than anything designed for visitors. The pace is emphatically Cantonese delta: unhurried, sociable, and oriented around food.