The ancient city walls of Guicheng (the original Mongolian city founded by Altan Khan in 1572) are mostly gone, but sections of the earthen ramparts survive in the southern part of the old town area, incorporated into parks and residential neighbourhoods. The surviving sections are not impressive by the standards of Xi'an or Nanjing, but they provide a physical connection to the city's founding moment and a quiet place to sit away from the commercial main streets.
A walk along the surviving section of the old south wall takes about twenty minutes and passes several interesting structures — a section of restored wall with a small museum, a courtyard garden used by elderly residents for morning exercises, and a stretch of street that retains the low, traditional building scale of the Qing-era city. The Guicheng district around the walls is one of the few areas of Hohhot where the street pattern, if not the buildings, still follows the original Mongolian city layout.