Hohhot's metro system is one of a very small number in the world to display trilingual signage on every station, platform, and rolling stock panel — Chinese characters, traditional Mongolian script (written vertically), and English. The Mongolian script, which flows from top to bottom in vertical columns, is one of the few traditional alphabets that has survived relatively intact in daily use in Inner Mongolia, and seeing it deployed throughout a modern mass transit system is unexpectedly striking.
The Mongolian announcements on trains are spoken in standard Mongolian rather than a local dialect, and the preservation of the script in public signage is a deliberate policy of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The metro is also worth riding simply as a way to move around the city: it is clean, cheap, and covers the main areas visitors use. The stations around Dazhao Temple and Xinhua Square are the most useful for sightseeing; the line toward Hohhot Dong connects to the high-speed rail station.