Qinghua is a small market town in northern Jincheng prefecture that preserves a largely intact Ming-dynasty street grid and a scattering of old commercial buildings along its main lane. It is considerably less visited than the more prominent fortified village sites, which works in its favour — you can walk through without the organised tour groups, and some of the residents still use the ground-floor shopfronts in the way they were originally intended. The old bridge at the entrance to the town is a well-proportioned Ming structure over a small river.
Qinghua works well as a stopping point on the way to or from the Huangcheng compound — it sits on a reasonable route between Jincheng city and the northeastern village cluster, and the twenty minutes it takes to walk through the old streets makes a useful change of pace from the larger ticketed sites.