To the casual observer Chifeng -- with its smoke stacks, crumbling apartment blocks and decrepit factories -- is just another industrial town trying to find its way in China's uncertain transition to a market economy.

A woman picks through the remains of a demolished house in Chifeng, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, January 2, 2007. Chifeng, typical of many poor and polluted inland cities in China, is an unlikely setting for a potential tourist hotspot. But all that could change come the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, for the city has been put on a list of tourist sites recommended by the Olympic Games organising committee.[Reuters]

But all that could change come the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, for Chifeng has been put on a list of tourist sites recommended by the Olympic Games organising committee.

Chifeng bills itself as the closest place from Beijing to experience the Inner Mongolian grasslands, where Genghis Khan's warriors roamed centuries ago and where his descendents still live.

The local government has high hopes the Olympic Games will draw foreign tourists to the city, creating jobs and easing the pain of unemployment caused by the closure or privatisation of the factories that used to be the city's economic mainstay.

"If we can get more visitors here on the tails of the Olympics, that's great," said Li Shuqing, 50, a laid-off worker who opened his own restaurant four years ago.

"For too long Chifeng has been remote, so I hope that we can be more connected to the outside world," Li added. "Maybe we can even get some foreign investment."

Yet Chifeng, referred to on its Chinese language travel Web site (www.cfly.net) as a "flourishing, outstanding tourist city" and a "tourist Mecca", may find it hard to attract large numbers of tourists.

The city has been judged so unworthy of tourism that English language guidebooks, including the iconic Lonely Planet, make not even a passing mention of it.

Indeed, foreign visitors are such an oddity that people stop to stare at them in the street.

"Why on earth would a foreigner want to come here?" said ethnic Mongolian Bataar as he smoked outside Chifeng's train station, built in a socialist-architectural style that was once considered de rigueur by Communist planners.

"There's nothing to see in Chifeng."

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