One gate, two habits The gate on the north side of Wuhou Shrine does two jobs. On the left, visitors queue for tickets to the halls; on the right, a woman in a padded jacket walks straight through, because the same grounds are a public park. Nobody stops her. The shrine is a national key cultural relic and the city's main Three Kingdoms site, and it is also where people exercise, walk laps and meet. The two uses share a paving pattern and a row of trees, and they do not compete for the same space. In the morning the path carries more walkers than ticket-holders. A ticket buys the halls; the path is free. Bags are checked, the barrier lifts, and both streams move in along the same path, at their own speeds.

A ruler and a minister in one compound The complex is a Ming and Qing reconstruction, not the building of the Three Kingdoms. Its plan is the argument. The hall of Liu Bei, the ruler, and the hall of Zhuge Liang, the minister, stand in one enclosure, with Liu Bei's tomb behind. A joint shrine to a ruler and his minister is unusual enough to state plainly: loyalty is given an address in the same courtyard as power. The Three Kingdoms story is set out in the exhibition rooms, in objects, maps and labels. But the plan teaches first. Before you read anything, you walk between two men who were not equals and are housed as though they were. The Three Kingdoms is the story; the Ming and Qing are the fabric, and keeping those two apart is the first useful thing to do here.

The wall that carries nothing Behind the halls runs the Red Wall, a curved red wall with bamboo behind it. The wall is low, the bamboo is thin, and the path between wall and planting is narrow enough that a group has to slow down and go through single file. The bamboo is not a grove; it is a narrow stand, planted to be looked through rather than walked in. Most visitors stop here to photograph, and the photographs come out much alike, which is the point of a wall like this: it gives a face or a shoulder a flat warm ground and a green edge. The wall holds no inscription and holds nothing up. Its work is to make a path legible, and to make a queue look like a walk.

Huiling, and the route out Huiling is the tomb of Liu Bei: an earth mound with a wall and a gate, and incense burning in front of it. The tomb is the quietest part of the route and the least explained. People bow, step back, and continue toward the exhibition rooms. The route is fixed, gate and hall and wall and tomb and shop and gate, and a fixed route is how a narrative becomes a habit. School groups move in tight blocks. Older men walk the perimeter path without looking up at the halls. The mound is raised and enclosed, and it asks for a slower pace than the halls do. The shrine keeps the story; the neighbourhood keeps the path, and neither is a performance for the other.