神州都邑 A Town of the Middle Kingdom
那獃子低著頭，只是笑。過了吊橋，入城門內，又見那大街上酒樓歌館，熱鬧繁華，果然是神州都邑。那呆子低着头，只是笑。过了吊桥，入城门内，又见那大街上酒楼歌馆，热闹繁华，果然是神州都邑。
逐句解 Line by line
The Idiot dropped his head and did nothing but grin.
He is not sorry. 著 is zhe, marking the lowered head as a state he stays in, and 只是笑 — just kept laughing — undercuts the show of obedience completely. He has done exactly what Pilgrim told him and enjoyed himself thoroughly.
They crossed the drawbridge, passed inside the gate, and saw on the main street wine-shops and singing-houses, noisy and splendid — truly a city of the divine land.
都 is dū here, a metropolis, and this is the only place in the chapter where the character is not the everyday adverb meaning all, which is read dōu and occurs fifteen times. 神州 is an ancient literary name for China itself, the Divine Land, so the sentence pays this Indian town the highest compliment the narrator has available: it is as good as home. The picture is assembled from the two things that mark a prosperous Chinese city in any period — places to drink and places to hear singing.
The drawbridge is the detail to notice. This is a real fortified town with a moat, gate and bridge, and the pilgrims walk in as ordinary travellers rather than arriving on clouds.
Calling an Indian city by China's own honorific name is either the highest praise in the book or a small blindness, and the novel does not settle which. Everything the pilgrims admire about Yuhua turns out to be something that reminds them of home.
Between the crowd's joke and the poem that follows, this is the chapter deciding what kind of place it is in. Not a demon kingdom, not a paradise: a busy provincial capital with wine-shops.