Guangzhou
South China's ancient trade port on the Pearl River
Guangzhou has been trading with the outside world for two thousand years, and it shows. This vast southern Chinese city, the urban core of a Pearl River delta agglomeration that runs into the tens of millions, has long been the country's commercial doorway, the place where merchants from across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe came to buy silk, porcelain, and tea. Today its twice-yearly Canton Fair still draws buyers from every corner of the globe.
The city sprawls across the head of the Pearl River delta in subtropical Guangdong, where the Pearl River braids toward the South China Sea. Low and humid, it shares its delta with Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and a cluster of other manufacturing cities in one of the densest urban regions on the planet. The river remains a working artery, lined with container terminals and crossed by bridges, while the modern skyline clusters around the Canton Tower's twisting steel lattice.
Known to Western traders as Canton, the city was for much of the Qing dynasty the only Chinese port open to European commerce, a restriction that helped trigger the Opium Wars. It later became a cradle of revolutionary politics, the base from which Sun Yat-sen and others challenged the imperial order. Since the reforms of the 1980s, Guangzhou and its delta neighbors have become the workshop of the world, manufacturing a staggering share of global consumer goods while the city itself grows ever more cosmopolitan.