Guangzhou

• 1. Introduction

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  Guangzhou, the southern Chinese city also called Canton, saw its Baiyun International Airport briefly become the busiest airport in the world by passenger traffic in 2020. Worldwide travel restrictions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic had upended air travel everywhere, and this airport rose to the top of the list. The city is the capital of Guangdong province and sits on the Pearl River, about 120 km northwest of Hong Kong. It is far older than any airport. Its history runs back more than 2,200 years, and it was a major terminus of the Silk Road. This documentary asks why one city carries two names, Guangzhou and Canton. It asks what drew Persian, Portuguese, British and American ships to this stretch of river, and why Chinese emperors alternately welcomed and banned them. It asks how a place of rice legends and flower gardens became a headquarters for revolutions. And it asks who fills the streets of Guangzhou today.

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• 2. Five Rams, Many Names

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  The English word Canton comes from the Portuguese Cidade de Cantão, a blend of local pronunciations of Guangdong. It originally named the walled city, though some authors later confused it with the whole province. The Postal Map Romanization adopted it for Guangzhou, and it stayed official until the city's name was changed to Guangzhou. As an adjective, Canton still describes the people, language, cuisine and culture of the city and the surrounding Liangguang region. One 19th-century spelling was Kwang-chow foo.

  The name Guangzhou is the official Mandarin romanization, and its first character means broad or expansive. The city took the name from the ancient Guang Prefecture once the prefecture's government sat there. Before that, the town was called Panyu, a name that survives in one of the city's districts today. Nobody is sure where Panyu came from. Eleven different explanations have been offered, including that it referred to two local mountains.

  Medieval Persians such as Al-Masudi and Ibn Khordadbeh knew the city as Khanfu. That name descended from Guangzhou Fu or Guangfu, titles it earned as a prefecture capital. Under the Southern Han, the city was renamed Xingwang Fu.

  The nicknames come from stories. The old Temple of the Five Immortals holds five stones, said to be the sheep or goats ridden by Taoist heroes who introduced rice farming around the time of the city's foundation. From those animals came the names City of Rams and City of the Five Rams. The earlier name City of the Immortals comes from the same tale. The newer nickname City of Flowers is usually read as a simple nod to the area's fine greenery.

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• 3. The Kingdom of Nanyue

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  A stockade of bamboo and mud is the earliest picture the records offer. A settlement now known as Nanwucheng stood in the area by 1100 BC, and tradition describes it as little more than that stockade. Panyu itself was founded in 214 BC on the eastern bank of the Pearl River. It became the seat of the Qin Empire's Nanhai Commandery and a base for the first invasion of the Baiyue lands in southern China. Legend says its soldiers were so vigilant that they kept their armor on for three years.

  In 204 BC, General Zhao Tuo made Panyu the capital of a new kingdom, Nanyue, after the Qin fell. He stayed independent through the struggle between Chu and Han. In 196 BC, he negotiated recognition of that independence in exchange for nominal submission to the Han. Archeologists have found that Panyu was a busy commercial center. Alongside goods from central China, they have uncovered remains that originated in Southeast Asia, India and even Africa.

  Zhao Tuo was succeeded by Zhao Mo and then by Zhao Yingqi. When Zhao Yingqi died in 115 BC, his younger son Zhao Xing was named heir, in violation of Chinese primogeniture. By 113 BC, the boy's Chinese mother, the Empress Dowager Jiu, had persuaded him to submit Nanyue to the Han Empire as a formal part of it. The native prime minister Lü Jia answered with a coup. He killed the Han ambassadors, the king, the king's mother and their supporters. An ambush then annihilated a Han force sent to arrest him.

  Emperor Wu of Han took offense and launched a massive war by river and sea. Six armies, under commanders including Lu Bode and Yang Pu, took Panyu and annexed Nanyue by the end of 111 BC. The Zhizhi Temple, founded in AD 233 from the estate of an official of the Wu kingdom, is said to include the residence of Zhao Jiande, the last of the Nanyue kings.

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• 4. Strangers at the Port

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  The Old Book of Tang described Guangzhou as an important port in southern China. Direct routes connected it to the Middle East. One record tells of a Chinese prisoner who returned home from Iraq twelve years after being captured at Talas.

  The relationship was often violent. While China was undergoing the An Lushan Rebellion, Arab and Persian pirates sacked the city on the 30th of October 758. In revenge, Chinese rebels killed thousands of Arabs and Persians in the Yangzhou massacre of 760. In 878, the rebel Huang Chao killed about 200,000 Arab, Persian and other foreigners in the Guangzhou massacre. The city's Jews, Christians and Parsis died with them. The port was closed for fifty years.

  The Later Liang governor Liu Yan then used Panyu as the base for a "Great Yue" or "Southern Han" empire, which lasted from 917 to 971. The region enjoyed considerable cultural and economic success in those years. Records from the 10th to 12th centuries show that the large foreign communities were not only men. They also included "Persian females".

  Travelers left their impressions. Odoric of Pordenone wrote that Guangzhou was as large as three Venices in area and rivaled all of Italy in the crafts it produced. He noted the abundant ginger and the large geese and snakes. In the 14th century, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited and described how the Chinese built their large ships in the port's shipyards.

  Then the door swung shut. Soon after declaring the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor reversed his earlier support for foreign trade and imposed the first of a series of sea bans. Private foreign trade became punishable by death for the merchant and exile for his family and neighbors. In 1384, the maritime intendancies of Guangzhou, Quanzhou and Ningbo were closed. Legal trade shrank to tribute delegations sent by or to official representatives of foreign governments.

  The Portuguese arrived after conquering the Melaka Sultanate. Rafael Perestrello reached Guangzhou in 1516 as a passenger on a native junk. His report induced Fernão Pires de Andrade to sail there with eight ships the next year. His voyage was understood as spying. His brother Simão and others tried to monopolize trade, enslaved Chinese women and children, turned to piracy and fortified the island of Tamão. Rumors even spread that the Portuguese were eating children.

  The Guangzhou administration was ordered to drive them off. It defeated them at the Battle of Tunmen and in Xicao Bay. It also held a diplomatic mission hostage in a failed attempt to force the restoration of the sultan of Malacca, who was counted a Ming vassal. After keeping the captives in cangues for most of a year, it executed 23 of them by lingchi.

  The Portuguese, called "Folangji", then smuggled goods with the help of local pirates at Macao, Lampacau and St John's Island. Leonel de Sousa legalized their trade with bribes to Admiral Wang Bo, and the 1554 Luso-Chinese Accord followed. The Portuguese promised to raise no fortifications and to pay customs dues. Three years later, after helping the Chinese suppress their former pirate allies, they were allowed to warehouse goods at Macau instead of Guangzhou itself.

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• 5. The Canton System

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  In October 1646, Zhu Yuyue, brother of the Longwu Emperor, fled by sea to Guangzhou, the last stronghold of the Ming empire. On the 11th of December, he declared himself the Shaowu Emperor and borrowed his imperial regalia from local theater troupes. He led a successful offensive against his cousin Zhu Youlang. On the 20th of January 1647, the Ming turncoat Li Chengdong sacked the city on behalf of the Qing, and Zhu Yuyue was deposed and executed.

  The Qing became somewhat more receptive to foreign trade after gaining control of Taiwan in 1683. The Portuguese from Macau and Spaniards from Manila returned, as did private Muslim, Armenian and English traders. From 1699 to 1714, the French and British East India Companies each sent a ship or two every year. The Austrian Ostend General India Company arrived in 1717, the Dutch East India Company in 1729, the Danish Asiatic Company in 1731 and the Swedish East India Company the year after. The first independent American ship came in 1784, and the first colonial Australian one in 1788.

  By then, Guangzhou was one of the world's greatest ports, run under the Canton System. For a long time, it was the only Chinese port accessible to Europeans. Its main exports were tea and porcelain. The Thirteen Factories, the only legal place to conduct foreign trade with China from 1757 to 1842, stood here. As a meeting place for merchants from all over the world, the city made a major contribution to the rise of the modern global economy.

  The city itself was low and crowded. In the 19th century, most buildings had only one or two stories. Exceptions included the Flower Pagoda of the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees and the guard tower known as the Five-Story Pagoda. Brick walls ran about six miles around the city, stood 25 feet high and were 20 feet wide. Eight main gates and two water gates were guarded by day and closed at night. A moat and canals served as the sewer, emptied daily by the river's tides.

  A partition wall with four gates divided the northern old town from the southern new town near the river. Beyond it stretched the suburb of Xiguan. Boats of fishers, traders and the Tanka, or boat people, almost entirely hid the riverbank for about four miles. Homes often had a storefront facing the street and used their courtyards as warehouses. A network of signal towers could relay a message to Beijing, about 1200 miles away, in under 24 hours. The Canton System held until the First Opium War broke out in 1839.

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• 6. Wars and Revolutions

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  On the 18th of March 1841, the British captured Canton after a series of battles in the Pearl River Delta. The Second Battle of Canton came two months later. After the Qing's 1842 treaty with Great Britain, Guangzhou lost its privileged trade status as more treaty ports opened to more countries. Chaos followed. The Punti and Hakka fought clan wars from 1855 to 1867, in which one million people died. Local Chinese destroyed the foreign trade facilities during the Arrow War of 1856-58. The international community moved to the outskirts, and most trade shifted to Shanghai.

  Guangzhou then became a staging ground for overthrowing the Qing. The uprisings of 1895 and 1911 were predecessors of the successful 1911 Revolution. The 72 revolutionaries whose bodies were found after the 1911 attempt are honored as the city's 72 Martyrs.

  Sun Yat-sen's fortunes rose and fell here. In 1917, Prime Minister Duan Qirui's abrogation of the constitution triggered the Constitutional Protection Movement. Sun headed the Guangzhou Military Government, backed by dissolved parliament members and southwestern warlords. It fell apart when the warlords withdrew support, and Sun fled to Shanghai in November 1918. The Guangdong warlord Chen Jiongming restored him in October 1920. On the 16th of June 1922, Sun was ousted in a coup and escaped aboard the warship Yongfeng. He rallied supporters from Yunnan and Guangxi, counterattacked and set up a government in the city for the third time.

  From 1923 to 1926, Sun and the Kuomintang used Guangzhou as a base to conquer the northern warlords. In 1924, the Kuomintang made the momentous decision to ally with the Communist Party and the USSR. The party reorganized along Leninist lines. The allied government set up the Peasant Movement Training Institute in the city, and Mao Zedong directed it for one term. With Soviet funds and weapons, Sun and his military commander Chiang Kai-shek built an army and trained its cadres at the Whampoa Military Academy.

  The alliance did not last. After Sun died in 1925, the left-wing leader Liao Zhongkai was assassinated in August, and the right-wing leader Hu Hanmin, the suspected mastermind, was exiled to the Soviet Union. On the 20th of March 1926, the Canton Coup let Chiang solidify his control over the Nationalists and their army. In 1927, communists launched the Guangzhou Uprising, led by Ye Ting and Ye Jianying, but the defense of the city failed. In 1931, Chen Jitang hosted a separate Nationalist government in Guangzhou in opposition to Chiang. Japan occupied the city by the end of December 1938 during the Canton Operation.

  Guangzhou was captured by the Communists on the 14th of October 1949. Defeated Nationalist forces blew up the Haizhu Bridge across the Pearl River as they retreated, amid a massive exodus to Hong Kong and Macau. The Cultural Revolution later destroyed many of the city's temples, churches and other monuments. Since the 1980s, proximity to Hong Kong and ties to overseas Chinese made Guangzhou one of the first beneficiaries of Deng Xiaoping's opening up. The People's Republic also built new housing on the banks of the Pearl River to help the city's boat people adjust to life on land.

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• 7. The Floating Population

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  The 2020 census counted 18,676,605 permanent residents in Guangzhou as of the 1st of November 2020. That was 47.05 percent more than the 12,700,800 recorded in 2010. About 86.19 percent lived in urban areas. Migration shaped the total. In 2008, domestic migrants from other Chinese provinces made up 40 percent of the population, and the 2020 census recorded 9,378,825 members of the floating population.

  Mayor Wan Qingliang once told an urban planning seminar that the city faced a serious population problem. Its land-use targets assumed 10.33 million registered residents, but with migrants the real number was nearly 15 million. The household registration system, called hukou, limits migrants' access to housing, schools and public benefits. In May 2014, legally employed migrants in Guangzhou were allowed to receive a hukou card that let them marry and seek permission for pregnancies in the city, rather than returning to their official hometowns.

  Some newcomers came from much farther away. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, citizens of sub-Saharan Africa who had first settled in the Middle East and Southeast Asia moved to Guangzhou in unprecedented numbers. They were responding to the 1997/98 Asian financial crisis. Today the city is home to thousands of African immigrants, including people from Nigeria, Somalia, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

  In 2010, Cantonese and Mandarin were each the native tongue of roughly half the city's people, since most Cantonese people speak Cantonese first and most migrants speak forms of Mandarin. A Jinan University survey of Guangzhou youths born in 2000 or later found that 69 percent could speak and understand Cantonese. Another 20 percent could understand it but not speak it, and 11 percent had no knowledge of it. A 2018 report by Shan Yunming and Li Sheng found that 90 percent of residents are bilingual in Cantonese and Mandarin. Pride in the language and a lively Cantonese entertainment scene help it survive, and since the 2020s some schools have offered limited Cantonese classes.

  The Hakka are another large group. Hakka speakers account for about 40 percent of Zengcheng District and a third of Huadu District. Guangdong province also has more than 130 boys for every 100 girls, an even more unbalanced ratio than the 112-120 found in most of China. Many overseas Chinese in the United States, Canada and Australia trace their ties back to Guangzhou.

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• 8. Pearl River Metropolis

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  In 2021, Guangzhou's economy reached ¥2,823 billion, or US$444.37 billion in nominal terms, second in South-Central China only to Shenzhen. The city is the main manufacturing hub of the Pearl River Delta. By 2018, more than 30,000 foreign-invested companies had settled there, according to China Briefing. They included 297 Fortune Global 500 companies with projects and 120 with headquarters or regional headquarters in the city.

  The Canton Fair, formally the China Import and Export Fair, was inaugurated in the spring of 1957. It is held every April and October and is the oldest and largest trade fair in China. From its 104th session, it moved from the older Liuhua complex to the new Guangzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center in Pazhou. Forbes ranked Guangzhou the best commercial city in mainland China for three consecutive years, 2013-2015.

  The city sits at the center of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, an urban agglomeration of about 70 million residents. On the 19th of March 2009, the Guangzhou and Foshan municipal governments agreed to set up a framework to merge the two cities.

  The Guangzhou Metro opened its first line in 1997, making the city the fourth in mainland China with an underground railway, after Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. As of 2025, the network has nineteen lines covering more than 700 km. A bus rapid transit system opened in 2010 along Zhongshan Road. It averages one bus every 10 seconds in a single direction and carries 1,000,000 passenger trips daily. Its stations, around 260 m long, are the longest of any such system in the world.

  The street plan changed with the times. In June 1919, work began on demolishing the city wall to make way for wider streets and tramways, and it took three years. Effective the 1st of January 2007, the municipal government banned motorcycles in the urban areas of Guangdong. By the end of 2006, 6,500 buses and 16,000 taxis already ran on LPG, and the city used more LPG vehicles than any other in the world.

  Baiyun International Airport opened on the 5th of August 2004. It replaced the old Baiyun airport, which had operated for 72 years and sat very close to the city center but could not meet rising air traffic demand.

  From the 12th to the 27th of November 2010, Guangzhou hosted the 16th Asian Games. The first Asian Para Games followed, from the 12th to the 19th of December. In 1991, the city had hosted the first FIFA Women's World Cup. In the 2010s, its football club won eight national titles between 2011 and 2019. It also won the AFC Champions League in 2013 and 2015, then lost 3-0 in the Club World Cup semifinals to Bayern Munich and to Barcelona.

  The present city spans 7434.4 square kilometers on both sides of the Pearl River. Baiyun Mountain is locally called the city's "lung", and the highest point, Tiantang Peak, reaches 1210 m. The climate is humid subtropical, with a monsoon season from April through September. Snow is almost unknown. The last recorded snowfall fell on the 24th of January 2016-87 years after the one before it.

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