Zhejiang

• 1. Introduction

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  Zhejiang is a coastal province in East China whose name translates, roughly, as "Crooked River" -- a nod to the winding Qiantang that drains its highlands and forms Hangzhou Bay. Sit with that image for a moment: a province named for a bend in a river, and yet this same stretch of coastline holds more islands than any other mainland province of China, more than three thousand of them scattered across the East China Sea. Its capital, Hangzhou, was once so admired that the proverb "Above there is heaven; below there is Suzhou and Hangzhou" became a fixture of Chinese poetry. Marco Polo visited and called the city "the finest and noblest city in the world." Today Zhejiang ranks fourth in GDP among all Chinese provinces, with a nominal output of US$1.27 trillion as of 2024. How did a hilly, resource-poor province -- where hills account for about 70 percent of the total land area -- come to be regarded as one of the wealthiest corners of China? And how did a place shaped by Neolithic settlers, rival kingdoms, and centuries of silk trade become the birthplace of both Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and Alibaba founder Jack Ma? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Kingdom of Yue

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  Around 528 BC, scribes in North China transcribed a song sung by boatmen from a people called the Yue. The scribes recorded the words phonetically because the language was mutually unintelligible with every dialect spoken in the north. That song is one of the earliest direct traces of the culture that once dominated what is now northern Zhejiang. The kingdom of Yue appears in chronicles from the Spring and Autumn period, and those chronicles claim its rulers descended from Yu the Great, the semi-legendary founder of the Xia dynasty. The Sword of Goujian -- an artifact bearing bird-worm seal script -- survives as physical evidence of the kingdom's craft. Under King Goujian, Yue absorbed its long-standing rival and fully annexed the lands of the kingdom of Wu in 473 BC. The Yue kings then moved their capital from their ancestral home near Mount Kuaiji, in present-day Shaoxing, to the former Wu capital at present-day Suzhou. The expansion proved short-lived. Without a southern rival to balance against them, the kingdom of Chu opposed Yue directly and destroyed it in 333 BC. Yue's former territory passed to the Qin Empire in 222 BC, organized into a commandery named for Kuaiji -- a place-name that would keep reappearing in Zhejiang's story for centuries.

• 3. The Grand Canal and Imperial Wealth

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  Hangzhou's status as a tax-generating powerhouse for successive Chinese empires rested on a single piece of infrastructure: the Grand Canal. After Zhejiang was incorporated into the Sui dynasty, its economic richness was turned toward the Sui's ambitions, and the emperor ordered the restoration and expansion of what became the Grand Canal of China. The canal regularly transported grain and resources from Hangzhou and its hinterland, along the shores of Hangzhou Bay and through Suzhou, all the way to the North China Plain. When the Sui collapsed, the Tang dynasty presided over what the source describes as a centuries-long golden age. Zhejiang remained an important economic center within the Tang's Jiangnan East Circuit. After the Tang fell in 907, the entire territory of modern Zhejiang came under the control of the kingdom of Wuyue, whose king Qian Liu chose Hangzhou as his capital. The Wuyue period was brief but transformative. Even after the kingdom was absorbed by the Song dynasty around 960, shrines to the Wuyue kings spread across former Wuyue territories. Many of those shrines -- known as "Shrine of the Qian King" -- still stand today, with the most visited example near West Lake in Hangzhou. In 1127, Hangzhou became the Song dynasty's capital under the name Lin'an, and it was then suspected to have been the largest city in the world.

• 4. Silk, Celadon, and the Export Trade

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  Longquan, a city in southern Zhejiang, lends its name to one of the most recognizable ceramic traditions in Chinese history. Greenware ceramics made from celadon had been produced in the area since the 3rd-century Jin dynasty, but the form reached its peak during the Southern Song and Yuan periods. Longquan greenware is defined by its thick, unctuous glaze in a particular bluish-green tint over an undecorated light-gray body. Yuan-period Longquan pieces shifted toward thinner, greener glazes on larger vessels, with shapes and decoration drawn from Middle Eastern ceramic and metalware traditions. These were produced in large quantities for export to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and later Europe. By the Ming dynasty, production quality had fallen enough that the Longquan kilns eventually lost their primacy to the kilns of Jingdezhen in neighboring Jiangxi. Silk traced a parallel arc. In 1832, Zhejiang was exporting silk alongside paper, fans, pencils, wine, dates, tea, and what the source calls "golden-flowered" hams. Silk production ranked Zhejiang second among China's provinces. Longjing tea -- grown in Hangzhou and still considered one of the most prestigious teas in China -- was already part of that export economy. The province's reputation as the "Land of Fish and Rice" was accurate in the most literal sense: rice was the main crop, and the Zhoushan fishery, off the island-studded coast, grew into the largest fishery in the entire country.

• 5. War, Occupation, and Division

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  During the First Opium War, the British navy defeated Qing forces at Ningbo and Dinghai. Under the Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1843, Ningbo became one of five Chinese treaty ports opened to nearly unrestricted foreign trade. Wenzhou followed in 1876 as Zhejiang's second treaty port. World War II brought a different kind of disruption. Much of Zhejiang was occupied by the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of China. After the Doolittle Raid, B-25 crews who came down in China were sheltered by anti-Japanese locals across the province. The Imperial Japanese Army launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign specifically to intimidate the Chinese out of helping downed American airmen. At least 10,000 civilians died in Jiangxi during the search for those men. After Japan's defeat, the Chinese Civil War brought a final partition. The Republic of China retreated to Taiwan, but the ROC continued to hold a scatter of coastal islands in Zhejiang, including Yijiangshan, the Dachen Islands, Pishan, and Nanji. ROC President Chiang Kai-shek -- himself a native of Zhejiang -- appointed General Hu Zongnan to establish a provincial government on the Dachen Islands in September 1951. The PRC captured Yijiangshan in January 1955. The ROC evacuated the Dachens in February of the same year, and the PRC occupied them by the end of that month, finally bringing the entire province under a single government.

• 6. The Zhejiang Model

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  During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, Zhejiang's economy was effectively frozen. The agricultural policy of the period prioritized grain at the expense of industrial and cash crops. Mao Zedong's self-reliance policy cut off maritime trade, which hit the port cities of Ningbo and Wenzhou hard. No major railroads were built in southern Zhejiang during this period, leaving transportation there poor. After the reform and opening up in 1978, Zhejiang took a different path. Local governments adopted permissive business policies. The province developed what analysts began calling the "Zhejiang model": a focus on entrepreneurship, an emphasis on small businesses responsive to market demand, large public investment in infrastructure, and mass production of low-cost goods for domestic and export markets. The per capita disposable income of urban residents reached 55,574 yuan in 2018, growing at an annual real rate of 8.4 percent. Rural residents saw per capita disposable income of 27,302 yuan the same year, growing at 9.4 percent. Alibaba and NetEase, both headquartered in Zhejiang, accelerated the province's push into digital economy development. Some economists have raised concerns that the Zhejiang model depends on cheap raw materials and public utilities in ways that are not sustainable, and that the province's many small manufacturers of low-cost goods may struggle to shift toward more technologically advanced industries. The economic center of gravity within the province has been drifting southeastward from Hangzhou toward the Wenzhou-Taizhou corridor.

• 7. Language, Opera, and Local Identity

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  Zhejiang's mountainous interior created conditions for one of the most linguistically fractured regions in China. Most residents speak varieties of Wu Chinese, but those Wu dialects diverge sharply. In parts of southern Zhejiang, a valley's dialect can be completely unintelligible to speakers in the next valley a few kilometers away. Mandarin and Huizhou dialects appear along the Anhui border; Min dialects appear near Fujian. The Yue boatman's song from 528 BC was, in a sense, the first recorded evidence of this separateness. Since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Mandarin has been promoted as the standard language nationwide, and most residents educated after 1978 can speak at least some Mandarin. Even so, a Zhejiang accent is detectable in almost everyone who grew up there. Yue opera -- known as Yueju -- originated in Shengzhou and is traditionally performed by actresses only, taking both male and female roles. It ranks among the most prominent forms of Chinese opera. Other regional opera traditions include Yongju from Ningbo, Shao opera from Shaoxing, Ouju from Wenzhou, and Wuju from Jinhua, each embedded in a distinct local culture. Zhejiang cuisine reflects the same regional layering: it is formally divided into Hangzhou, Shaoxing, and Ningbo styles, and counts as one of the eight great culinary traditions of China. Hangzhou-style cooking emphasizes freshness; Shaoxing leans on its rice wine culture and fermented flavors; Ningbo specializes in seafood from that long, island-studded coast.

• 8. Research, Politics, and the Road Ahead

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  Hangzhou ranked 10th globally in scientific research output as tracked by the Nature Index; Ningbo ranked 85th and Wenzhou 130th. Zhejiang University stands as the province's flagship institution in Hangzhou, alongside the China Academy of Art and a cluster of specialized technical universities. The province's political history carries its own weight. Of the fourteen Party Secretaries Zhejiang has had since 1949, none were native to the province. Xi Jinping served as Party Secretary from 2002 to 2007 before rising to become General Secretary and President. Zhang Dejiang, who served from 1998 to 2002, became Chairman of the National People's Congress. The province's inaugural Party Secretary, Tan Zhenlin, was one of the leading voices against Mao's Cultural Revolution during the February Countercurrent of 1967. Jiang Hua, who served from 1956 to 1968, later served as the chief justice in the Special Court case against the Gang of Four in 1980. The Hangzhou Bay Bridge, connecting Haiyan County to Cixi, is the longest bridge over a continuous body of sea water in the world. Zhejiang was also the first province to pilot China's common prosperity program, a policy initiative aimed at reducing the gap between rich and poor -- a fitting test case for a province whose wealth has always been unevenly distributed between its flat, developed north and its mountainous, poorer south.