Legend tells how Guangzhou was founded by Five Immortals riding five rams, each of whom planted a sheaf of rice symbolizing endless prosperity - hence Guangzhon’s nickname, Yang Cheng (Goat City). Myths aside, a set- dement called Panyu had sprung up here by the third century BC, when a rogue Qin commander founded the Nanyue Kingdom and made it his cap- ital. Remains of a contemporary shipyard uncovered in central Guangzhou during the 1970s suggest that city had contact with foreign lands even then: there were merchants who considered themselves Roman subjects here in 165 AD, and from Tang times vessels traveled to Middle Eastern ports, introducing Islam into China and exporting porcelain to Arab colonies in distant Kenya and Zanzibar. By 1405 Guangzhou’s population of foreign traders and Overseas Chinese was so large that the Ming emperorYongle founded a special quarter for them, and when xenophobia later closed the rest of China to outsiders, Guangzhou became the country’s main link with the world. Restricted though it was, this contact with other nations proved to be Guangzhou’s - and China’s - undoing. From the eighteenth century, the British East India Company used the city as a base from which to purchase silk, ceramics and tea, but became frustrated at the Chinese refusal to accept trade goods instead of cash in return. To even accounts, the company began to import opium from India: addiction and demand followed, making colossal profits for the British and the Co Hong, their Chinese distributors, but rapidly depleting imperial stocks of silver. In 1839 the Qing government sent the incorruptible Commissioner Lin Zexu to Guangzhou with a mandate to stop the drug traffic, which he did by blockading the foreigners into their water- front quarters and destroying their opium stocks. Britain declared war and, with a navy partly fended by the opium traders, forced the Chinese to cede five ports (including Guangzhou and Hong Kong) to British control under the Nanking Treaty of 1842. Unsurprisingly, the following century saw Guangzhou develop into a revolutionary cauldron. It was here during the late 1840s that Hong Xiuquan formulated his Taiping Uprising (see p.458), and sixty years later the city hosted a premature attempt by SunYatsen to kick out China’s Qing rulers. When northern China was split by warlords through the 1920s, Sun Yatsen chose Guangzhou as his Nationalist capital, while a youthful Man Zedong and Zhou Enlai flitted in and out between mobilizing rural peasant groups. At the same time, anger at continuing colonial interference in China was channeled by unionism, the city’s workers becoming notoriously well organized and prone to rioting in the face of outrages perpetrated by the Western p0wen. However, many of Guangzhou’s leftist youth subsequently enrolled in militias and went north to tackle the warlords in the Northern Expedition, and so became victims of the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, Chiang Kai-shek’s suppression of the Communists (see p.399). A Red uprising in Guangzhou that December failed, leaving the city’s population totally demoralized. Controlled by the Japanese during the war and the Guomindang afterwards, they were too apathetic to liberate themselves in 1949, and had to wait for the PLA to do it for them. Few people would today describe the Cantonese as apathetic, at least when it comes to business acumen. Unlike many large, apparently modern Chinese cities, Guangzhou enjoys real wealth and solid infrastructure, its river location and level of development making it in many ways resemble a grittier, rougher-around-the-edges version of Shanghai. Hong Kong’s downturn since the handover and Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s has also encouraged southern businesses and wealthy entrepreneurs to relocate to Guangzhou, taking advantage of the mainland’s lower costs and better work opportunities. At the same time, Guangzhou is thick with China’s mobile rural community, often living below the poverty line: at any one time, a staggering one million migrant workers, many from the backblocks of Jiangxi and Anhui provinces, are based in Guangzhou - one fifth of the city’s total population.

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