Guangzhou, China

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Other names of Guangzhou:
Canton (Old name)

Adjective: Not applicable, Cantonese refers to the province of Guangdong

Guangzhou (From Wikipedia)
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Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province in southern China. The city was formerly known internationally as Canton City or simply Canton, after a French language transliteration of the city name in Cantonese. It is a port on the Pearl River, which is navigable to the South China Sea. As of the 2000 census, the city population was 9.94 million making it the most populous city in the province and the fifth most populous in China.

The Chinese abbreviation of Guangzhou is Sui (穗; pinyin: sùi; Jyutping: seoi6; Yale: seuīh) or sometimes GZ. This city has the nicknames of Wuyangcheng (city of five rams), Yangcheng (city of rams), Huacheng (city of flowers), or Suicheng. The city can also be refered to as the WuMengCheng (City of Wood Wools), a reference to a tall, native tree that produces wool fiber in its gorgeous red blossoms.

"Canton" was the convenient French romanisation for Europeans who during the colonial period generally did not understand ideographic characters (see exonym and endonym). When the term "Canton" is pronounced in French it provides a closer oral rendering of the name in its original Cantonese. Guangzhou is a Mandarin pronunciation of the Han ideographs.

History

It is believed that the first city built at the site of Guangzhou was Panyu (番禺; the locals pronounced this in Cantonese as Poon Yu) founded in 214 BC. The city has been continuously occupied since that time. Panyu was expanded when it became the capital of the Nanyue Kingdom (南越) in 206 BC.

The Han Dynasty annexed Nanyue in 111 BC, and Panyu became a provincial capital and remains so until this day. In 226 AD, the city became the seat of the Guang Prefecture (廣州; Guangzhou). Therefore, "Guangzhou" was the name of the prefecture, not of the city. However, people grew accustomed to calling the city Guangzhou, instead of Panyu.

Arabs and Persians sacked Guangzhou (known to them as Sin-Kalan) in AD 758, ² according to a local Guangzhou government report on October 30, 758, which corresponded to the day of Guisi (癸巳) of the ninth lunar month in the first year of the Qianyuan era of Emperor Suzong of the Tang Dynasty. ³

During the Northern Song Dynasty, a celebrated poet called Su Shi visited Guangzhou's Baozhuangyan Temple and wrote the inscription "Liu Rong" (Six Banyan Trees) because of the six banyan trees he saw there. It has since been called the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees.

In 1711, the British East India Company established a trading post in Guangzhou. The Qianlong Emperor restricted foreign traders to a district in Guangzhou under the Canton System in 1760.

Guangzhou was one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened by the Treaty of Nanking (signed in 1842) at the end of the First Opium War between United Kingdom and China. The other ports were Fuzhou, Xiamen, Ningbo and Shanghai.

In 1918, "Guangzhou" became the official name of the city, when an urban council was established in Guangzhou. Panyu became a county's name south of Guangzhou. In both 1930 and 1953, Guangzhou was promoted to the status of a Municipality, but each promotion was cancelled within the year. Japanese troops occupied Guangzhou between October 12, 1938 and September 16, 1945.

After the communist take-over, urban renewal projects in the city improved the lives of many residents. New housing on the shores of the Pearl River provided homes for the poor boat people. Reforms by Deng Xiaoping, who came to power in the late 1970s, led to rapid economic growth due to the city's close proximity to Hong Kong and access to the Pearl River.

As labor costs increased in Hong Kong, manufacturers opened new plants in the cities of Guangdong including Guangzhou. As the largest city in one of China's wealthiest provinces, Guangzhou attracts farmers from the countryside looking for factory work. Cantonese links to overseas Chinese and beneficial tax reforms of the 1990s have aided the city's rapid growth.

In 2000, Huadu and Panyu were merged into Guangzhou as districts, and Conghua and Zengcheng became county-level cities of Guangzhou.

• Interface is very similar to Google Maps
• Click on the orange squares, they represent major metropolitan areas where detailed street maps are available.
• Very detailed mapping for the country side including names of many small villages
• Subway routes included for major cities, but stations are not shown.
• Accurate highway information but some projection errors are found in known areas.
• User-friendliness: 4/5
• Printer-friendliness: 4/5 (Use the print command on the top right hand corner)

• First Interactive Maps of China
• Accurate information on streets and highways of most major cities in China.  Relative lack of information on rural areas.  As many other maps of China, it has difficulties catching up with the extreme speed of infrastructure construction. Some erroneous information on roads, for instance, a few highways are not actually highways.
• Select city, province or regions in the middle column and go from there.
• The Zoom tool is on the right margin of the map window.
• User-friendliness: 3/5
• Printer-friendliness: 4/5

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