Guangzhou

Guangzhou began as Panyu, founded in 214 BC when Qin armies reached the far south, and it became the capital of the kingdom of Nanyue under Zhao Tuo before the Han empire absorbed it in 111 BC. Its position near the mouth of the Pearl River made it China's southern window on the sea. Under the Tang dynasty a large community of Arab and Persian merchants lived in the city, which had an office of maritime trade, and the mosque and the oldest temples date their foundation to those centuries.

From 1757 the Qing confined all Western trade with China to Guangzhou under the system Europeans called the Canton System, conducted through a guild of licensed merchants at the Thirteen Factories on the riverbank. The tea trade flowed out and opium flowed in, and after Lin Zexu destroyed confiscated opium at Humen in 1839 the First Opium War followed. Defeat opened other ports and cost Guangzhou its monopoly; after the Second Opium War the sandbank of Shamian was leased to Britain and France as a foreign concession.

The city then became a centre of revolution. Hong Xiuquan of the Taiping was born in a Hakka village in what is now the city's Huadu District, Sun Yat-sen studied and organised here, and in the 1920s Guangzhou was the base of the Nationalist government, home to the Whampoa Military Academy and to the failed uprising of 1927. Industry and population grew after 1949, but the transformation came with the reforms launched in 1978, when Guangdong's proximity to Hong Kong made it China's export workshop. The Canton Fair, running since 1957, kept the old trading role alive, and since 2000 the city has spread east into Tianhe and south across the river.

Guangzhou is the cultural capital of the Cantonese world. Cantonese is the language of the street, the market and the tea house, although Mandarin is the language of schools and offices and of the millions of migrants from inland provinces. Cantonese opera, with its high singing, painted faces and martial acrobatics, is listed by UNESCO as intangible heritage and is still performed in parks and private clubs as well as theatres; amateur singers gather most mornings beside the lakes of Liwan.

Lingnan culture — the term for the region south of the mountain ranges — has its own architecture and art. Grey-brick Xiguan townhouses with carved wooden screens and coloured glass, arcaded qilou shophouses built for rain and sun, ceramic figures crowding temple ridgelines, and the Lingnan School of painting all belong to the city. So does a long history of leaving: emigrants from Guangdong built Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, North America and Australia, and many clan halls were funded from abroad.

Daily manners are practical and commercial. Guangzhou people have a reputation in China for caring more about business and food than about politics, for superstition about lucky numbers and words, and for keeping festivals thoroughly: flower markets before the Lunar New Year, dragon boat visits between villages at Duanwu, and mooncakes ordered weeks in advance for Mid-Autumn. Ancestral halls and household shrines remain in ordinary use, and lion dances open new shops.

About 18.7 million people live in the city's administrative area, which stretches from the hills of Conghua in the north to the delta flats of Nansha. It is the capital of Guangdong, China's most populous province, and sits within a nearly continuous urban belt that also takes in Foshan, Dongguan and Shenzhen. A large share of residents were born elsewhere: factory and service workers from Hunan, Guangxi, Sichuan and further inland, and a long-established African and Middle Eastern trading community around the wholesale markets of Xiaobei and Sanyuanli.

The economy runs on trade, logistics, cars, chemicals, and increasingly on finance, software and design in Tianhe. Wholesale markets remain a defining industry, selling clothing, leather, electronics, tea and dried goods in whole streets devoted to one trade. The port has moved downstream to Nansha, and the old riverside warehouses have become restaurants and creative quarters.

The day starts early with tea houses filling by seven, moves indoors during the hot afternoons, and comes alive again after dark, when riverside promenades, night markets and outdoor tables are busiest. Housing costs, long commutes from the outer districts and the summer risk of typhoon flooding are the everyday concerns, along with the school places and residence registration that determine what services migrant families can use.

Guangzhou is where Cantonese cooking is at home, and its guiding idea is that the flavour of a fresh ingredient should be tasted rather than covered. The daily ritual is yum cha, morning tea, which begins early and can last for hours: pots of oolong or pu'er with dim sum brought in bamboo steamers — har gow shrimp dumplings in translucent wrappers, siu mai, cha siu bao barbecued pork buns, cheung fun rice rolls, chicken feet in black bean sauce and egg tarts.

Roast-meat shops hang char siu, crisp-skinned roast pork and soy-marinated geese in their windows, sliced over rice at lunch. Wonton noodles in a clear prawn-roe broth, congee simmered smooth with fish or preserved egg, steamed fish with ginger and spring onion, and clay-pot rice cooked to a crust are the everyday dishes. Every household has its slow-boiled soups, with herbs and dried ingredients bought by weight at markets such as Qingping, prescribed according to the season and the weather.

Sweets and snacks are their own tradition: double-skin milk pudding from Shunde just downstream, sesame paste, water chestnut cake, ginger-milk curd and the lotus seed mooncakes the old restaurants sell at Mid-Autumn. The city's famous saying that Cantonese eat anything with four legs except a table is a joke about variety, but it points at a real appetite for unusual ingredients and for freshness above all else. Tea remains the drink, with Phoenix oolong from the hills near Chaozhou and Anxi Tieguanyin widely served.