Tianjin

Tianjin grew where the Grand Canal met the Hai River, the point at which grain shipped north from the Yangtze delta was transferred for the last stage to Beijing. A garrison town, Tianjin Wei, was established here in 1404 under the Ming, and the walled Chinese city that followed lived on salt, shipping and the canal trade, with the Tianhou temple to the sea goddess at its centre.

The modern city was made by foreign force. After the Second Opium War the treaties of 1858 and 1860 opened Tianjin to trade, and Britain, France and later Germany, Japan, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Belgium, with an American presence as well, carved concessions out of the riverbank, each with its own laws, police and architecture. The Boxer movement reached the city in 1900, when foreign troops fought their way through it on the road to Beijing and afterwards levelled the Chinese city's walls. Under the Republic, Tianjin's concessions became a refuge for deposed politicians, including the last Qing emperor, who lived here in the 1920s and 1930s.

Japanese forces occupied the city from 1937 until 1945, and the People's Liberation Army took it in January 1949. Industry expanded afterwards, and Tianjin became a major manufacturing centre under central control. The Tangshan earthquake of 1976 caused heavy damage and casualties here as well. Since the 1990s the city has built the Binhai New Area on the coast as a port, petrochemical and technology zone, opened the high-speed line to Beijing in 2008, and restored the concession districts for tourism, while a large explosion at a chemical warehouse in the port in 2015 killed more than a hundred people and prompted a national review of dangerous-goods storage.

Tianjin's reputation in China is for talk and comedy. Xiangsheng, the two-person cross-talk routine of puns, patter and mock argument, is closely tied to the city, and its teahouses still stage it nightly for audiences who know the classic sketches. The local dialect, flatter and faster than Beijing's, is part of the joke, and residents are thought of nationally as sociable, sharp-tongued and unimpressed by pretension, a self-image they enjoy.

Craft traditions are equally well known. Nirenzhang clay figurines, modelled and painted with great realism, have been made by the same family workshop tradition since the 19th century; Yangliuqing, a town in the western suburbs, gave its name to the woodblock New Year prints of plump children and door gods that were once pasted on houses across the north; and the city's painted kites are a recognised craft in their own right.

The concession century left a physical and social legacy. Churches, banking halls and villas of a dozen national styles stand within a few streets of one another, and their history is taught as a story of foreign privilege as well as of architecture. Nankai University and the schools founded in the early 20th century made the city an education centre, and Zhou Enlai, who studied in the city as a young man, is a local point of pride. Sport, particularly football and tennis, has a strong following, and morning exercise along the river is a daily ritual.

The municipality holds about 13 million people, most of them in the central districts along the river and in the Binhai area on the coast; it is a province-level city, so its boundaries take in farmland and mountains as well as the built-up area. Housing is cheaper than in Beijing, and the half-hour train has created a commuting and second-home relationship with the capital.

The economy is industrial and maritime: the port of Tianjin is China's largest artificial deep-water harbour and among the world's largest by throughput, and the city makes cars, aircraft components, machinery, chemicals and electronics, with petrochemicals and offshore oil concentrated in Binhai. Finance, logistics and universities matter too. Growth has been uneven since the 2010s, with heavy local government debt and the slowing of some Binhai projects widely discussed, and the city has worked to clean up air and water quality.

Daily rhythms are those of a northern industrial city: early breakfasts of jianbing bought from a cart, long commutes by metro or bus, and evenings in the riverside parks, where crowds dance, sing and fly kites. Older residents still live in the tightly packed lanes behind the main avenues, and redevelopment there is a constant subject. Winter heating runs from November to March, and the wind off the Bohai Sea makes the cold feel sharper than the thermometer suggests.

Tianjin's food is northern, wheat-based and snack-heavy, and the city takes its street eating seriously. The most famous item is the Goubuli baozi, a steamed bun of pork and stock with a pleated top, sold by a business that dates its founding to the 1850s and named, according to local legend, after a nickname of its first owner. Whether or not the buns still justify their fame is one of the arguments every Tianjin resident has an opinion about.

Breakfast is the city's real strength. Jianbing guozi, a thin mung-bean pancake cooked on a hot plate, spread with egg, folded around a sheet of crisp fried dough and brushed with fermented bean sauce and chilli, is made on street corners every morning and is considered the authentic version of a snack now sold across China. Alongside it come bowls of laomian tea, a savoury thickened gruel, sesame flatbreads and fried dough sticks.

Sweet and savoury gifts are a local institution: Guifaxiang mahua, dense plaited dough twists threaded with sugar and nuts, and Erduoyan fried rice cakes, sticky sweet cakes named after the narrow lane where they were first sold. Seafood from the Bohai Sea — crabs, prawns, razor clams and small fish — appears on menus in autumn, and the Muslim quarter serves lamb, beef and flatbreads. The old teahouses pour jasmine tea by the pot, usually with a comedy routine on the stage.