Yangzhou

Yangzhou's story begins in 486 BC, when King Fuchai of Wu completed the Han Canal to carry supplies north to the Huai River, and a year later built the fortress of Hancheng here to guard it. That short waterway was the seed of the Grand Canal. When the Sui dynasty joined the canal system together at the start of the seventh century, Yangzhou sat at the point where the canal met the Yangtze, and Emperor Yang of Sui made it his southern capital and died here in 618.

Under the Tang the city became one of the richest in China, a port where salt, tea, silk and rice changed hands and where Arab and Persian merchants lived among many other foreigners. The monk Jianzhen, abbot of Daming Temple, finally reached Japan on his sixth attempt in 753. Marco Polo claimed to have served the Yuan in the city for about three years. In 1645 the Qing conquest brought catastrophe when the city, defended by Shi Kefa, fell after a siege and its people were massacred.

Recovery came through salt. The Qing salt administration for the Lianghuai region was based here, and the licensed salt merchants became fabulously wealthy, building gardens, sponsoring painters and scholars and hosting the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors on their southern tours; the Slender West Lake took its form to receive them. From the 1850s the Taiping war ravaged the region, the canal was neglected and the railways bypassed the city, and Yangzhou sank into a long provincial quiet. Since the 1980s it has grown again on manufacturing, tourism and the restoration of its old city, and in 2014 its canal sections were inscribed as part of the Grand Canal World Heritage Site.

The salt merchants of the 18th century made Yangzhou a centre of taste. The Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, a loose group of painters that included Zheng Banqiao, broke with court convention and are still studied; the merchants' private gardens became famous across China; and the local crafts of lacquerware, jade carving, embroidery and paper-cutting survive, and the history of woodblock printing is told in the block-printing museum. Yangzhou pinghua, storytelling in the local dialect, and the regional opera known as Yangju are still performed.

The city is proudest of what locals call its three knives: the cook's knife, the barber's razor and the pedicurist's blade. Yangzhou chefs cut ginger and tofu to hair-fine threads, and the city's bathhouses, with their foot treatments, are a social institution. An old line of poetry about going down to Yangzhou in the third month when the mist and blossom are thick is quoted to every visitor and explains why spring is the busy season.

Daily manners are gentle. Yangzhou is a small city by Chinese standards and people are slower and more talkative than in Shanghai or Nanjing. The Jianzhen connection gives the city a lasting link with Japan, and Nara is one of its sister cities. Islam has a long history here through the Tang-era traders and the Puhaddin tomb, and the old city keeps a mosque, the Crane Mosque, founded in the 13th century.

The prefecture of Yangzhou has about 4.5 million people, of whom about 2.6 million live in the urban area. The economy mixes industry — including shipbuilding along the Yangtze, machinery and textiles — with tourism and a well-known toy industry, especially stuffed animals. Wages and rents are well below those of Nanjing and Shanghai, which keeps many younger graduates commuting or moving away.

Most residents live in apartment blocks in the western and eastern new districts; the old city's courtyard houses are home to older families, small businesses and an increasing number of guesthouses. The day starts early with morning tea or a bowl of noodles, offices and schools run from eight, lunch is followed by a rest in summer, and evenings are spent in the new town's malls, in the parks along the canal, dancing in squares or in a bathhouse. Retired men fish in the canal and play cards under the willows.

The issues people discuss are familiar across Jiangsu: the cost of flats, the balance between restoring the old city and keeping it a place where ordinary people live, car traffic in streets laid out for carts, and the pressure to attract younger workers. Tourism from Shanghai and Nanjing has grown, and holiday crowds on Dongguan Street are now a seasonal fact of life.

Yangzhou is one of the centres of Huaiyang cuisine, one of the four great traditions of Chinese cooking, known for knife work, careful seasoning and a slight sweetness rather than heat. Yangzhou fried rice, Yangzhou chaofan, egg fried rice with shrimp, pork and vegetables cut small, is the dish the world knows; lion's head meatballs, shizitou, large pork balls braised or steamed with greens, and dried tofu threads in chicken broth, dazhu gansi, where a block of pressed tofu is shaved into threads as thin as noodles, show the kitchen's technique. River fish, crab and seasonal greens from the canal country fill out the menus.

Morning tea, zaocha, is the city's great institution. A proper teahouse breakfast runs from a pot of tea and a plate of cold dishes through steamed buns and dumplings: the three-filling sanding bao of pork, chicken and bamboo shoot, soup dumplings, vegetable buns, and the thousand-layer cake, qianceng yougao, a semi-sweet, layered steamed cake.

Snack streets around Dongguan Street sell local snacks and sweets, and the city's pickles, Yangzhou jiangcai, are a well-known local product. The main local drink is tea, and the Fuchun teahouse blends its own. The city's chefs are proud that the first state banquet of the People's Republic, in 1949, served Huaiyang cooking.