Canton is the commercial, flavourful and cosmopolitan face of southern China. For more than two thousand years, this city on the banks of the Pearl River was China's great gateway to the world: silk, tea, porcelain and spices passed in and out through its docks, and Arab, Persian, Indian and, later, European merchants came ashore here. It was the eastern end of the Maritime Silk Road and, for a century, the only port through which the empire allowed trade with the West. That mercantile, international spirit still beats in the city, today one of China's great economic engines.
But if there is one thing travellers will remember Guangzhou for, it's the food. Cantonese cuisine is one of the great cuisines of China and the world, and here, in its birthplace, you can enjoy it at its finest: dim sum trolleys in century-old teahouses, the art of the wok, fresh fish and seafood, roast duck, 'char siu'... 'Eat in Canton' is an old Chinese saying that sums up the city's culinary fame. Add to that charming spots like the colonial island of Shamian, historic temples, fascinating markets and intense street life.
This guide covers the best of Guangzhou with a practical eye: what to see among the temples, Shamian Island and the modern Canton Tower, where and how to enjoy dim sum, how to get around on its huge metro, how to make the most of its proximity to Hong Kong, and what you need to know about transport, prices and the VPN before you arrive. It's a less touristy city than Beijing or Shanghai, but authentic, delicious and with a fascinating history as China's eternal gateway to the world.
Founded more than two thousand two hundred years ago, Canton (Panyu in ancient times) was the capital of the Nanyue kingdom in the 2nd century BC and, from very early on, the great port of southern China. For centuries it was the end point of the Maritime Silk Road, with an active community of foreign merchants, and under the Ming and Qing dynasties it became the main — and for a time the only — port authorised to trade with the West, under the so-called 'Canton System'. It was here that the opium crisis broke out, leading to the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century. The foreign concessions were established on Shamian Island. In the early 20th century, Canton was a revolutionary hotbed, the cradle of Sun Yat-sen's republicanism and an early base for both the Kuomintang and communism. After the founding of the People's Republic, and above all with Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up policies from 1979 (which began in this province, Guangdong), Guangzhou re-emerged as one of China's great industrial and commercial powerhouses. The full story, from the Nanyue kingdom to the gateway of world trade and today's megacity, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Cantonese and karst south: the trading gateway of Canton, colonial Hong Kong and its return, the peaks of the Li River at Guilin and the stone pillars of Zhangjiajie.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Canton begins at the far edges of the ancient Chinese world. When the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, unified China in the 3rd century BC and pushed his empire southwards, he ordered a city to be founded in the fertile Pearl River Delta: Panyu, the seed of today's Guangzhou. It was frontier land, warm and lush, home to the Yue peoples, who were culturally distinct from the northern Chinese, at a meeting point of rivers that opened onto the South China Sea.
After the fall of the Qin dynasty, a general named Zhao Tuo, who had been sent to govern the south, took advantage of the chaos to break away and, in 204 BC, founded his own kingdom, the Kingdom of Nanyue ('the Southern Yue'), with Panyu as its capital. Nanyue was a powerful state that ruled for almost a century over what is now southern China and northern Vietnam, blending Chinese culture with that of the local Yue peoples. The most spectacular evidence of that kingdom came to light in 1983, when the intact tomb of one of its kings was discovered by chance in the very centre of Guangzhou, his body wrapped in a jade burial suit and surrounded by fabulous grave goods. It is now one of China's great archaeological treasures.
In 111 BC, the Han empire conquered Nanyue and brought the south into China for good. But Panyu kept its key role: its position at the mouth of the Pearl River, with access to the sea, soon made it the great port of the south, the gateway through which China looked out to the southern seas and to trade with distant lands. That maritime, mercantile calling would shape its whole history.
For more than a thousand years, Canton was China's main international port and one of the great trading hubs of Asia. Already under the Tang dynasty (7th–10th centuries), the city was the eastern end of the Maritime Silk Road, the network of sea routes linking China with Southeast Asia, India, Persia and the Arab world. Silk, porcelain and tea left from its docks, while spices, ivory, perfumes and precious stones came in. The city was home to a large community of foreign merchants —Arabs, Persians, Indians, Jews— with their own quarters, mosques and temples; in fact, Canton still has one of the oldest mosques in the world, the Huaisheng Mosque, founded, according to tradition, in the lifetime of Muhammad himself.
Through the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasties, the port of Canton remained a first-rate trading centre, although it had its ups and downs depending on imperial policy, which was sometimes more open and sometimes more wary of contact with the outside world. The arrival of the Europeans from the 16th century onwards —first the Portuguese, who settled nearby in Macao, and then the Dutch, the British and others— opened a new era. Canton became the meeting point between China and the trading powers of the West.
That role became exclusive in the 18th century. In 1757, the Qing dynasty, distrustful of contact with the Western 'barbarians', decided to close every port in the country to European trade except one: Canton. For almost a century, under the so-called 'Canton System', all of Europe's enormous demand for Chinese tea, silk and porcelain had to be channelled through this single city, and only through a group of licensed Chinese merchants, the 'hong'. Canton grew immensely rich and cosmopolitan, and some of its merchants were among the wealthiest men in the world in their day.
The Canton System, lucrative as it was, hid an explosive imbalance. The Europeans, and above all the British, bought vast quantities of Chinese tea, but China wanted almost nothing from the West in return, which meant paying in silver and draining European coffers. To turn this around, British traders found a commodity they could sell in huge volumes in China: opium, grown in India. By the early 19th century, opium smuggling through Canton had reached devastating proportions, with millions of Chinese addicts and an outflow of silver that now ran the other way.
When the imperial government decided to act, it was in Canton that the crisis broke out. In 1839, the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed thousands of chests of British opium in the area, an act that triggered the First Opium War (1839–1842). Overwhelming British military superiority humiliated China and, through the Treaty of Nanking, forced it to open several ports, cede Hong Kong and end Canton's monopoly. A Second Opium War (1856–1860), which also began with incidents in Canton, deepened the humiliation.
As a result, the foreign powers gained concessions in the city. On Shamian Island, a strip of land reclaimed from the river, the British and French enclaves were set up, with their European buildings, banks, churches and clubs, cut off from the rest of the city. Canton, once the proud gateway through which China set the rules of trade, became a symbol of the so-called 'century of humiliation' at the hands of foreign powers. But that clash also gave rise to a city that was especially open, restless and ready for change.
Its open character and its contact with the world made Canton one of the great revolutionary hotbeds of modern China. Guangdong province was the birthplace of Sun Yat-sen, the 'father of modern China', who led the republican movement against the Qing dynasty. After the fall of the empire in 1911, Canton was time and again the base of the nationalist movement: Sun Yat-sen set up revolutionary governments here, and in 1924 the Whampoa Military Academy was founded on the outskirts of the city, training officers of the Kuomintang and, in many cases, of the young Communist Party too, at a time when the two were working together.
The city went through intense political and labour unrest in the 1920s, with strikes, mass mobilisations and violent episodes such as the short-lived and bloody 'Canton Uprising' staged by the communists in 1927, which was brutally crushed. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Canton was occupied by the Japanese army in 1938 and endured the hardships of war until 1945. After the communist victory in the civil war, the city became part of the People's Republic in 1949.
Under the new regime, Canton kept a unique role: despite the country's general isolation, it remained a window to the outside world, above all through the Canton Fair, the great twice-yearly trade fair created in 1957, which for decades was almost the only channel through which Maoist China traded with the capitalist world. That status as a trading gateway, kept up even in the most closed years, prepared the city for the starring role that awaited it with economic opening.
Canton's great revival came with Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. It is no coincidence that China's opening began right here, in Guangdong province: in 1979–1980, the government chose this region, next to Hong Kong and steeped in Cantonese trading tradition, to launch its experiment in controlled capitalism, creating the first Special Economic Zones nearby, such as Shenzhen, which went from fishing village to metropolis in a single generation. Guangdong became the 'factory of the world' and the engine of China's industrialisation, and Guangzhou, as its capital, bounced back with overwhelming force.
In the decades that followed, the city transformed at breakneck speed: skyscrapers went up, one of the most extensive metro systems in the world was built, the new financial district of Zhujiang New Town was developed and, for the 2010 Asian Games, the slender Canton Tower opened, the new icon on the riverbank. The Pearl River Delta —which takes in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan, Hong Kong and Macao— became one of the largest and richest urban areas on the planet, a gigantic industrial, technological and commercial hub.
Today Guangzhou is a booming, cosmopolitan megacity of more than eighteen million people that keeps its ancient calling alive: that of China's great trading gateway to the world, with its Canton Fair drawing business people from across the globe. But beneath the skyscrapers beats a history thousands of years old: the tomb of the King of Nanyue, the temples, the oldest mosque, the colonial island of Shamian, the teahouses where dim sum was born. Canton is still what it has been for two thousand years: the place where China meets the world, and where you eat better than anywhere else in China.
