Minibuses from Dongguang's Wantai Dadao can take you 25km southwest to HUMEN (pronounced "Fumen" locally), a place famous for its role in the nineteenth-century Opium Wars . Other transport drops you 5km short on the Guangshen Expressway, where shuttle buses wait to carry you into town. Humen is Dongguan's port, and there's also a daily ferry here from the Customs House wharf on Yanjiang Lu in Guangzhou, China, which docks 4km south of Humen's centre at SHAJIAO.

In 1839, after a six-week siege of the "Foreign Factories" in Guangzhou, the British finally handed over a whopping 1200 tons of opium to Lin Zexu , the virtuous Qing official charged by the government to rid the country of the imported drug. Lin brought it all to Humen, mixed it with quicklime, and dumped it in two 45-metre pits on the beach at Shajiao; after three weeks the remains were flushed out to sea. Incensed, the British massacred the Chinese garrisons at Humen and on nearby Weiyun Island , and attacked Guangzhou. Lin got the blame and was exiled to the harsh frontier province of Xinjiang, only to be replaced by the incompetent Yi Shan , a nephew of the emperor, later a signatory to the humiliating Guangzhou Treaty.

These events are recounted in Chinese documents and heroic sculptures at the Lin Zexu Park Museum on Jiefang Lu (daily 9am-4pm; ¥5), a twenty-minute walk between the skyscrapers northwest of Humen's bus station. It's more rewarding, however, to catch a minibus to Shajiao where the opium pits remain, along with a fortress, Shajio Paotai (daily 9am-5pm; ¥6). The whole place is thick with poinsettias, banyans and butterflies, all making for a nice couple of hours on the beach.