The rail spur from Hangzhou through Shaoxing ends at NINGBO (Calm Waves), China, an important economic hub and ocean-going port in the northeast corner of the province. Despite being a port, the city is actually set some 20km inland, at the point where the Yuyao and Yong rivers meet to flow down to the ocean together. All around you'll see flat watery plain and paddy fields, and, along the heavily broken and indented shoreline, the signs of local salt-panning and fishing industries. Ningbo today would hardly be worth a special journey, except that it is a vital staging post for the trip to the nearby island of Putuo Shan . If you're passing through, however, there are one or two features of interest, in the interesting Tianyige Library and in the monasteries in the countryside beyond the city.

Ningbo possesses a short but eventful history. Under the Tang in the seventh century, a complicated system of locks and canals was first installed, to make the shallow tidal rivers here navigable, and at the end of the twelfth century a breakwater was built to protect the port. From that time onwards, trade with Japan and Korea began to develop massively, with silk being shipped out in exchange for gold and, under the Ming, Ningbo became China's most important port. There was early European influence, too. By the sixteenth century the Portuguese were using the harbour, building a warehouse downstream and helping to fight the pirates, while in the eighteenth century the East India Company began pressing to set up shop. Eventually, in 1843, after the Opium War, Ningbo became a treaty port with a British Consulate.

The town was swept briefly into the Taiping Uprising in 1861, but thereafter lost ground to Shanghai very rapidly. Only since 1949 has it begun to expand once more, and the river has been dredged, passenger terminals and cargo docks built, bridges completed and facilities generally expanded to handle the output of the local chemicals, food-processing, and metallurgy industries. However, despite the fact that Ningbo today is considered one of the boom areas of China, it still wears a rather dilapidated...