Straddling the Grand Canal north of the China Yangzi, an hour by bus north of Zhenjiang and a couple of hours from Nanjing, YANGZHOU is a leafy and relaxing city. Today its proud boast is of having produced the nation's leader - President Jiang Zemin - but its origins go back to around 500 BC when the Wu rulers had channels dug here which were later incorporated into the Grand Canal. Thanks to its position at the junctions of the Yangzi, the Grand Canal and the Huaihe River, Yangzhou rapidly developed into a prosperous city, aided by a monopoly of the lucrative salt trade . Under the Tang and later, many foreign merchants, including a community from Persia, lived and traded here, leaving behind a twelfth-century mosque and a much-quoted (though wholly unsubstantiated) tale that Marco Polo governed the city for three years. It was a city renowned too for its culture, its storytellers and oral traditions, with stories being handed down through the generations. As such, it frequently attracted the imperial court and its entourage, as well as artists and officials moving here in retirement, who endowed temples, created enclosed gardens and patronized local arts.

Despite the industrial belt which now stretches round the south and east of the city, there's still a faint sense of a cosmopolitan, cultured past here, evident in the gardens , in the Islamic relics and in the layout of roads, waterways and bridges in the city centre. Out on the northwest edge of town are Yangzhou's two main sights, Shou Xihu and Daming Si , a lake and a temple both of which were part of Emperor Qianlong's regular tourist itinerary in the eighteenth century.