Legend tells how Guangzhou - nicknamed Yang Cheng ("Goat City") - was founded by Five Immortals riding five rams, each of whom planted a sheaf of grain symbolizing endless prosperity. Myths aside, an administrative city called Panyu had sprung up here by the third century BC, when a rogue Qin commander founded the Nanyue Kingdom and made it his capital. Remains of a gigantic contemporary shipyard uncovered in central Guangzhou during the 1970s suggest that city had contact with foreign lands even then: there were merchants who considered themselves Roman subjects here in 165AD, and from Song times vessels travelled along the "Maritime Silk Road" to Middle Eastern ports, later introducing Islam into China and exporting porcelain to Arab colonies in distant Kenya and Zanzibar. By 1405 Guangzhou's population of foreign traders and Overseas Chinese was so large that the Ming emperor Yongle founded a special quarter for them, and when xenophobia later closed the rest of China to outsiders, Guangzhou became the country's main link with the world.

 

Restricted though it was, this contact with other nations ultimately proved to be Guangzhou's - and China's - undoing. From the eighteenth century, the British East India Company used the city as a base from which to purchase silk, ceramics and tea, but became frustrated at the Chinese refusal to accept trade goods instead of cash in return. To even accounts, the company began to import opium from India, long used as a medicine in China but now encouraged as a recreational drug. Demand and addiction soared, making colossal profits for the British and members of the Co Hong , their Chinese distributors, but rapidly depleting imperial stocks of silver. In 1839 the Qing government sent the incorruptible Commissioner Lin Zexu to Guangzhou with a mandate to stop the drug traffic. Having blockaded the foreigners into their quarters on Shamian Island, Lin demanded the handover of all opium stocks and publicly destroyed them. Britain declared war, and, with a navy partly funded by the opium-traders, forced the Chinese to cede five ports (including Guangzhou and Hong Kong) to British control under the Nanking Treaty of 1842.

Unsurprisingly, Guangzhou became a revolutionary cauldron. It was here during the late 1840s that the Christian convert Hong Xiuquan formulated his anti-Manchu Taiping Uprising , and sixty years later the city hosted a premature attempt by Sun Yatsen to kick out China's Qing rulers. Guangzhou even briefly became Sun's Guomindang capital in the 1920s, while a youthful Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai flitted in and out between mobilizing rural peasant groups. At this time the Guomindang and Communists were allies, and a substantial part of Guangzhou's leftist youth was enrolled in militias and sent into the country against troublesome warlords in the Eastern and Northern Expeditions . Having effectively unified central China for the government, many became victims of the 1927 Shanghai Massacre , Chiang Kaishek's Communist suppression. A Red uprising in Guangzhou that December failed, and the city's working class, once the best organized in the country, was left totally demoralized. Controlled by the Japanese during the war and the Guomindang afterwards, in 1949 they were too apathetic to liberate themselves and had to wait for the PLA to do it for them.

Few people would today describe Guangzhou's population as apathetic, at least when it comes to business acumen. Unlike many large, apparently "modern" Chinese cities, there's real wealth and solid infrastructure here - even if there have been a couple of high-profile financial belly flops recently. At the same time, Guangzhou is thick with China's mobile rural community, lured to the city by tales of cheap riches and often too poor to leave: street life here is visibly tougher than elsewhere in China and daily expenses are noticeably higher. Vast amounts of cash do indeed flow into (and out of) the city, particularly during the bi-annual Trade Fair , but this creates more inflation than jobs and the profits tend to be concentrated in volatile commercial capital. On the other hand, government incentives and the mainland's cheap labour costs compared with Hong Kong have seen accelerating domestic and foreign investment in southern China, and Guangzhou is profiting from its position at the core of the Pearl River Delta's industrial and manufacturing sprawl.