The Nanjinger

Danzhou; the City with No Districts, an Exiled Poet and Hainan’s Import Gateway

The city of Danzhou governs no districts at all, only towns, farms and a free-trade zone, yet it is Hainan’s largest city by ...
The Nanjinger

China Creates an X-Class of Train Numbers for Services above 350KM/H

China is giving its fastest trains a letter of their own. A new X prefix, read xīn (新, “new”), will mark Fuxing bullet trains ...
The Nanjinger

Car-Bed Campers Turn Hotel Car Parks into Free Showers and Toilets

Chinese road trippers are swapping hotel rooms for the back seats of their own cars, folding them flat into beds and parking overnight at service stations, scenic car parks and even hotel grounds, ...
The Nanjinger

Wuxi Opens Metro Line S1; Jiangyin to Lake Tai in Just 30 Minutes

Opened on 31 January, the 30.4-km long Line S1, with a maximum design speed of 120 km/h, operates between Jiangyin Bund on the bank of the Yangtze in the north and Yanqiao in Huishan District in the ...
The Nanjinger

Yanbian; the “Third Korea” where Street Signs Put Korean First

Shop signs, road signs and official seals across Yanbian, in China’s north-east, must carry both Korean and Chinese, and local rules say that when the two are set side by side the Korean comes first, ...
The Nanjinger

Oktoberfest Kicks off in Suzhou’s “Hometown of German Companies”

Concurrent with Munich’s Oktoberfest, the Taicang Rothenburg Beer Festival is underway in the city home to 500 German companies and where 3,000 Germans work. Full story (in Chinese) via this link; ...
The Nanjinger

Yangjiang; the Shipwreck that Took Thirty-Six Years to Fully Uncover

A Sino-British salvage team searching for a completely different, Dutch East India Company wreck stumbled instead in 1987 upon a Song dynasty merchant ship that had lain buried beneath the seabed off ...
The Nanjinger

Jiangmen; the City that Backed Down Twice in Two Years

Jiangmen’s government banned pet dogs from public places across its three urban districts in August 2011, after rabies had killed 42 people in the preceding three years; officials set aside a 13 acre ...
The Nanjinger

Changde; The City that Built a Tourist Attraction out of a Place that Cannot Be Found

Tao Yuanming wrote, in 365 AD, about a fisherman who stumbled into a hidden valley of blossoming peach trees, stayed for days, and marked his route home so carefully that he still could never find his ...
The Nanjinger

Shantou; the City Where a Typhoon Killed Tens of Thousands

A typhoon made landfall near Shantou at nine o’clock at night on 2 August 1922, with its lowest recorded pressure at 932 hectopascals and winds reaching around 100 miles an hour; the storm surge that ...
The Nanjinger

Jingdezhen; The Rare Chinese City Named after an Emperor’s Reigning Era

Emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty was so impressed by the local porcelain in 1004 that he ordered the town, then called Changnan, renamed after his own reigning era, Jingde, an honour historians ...
The Nanjinger

Shijiazhuang; The City Where China’s Money Was Born

Three wartime banks, the North China Bank, the Beihai Bank and the Northwest Farmers Bank, merged in Shijiazhuang on 1 December 1948 to form the People’s Bank of China, which issued the first notes of ...