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

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

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

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

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

Dongguan; the Factory City that Lost Its Grip on Fourth Place

Ningbo overtook Dongguan as China’s fourth-largest exporting city in 2024, shipping ¥945.5 billion of goods abroad against Dongguan’s ¥889.7 billion, ending a run of more than a decade during which ...
The Nanjinger

Changchun; where Russia and Japan Built Rival Stations Two Kilometres Apart

Two railway stations stood about two kilometres apart from 1907, one run by Russia and one by Japan, because the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth had divided control of the railway between the two empires at ...
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 ...
The Nanjinger

Beijing; the Capital whose Oldest Resident Went Missing in 1941

China’s best-known early human, Peking Man, vanished in December 1941 while his fossils from Zhoukoudian, now part of Beijing, were being shipped abroad for safekeeping on the eve of the Pacific War; ...
The Nanjinger

Shenzhen; the City Named after a Village Irrigation Ditch

Shenzhen takes its name from the water channels that once crossed the area’s farmland; in the local Hakka and Cantonese dialects, the character zhen refers to a ditch or drain cut through the fields.