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

Siping; Few Places Owe So Much to a Single Line of Steel

Siping was a village called Sipingjie until 1902. That year the railway between Changchun and the port of Dalian was completed. A station opened, traders arrived and within a generation the village ...
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

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

Baishan; the Mineral Water City that Faces a North Korean Provincial Capital

Nearly 200 springs in the mountains around Baishan flow a combined 455,000 cubic metres of water a day, and the city says an international drinking-water organisation named it China’s International ...
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

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

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

Cangzhou; the City Guarded by a Forty-Tonne Iron Lion

Craftsmen cast Cangzhou’s great iron lion in 953, during the Later Zhou dynasty, covering its hollow belly with text from the Diamond Sutra. Why they made it remains uncertain; one enduring local ...
The Nanjinger

Shaoguan; the City that Talked a Missionary Out of His Robes

Zhaoqing’s new viceroy seized Matteo Ricci’s mission house in 1589 and expelled him from the city; Ricci relocated to Shaoguan, further up the North River, initially lodging at the Buddhist Guangxiao ...
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.