Who ruled Guangzhou?

Guangzhou, long known in the West as Canton, lies on the Pearl River near the head of its delta in southern China. For more than two thousand years it has been China's great southern port, the place where Chinese goods met traders from South-East Asia, India, the Islamic world and later Europe. That openness made it both rich and vulnerable, and it was the stage on which China's confrontation with the West began in the 19th century.

The city was founded as Panyu in 214 BCE, when armies of Qin Shi Huang conquered the lands of the Yue peoples in the far south. After the Qin collapsed, the Qin general Zhao Tuo made Panyu the capital of his independent kingdom of Nanyue, which lasted until the Han dynasty conquered it in 111 BCE. The tomb of one of Zhao Tuo's successors, found in 1983, is now a museum in the city centre.

By the time of the Tang dynasty, Guangzhou was the main Chinese terminus of the maritime trade routes, sometimes called the maritime Silk Road. Large communities of Arab, Persian and other foreign merchants lived in a quarter of their own, and the Huaisheng Mosque claims an origin in this period. The port suffered for its wealth: raiders sacked it in 758, and in the late 870s the rebel army of Huang Chao took the city and killed large numbers of its foreign residents. In the 10th century Guangzhou was the capital of the Southern Han kingdom, and under the Song dynasty a maritime trade office supervised its commerce.

Portuguese ships reached the Pearl River in 1517, and the Portuguese settled at Macau, at the mouth of the estuary, from the 1550s. The Ming fell in the 1640s, and in 1650 Qing armies took Guangzhou from Ming loyalists after a long siege followed by a massacre. In 1757 the Qing dynasty restricted all Western seaborne trade to Guangzhou alone. Under this Canton System foreign merchants could live only in the Thirteen Factories outside the city walls during the trading season and had to deal through licensed Chinese merchants, the Cohong.

British frustration with these limits, and Chinese efforts to stop the illegal opium trade, led to the First Opium War. In 1839 the commissioner Lin Zexu destroyed over a thousand tonnes of seized opium at Humen, near the city. The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 ended the Canton monopoly by opening four other ports, and British and French forces occupied Guangzhou from 1857 to 1861 during the Second Opium War.

Guangzhou became a cradle of Chinese revolution. Sun Yat-sen, born in the nearby Pearl River delta, launched several uprisings there, and in the 1920s the city was the base of his Nationalist government, home to the Whampoa Military Academy, from which the Northern Expedition set out in 1926. Japan occupied Guangzhou from 1938 to 1945, and Communist forces took it in October 1949. Its trade fair, held from 1957, was for decades one of the few windows between the People's Republic and foreign buyers. After the reforms of 1978 the Pearl River Delta became a centre of world manufacturing, and Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, grew to a city of more than 18 million people.