Shanghai Before the Foreigners (opens in new tab)

This is a super important point, Chinese city are the equivalent of American MSA's.

the migration during the last decades from rural China into the cities has been the largest population migration in the history (something like 800M people moved). One can imagine how future generations will be learning about great migrations - like that of the Goths and Huns in the 4th century or this migration in China in the 20-21st century and the resulting large scale effects on the history lasting for centuries.

Btw, interesting depiction of Shanghai - exterritorial status of the foreign concessions for example - in 1937 in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_Hundred . In the West we sometimes miss that the 2nd Sino-Japanese war can be naturally considered part of the WWII which thus de-facto was already going in the 1937.

Shenzhen received, in 1980, the special legal privilege of engaging in commerce with Hong Kong. It's not natural growth.

If you had read his books you wouldn't have been surprised. Libertarian capitalist ideals and individualism are themes throughout his works.

It is also hard to talk about the relatively new coastal development without the fact that in the 1600s the Qing forcibly evacuated most coastal areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Clearance

And before that, the Ming banned coastal trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin

Not sure how you can mention Nanjing without Yangzhou, Suhzou and Hangzhou. Together they basically encircle modern Shanghai.

It is documented in the Tang Dynasty that boats from Japan bound for China would sometimes land along the coast of Jiangsu then the occupants would move inland. IIRC if riverborne the first small town they would reach was Nantong, and the first major town up-river would be Yangzhou. Approaching overland, they would no doubt be escorted directly to Yangzhou. Jiangsu seems to have essentially consisted of a vast canal network and agricultural lands. Presumably the Koreans hit Shandong (dodging pirates), and the South (India) and Southeast Asians (Philippines, Sumatra, Borneo, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia) hit Guangdong or Guangxi. Fujian, in the middle of these landing zones, had sometimes in history a flourishing trading culture, with Quanzhou IIRC the town from which historically attested Chinese Zhenghe expeditions departed as far as Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and Africa, and global religious communities are attested.

Zhenghe was himself a sufi muslim Eunuch born inland in the Himalayas at ~2200m altitude, last bastion of the purged Mongol-era ruling family of Yunnan, descended from the pre-Mongol invasion Emir of Bokhara, Uzbekistan, and through his family thought to be fluent in Persian, which was then something of a pan-regional lingua franca.

Despite this, the modern Chinese state narrative is that everyone is flat "Chinese". Further leaning on the Central Asian cultural nexus, it is worth re-stating that Li Bai, arguably classical China's most famous poet, was actually born in Kyrgyzstan and after moving to China lived primarily in the then-remote province of Sichuan, quite peripheral to northern Chinese culture, in fact the province was contemporaneously successfully invaded by the Tibeto-Burman rival kingdom of Nanzhao, whose still visible legacy includes undeniably Hindu grottoes carved in Sanskrit.

If you want to learn history, don't look at modern textbooks.

China is a gold mine for archaeology. It seems like every year there are huge discoveries. Like forgotten cities or something. https://www.world-archaeology.com/features/the-lost-world-of...

> just an hour or so up the river

Bullet train takes nearly 2 hours. So I assume it would take about half a day by boat. But still good point.