Pearl River Sunset

Shenzhen Expressway sunset

Guangzhou, our first stop in China, was known to the west for centuries as Canton - the first and for a very long time the most important Chinese port city to be open for foreign trade. Since the Beijing government began its post-Mao economic reform, it has returned to that role, from its site at the heart of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) open economic area.

A vast proportion of the "foreign" direct investment in China in fact comes from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese diaspora. The PRD open area was set up to benefit from Hong Kong investment, and it has - it is the richest and most developed area of China, rivalled only by the Yangtze river delta area around Shanghai. Within the PRD, the city of Shenzhen - just across the border from Hong Kong - was set up as a Special Economic Zone with even greater investment incentives, and in the last three decades Shenzhen has gone from being a small fishing village to one of the largest and richest cities in China, with a population equal in size to New York's.

As we made the two-hour trip up the (Hong Kong-financed) expressway from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, we travelled through the most industrial landscape I've ever seen - a continuous expanse of factories and workers' housing, covered in a thick layer of pollution tinted pink and orange by the sunset and set aglow by the occasional neon sign (in fact we haven't seen blue sky since we left Singapore). When you read that something is "Made in China," chances are it's made here.

We're taking a night bus to Guilin tonight, which should be a somewhat different experience. In the meantime I'll see if I can bring some order to our Flickr page.