Audioguides Guangzhou

For centuries, Guangzhou was the only city in China where European merchants were permitted to trade, a system that made it not just wealthy but cosmopolitan in ways that confounded Western visitors. The Canton System funneled silk, porcelain, and tea through this Pearl River port while strictly confining foreign traders to their waterfront warehouses. The Canton Fair, which still runs twice a year and claims to be the oldest and largest trade fair in China, is the direct descendant of those arrangements. Founded as Panyu in 214 BC and later renamed Guangzhou, the city has been doing business with the world for longer than most countries have existed.

Guangzhou's most enduring export is its food.

Cantonese cuisine -- the cooking that defined Chinese restaurants across the world, from dim sum trolleys in San Francisco to roast duck in Sydney -- was born in kitchens here. The particular obsession with fresh ingredients, subtle seasoning, and technique over blunt heat is a Guangzhou signature. The city spreads across the Pearl River delta: Shamian Island holds tree-shaded colonial buildings from the British and French concession era; the Guangzhou Tower, completed in 2010, twists 600 meters above the Tianhe district where the financial skyline has been comprehensively rewritten since the 1990s. Between those two scales lies a city that has never entirely stopped trading.