Guangzhou has been an important port since at least the Qin dynasty, and the Port of Guangzhou is still the largest general-purpose port in South China. It lies on the Pearl River in Guangdong Province, where the Xi, Bei and Dong rivers meet, with older wharves at Huangpu and the city's Inner Harbour and its main container terminals at Nansha, on Lingdingyang at the mouth of the river. In 2022 it handled 24.86 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containers, sixth in the world according to Lloyd's List, along with oil, coal, grain, fertiliser, steel, ore and cars. The state-owned Guangzhou Port Group, set up on 26 February 2004 from the old Guangzhou Harbour Bureau, runs it. It matters because it links more than 300 ports in over 80 countries with a hinterland that reaches well beyond Guangdong into Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi. Behind those figures are the merchants, pilots, dock workers and river wildlife who have shaped the port and paid for it, and they are what this article follows.
Hong Merchants and Supercargoes at the Thirteen Factories
For centuries Guangzhou's foreign trade depended on a small number of people licensed to handle it. Portuguese traders arrived in 1516, when Rafael Perestrello came on a local junk, and for the next three centuries Europeans traded on terms set by a shifting series of Chinese rules. In 1757 the Qing court confined almost all Western trade to Canton, as the city was then known, under what historians call the Canton System. It lasted until 1842.
On the Chinese side, the trade ran through licensed merchants called hongs. In 1760, with official permission, the merchant Puankhequa and nine other hongs formed the Cohong, a monopoly that bought goods on behalf of foreigners, collected duties and guaranteed every foreign ship and crew that entered the harbour. Above them stood the Hoppo, the imperial customs superintendent, who set the charges on each arriving ship and could grow very rich doing so.
The best known of the hong merchants was Wu Bingjian, called Howqua in the West (1769–1843). As head of the E-wo hong and leader of the Cohong, he was one of the few men licensed to sell silk and porcelain to foreigners, and he was at one time reckoned the richest man in the world. William Jardine, James Matheson, Samuel Russell and Abiel Abbot Low all did business with him, and portraits of Howqua still hang in houses built by grateful American merchants in Salem and Newport.
The foreigners lived and worked in the Thirteen Factories, a strip of offices, warehouses and apartments on the riverbank in the city's western suburbs, in what is now Liwan District. "Factory" meant a trading post run by factors, not a workshop. The agents were known in English as supercargoes, and in Chinese as daban, which later reached English through Cantonese as tai-pan. Traders followed the monsoon, arriving between June and September and leaving between November and February. The Chinese hong merchants owned the warehouses and apartments the foreigners were obliged to rent. The factories burned by accident in 1822, and again in 1841 and 1856 during the two Opium Wars. In the 1822 fire, according to one account, silver melted out of the hongs and ran in a stream almost two miles long. The site is now Guangzhou Cultural Park.
Whampoa Pilots, Humen and the Opium Destroyed in 1839
Big ships never reached the factories. Before modern dredging, silt from the Pearl River made the channel shallow and unpredictable as far south as Macau, and foreign captains depended on local pilots to bring them up from the Humen Strait, known to Europeans as the Bogue. With little wind in the river, most sailing ships had to be towed north. They anchored off Pazhou, then called Whampoa Island, about 40 kilometres upriver of Humen, and a fleet of smaller boats ferried cargo the roughly 26 kilometres to the wharves at the factories. Traders rented stores and repair sheds on the island, and the anchorage was a common subject in 18th-century art.
The heaviest cost of the Canton trade came from opium. After Britain cut its import duty on Chinese tea from 110 per cent to an average of 10 per cent in 1784, demand soared, and the East India Company, which had to pay for tea in silver, acquired a monopoly on Indian opium production in 1793. Selling the drug in China had been illegal since 1800, so private traders smuggled it up the coast. In 1839 the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu seized their stocks, and from 3 June, over 23 days, his officials destroyed about 1,000 long tons of opium on the riverbank outside Humen town in what is now Dongguan. Britain used the destruction as a reason for war. The First Opium War ran from 1839 to 1842, and the Treaty of Nanking ended the Canton System and opened other ports to foreign trade. Howqua is said to have helped raise one million of the three million silver dollars the Qing government had to pay under the treaty. He died in Canton in 1843. His family's business declined after the Opium Wars, and in 1891 Russell & Company, the American house that had handled his foreign investments, collapsed.
Guangzhou Port Group and the Move Downriver to Nansha
The modern port grew in two stages. First came Huangpu, downstream of the old city, which was absorbed into the Port of Guangzhou. In 1999 the port handled more than 100 million tonnes of cargo in a year, only the second mainland Chinese port to do so, and by 2006 the wider port had passed 300 million tonnes.
The second stage was a move towards the sea. Huangpu remains a working port area, but Nansha, far downstream near the mouth of the river, is now home to the main port. The Nansha Technology Development Zone was carved out of Panyu District in 1993, became Nansha District in 2005 and was named a state-level new area in September 2012, the sixth in China, following others including Shanghai's Pudong and Tianjin's Binhai. The district covers 803 square kilometres at the southern end of Guangzhou, facing Dongguan across the river. To let bigger ships in, the government approved dredging in July 2009 so that vessels of 100,000 tonnes could enter Nansha at high tide, with further work aimed at letting them in at low tide as well. Guangzhou Metro Line 4 now runs down to Nansha Passenger Port station, and Line 18 reaches Wanqingsha.
The port's influence reaches beyond the wharves. It played a part in the success of the Canton Hospital, a missionary hospital in the city, and Pazhou, once the foreign anchorage, is now home to the Guangzhou International Convention and Exhibition Center, the current site of the Canton Fair. The fair, held every spring and autumn since 1957 and co-hosted by the Ministry of Commerce and the Guangdong government, brings together more than 24,000 exporting companies.
Dredging, Reclamation and the Chinese White Dolphins of Lingdingyang
Keeping ocean ships moving on the Pearl River has a price, and much of it is paid underwater. The river's estuary at Bocca Tigris is dredged regularly to stay open to ocean vessels, and every new berth at Nansha means more traffic across Lingdingyang, the wide estuary shared with Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macau.
These brackish waters are home to the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, known locally as the Chinese white dolphin. The species was first documented in English in 1637 by Peter Mundy near the Pearl River, and the estuary's mix of fresh and salt water keeps it there. It is threatened by habitat loss, water pollution, coastal development, overfishing, collisions with vessels and underwater noise, and in 2015 the IUCN classed it as vulnerable. Hong Kong conservationists warned in 2013 that the population in their part of the estuary had fallen from 158 animals in 2003 to 78 in 2011. Public concern in Hong Kong began with the building of Chek Lap Kok Airport, which reclaimed nine square kilometres of seabed off northern Lantau, one of the dolphins' main habitats.
The city itself has had to clean up. Rapid industrialisation once made Guangzhou a rather polluted city; after green urban planning was introduced, it is now counted among the most liveable cities in China. On the river, a 500-kilovolt power line crosses near the Nansha Bridge, carried on three of the tallest pylons in the world so that ships can pass underneath.
Who Gains From 24.9 Million TEU
The benefits are easiest to see in the numbers. Container traffic rose from 3.3 million TEU in 2004 to 12.6 million in 2010, 18.9 million in 2016 and 24.9 million in 2022. Those boxes carry the output of the Pearl River Delta's factories, and Guangzhou is the delta's main manufacturing hub. In 2021 its GDP reached ¥2,823 billion, about US$444 billion, with output per person of ¥151,162.
The gains are shared unevenly along the river. Industries in neighbouring provinces such as Hunan and Jiangxi rely on Guangzhou as their transport hub, and the port shares the estuary with a larger neighbour: the Port of Shenzhen moved about 30 million TEU in 2022. Today the port is part of the Maritime Silk Road route, the latest version of a trade route whose older history is traced in our guide to the Maritime Silk Road. And the estuary that carries all of this, with its dredged channels, reclaimed shores and dwindling dolphins, is mapped in our guide to the Pearl River Delta.