Guangzhou — the Canton of the old trade charts — is where China met the outside world for the better part of two thousand years. Founded as a Qin garrison in the third century BC, it grew into the main port of the Maritime Silk Road under the Tang, and from 1757 to 1842 it was the only Chinese harbour open to foreign merchants at all. That long habit of trade explains the city's character: quick, pragmatic, unglamorous in the way of a place that has always been busy making a living, and unexpectedly generous once you sit down to eat. It is the capital of Cantonese culture — the nine-tone language, the opera, the morning ritual of yum cha — and, since 1957, host of the Canton Fair, the twice-yearly trade show that still packs the city's hotels.
It is also a sprawling, humid megacity of some eighteen million people, and its stories are easy to walk straight past. That is the case for exploring it with self-guided audio guides: each landmark below carries a narration that explains what you are looking at, from a 2,000-year-old palace drain to a broadcast tower with a Ferris wheel on the roof. Begin with the skyline's signature. The Canton Tower twists roughly 600 metres above the south bank of the Pearl River, and its evening light show (nightly from 7:30) is the single view that ties the old and new city together.
Yuexiu Hill: where Guangzhou began
The city's origin story lives on Yuexiu Hill. Yuexiu Park, the largest park in the downtown core, holds a stretch of Ming-era city wall and the Five Rams sculpture — the emblem of the legend in which five immortals rode down on goats bearing rice, which is why locals still call this place Yangcheng, the Goat City. On the hilltop stands the five-storey Zhenhai Tower (镇海楼), a red Ming watchtower from 1380 that now houses the municipal museum and looks out over the modern towers it was built to guard against pirates. A short walk south, the Nanyue Kingdom Palace Museum protects the excavated palace gardens of the Nanyue kings, who ruled a breakaway state here in the second century BC; the audio guide is worth it precisely because the ruins are subtle — stone-lined pools and a curved channel that once ran water through a royal garden.
Temples of the old walled city
Within a few blocks of each other, three religions arrived by sea. The Temple of the Six Banyan Trees is nearly 1,500 years old and is dominated by the octagonal Flower Pagoda, at 57.6 metres the tallest pagoda in the city; the poet Su Dongpo named the temple in 1100 after the banyans he found in its courtyard. Next door, Guangxiao Temple is older still and is where the Zen patriarch Huineng is said to have been ordained in the seventh century — the story of the wind, the flag and the mind is one of the great Chan parables and belongs to this courtyard. And on Guangta Road the Huaisheng Mosque (怀圣寺) with its plain, lighthouse-like minaret is one of the oldest mosques in China, a reminder that Arab and Persian traders were settling in Canton in the Tang dynasty.
Shamian Island and the Canton trade
The western district of Liwan is where the foreign trade was actually done. After the Opium Wars, Britain and France were granted Shamian Island, a sandbank on the Pearl River that they built up with consulates, banks, churches and tree-lined boulevards; today it is the quietest square kilometre in the city, and its 150-odd colonial buildings are the backdrop for every wedding photographer in Guangzhou. Across the water, the twin granite spires of the Sacred Heart Cathedral (石室圣心大教堂) rise from a site that took 25 years to build and is the largest Gothic cathedral in Southeast Asia — its stone came from Hong Kong, its plans from Paris. A little north, the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall, built in 1894 by 72 branches of the Chen family, is the finest surviving piece of Lingnan architecture in the city, its roof ridges crowded with painted ceramic figures and its halls now home to the Guangdong Folk Art Museum.
Yum cha along Shangxiajiu and Yongqingfang
Guangzhou is the birthplace of dim sum, and the old west end is where to eat it. Shangxiajiu Pedestrian Street runs 1,237 metres under arcaded qilou shophouses, and its side streets hold the century-old teahouses where morning tea — shrimp dumplings, rice rolls, char siu buns and a pot that never empties — is a social institution rather than a meal. Nearby, Yongqingfang is a block of restored grey-brick lanes that has become the district's arts-and-cafés quarter, and it hides the Lixiaolong Ancestral Home — the family house of Bruce Lee, whose father was a Cantonese opera star from this neighbourhood. Come early on a weekend; the tables fill by nine.
Zhujiang New Town and the Pearl River skyline
The new city is a single axis. Huacheng Square is the green spine of Zhujiang New Town, lined by the tallest buildings in southern China and pointing straight across the river at the Canton Tower; the fountains and the evening crowds make it the best free show in town. At its southern end, Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House (广州大剧院) sits like two river pebbles on the bank, and beside it the Guangdong Museum — a lacquered box on stilts, with 160,000 objects inside from Cantonese export porcelain to dinosaur fossils — is the place to make sense of everything you have seen so far.
Getting around
Guangzhou's metro is fast, cheap and bilingual, and links Baiyun Airport, both main railway stations and every district in this guide; lines 1, 2 and 3 cover most of the ground. Spring (March–April) and autumn (October–November) are mild and dry; summers are hot, wet and typhoon-prone. Most visitors give the city two or three days — enough for the old west end, Yuexiu Hill and an evening on the river — before pushing on to Hong Kong, an hour away by high-speed rail.