Shamian Island

This guide to Shamian Island in Guangzhou traces how a swampy Pearl River sandbank crowded with tea boats and houseboat people in 1859 became a solid, man-made island in barely two years, ceded to Britain and France after China's defeat in the Second Opium War. It follows the laborers who walled the mudflats in granite and packed them with dredged sand, and the roughly four-to-one split of the new land between the two colonial powers. Look for the camphor trees lining the avenue, descendants of plantings from those same decades.