Five kilometres east of the old city on what only 15 years ago was and paddies by the Pearl River gleam a trio of towers, emblematic of Guangzhou’s rediscovered international confidence, and the latest chapter in a story which plies through the city’s complex history and relationship with its wider world.

South is Canton Tower, a collaboration between Dutch architects and British engineers, a futuristic hyperboloid and the second tallest tower in the world. North are the Guangzhou Twin Towers – the 103 storey International Finance Centre and 111 storey CTC Finance Centre, the crowning glory of Guangzhou’s international Zhujiang New Town. Inside the British- and American-designed colossi are leading international companies, hotels, and some of the 60+ consulates which have accompanied Guangzhou’s meteoric ascension to the world stage in the past two decades.

Guangzhou, sited on the Pearl River Delta and with access to Asian trade routes and (latterly) the markets of Hong Kong, is a city where the wheels of history turn more obviously than many. The immediate origin of today’s prosperity lies in Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reform programme, opening up free trade zones across south China to unleash the industry and creativity of the Chinese people after decades of suffocation under Mao’s state-led economy. But from the pre-Qin Baiyue Kingdom which ruled Canton in the 3rd century BCE, and in whose tombs Parthian and Roman glassware has been found, China’s Southern Gateway has always attracted coteries of traders, missionaries and travellers who have set up shop and much more. The city’s story is one of pulses of opening and closing, allowing and then stymying the international tides that have periodically enriched – materially and culturally – the entrepôt.

Journey from the West

Within the formerly walled old city of Guangzhou sits one of its most striking temples – the 六榕寺 Liurongsi ‘Temple of the Six Banyans’. Presided over by a much restored pagoda (one of the tallest buildings in old Guangzhou, and the core of which dates to the medieval Song Dynasty) the site itself dates back to 537 and the Liang Dynasty, one of the many power which spent over 300 years brawling over the remains of Han China.

Its patron was the Liang Emperor Wu. A devout Buddhist, his foundation of the temple came to a backdrop of Buddhist expansion in China – which had first entered from India in the later years of the Han, and which flourished as Mahayana Buddhism over the following centuries. 70 years later one of China’s most famous adherents, Xuanzang, would start his epic ‘journey to the west’ to bring back Sanskrit manuscripts to the Chinese capital Chang’an (present Xi’an). Guangzhou, then the port city of Panyu, was one of many of the conduits through which Buddhism circulated through South East Asia; interred in the original temple were the relics of Cambodian saints transported to the trade town.

Lighthouse of Mecca

Founded only a few decades later, and situated a short stroll to the south past shops specialising in air conditioning units, LEDs and kitchenware, is among my favourite sites in Guangzhou: the 怀圣 Huaisheng ‘Grand Mosque of Canton’, also known by a misattribution of its unique 光塔 guangta minaret as the ‘Lighthouse Mosque’.

Alongside the flow of Buddhist and East Asian traders into 7th century Panyu/Guangzhou came a new force on the world stage – the Arab traders fanning across the Indian Ocean and beyond as the vanguard of Islam’s expansion across the world. Legend has the mosque founded as early as 627 CE by the first Muslim missionary to China; what we do know is that Muslim traders in this period were bringing their wares and religion to communities across China’s southern seaboard, with mosques and Arabic gravestones appearing along the Guangdong coast and further east in Quanzhou and Fuzhou in Fujian. By the 8th century Guangzhou is recorded as the route back home from the Islamic world for at least one Chinese survivor of the Battle of Talas,  the disastrous defeat in present Kazakhstan of the Tang Dynasty by an alliance of Abbasid and Tibetan forces which forever put a limit on westward Chinese expansion.

The current Huaisheng Mosque dates to at least the 11th century Song Dynasty, with restoration under the Yuan in the 14th century; documentary claims put the Minaret even older, as far back as the Tang who jockeyed with the Abbasid Caliphate for hegemony in Central Asia. If the mosque is this old, it witnessed troubled times for open Guangzhou: in 758 Arab and Persian pirates sacked the port in which they had been growing an increasing presence; and in the 878 ‘Guangzhou Massacre’ the Tang rebel Huang Chao butchered tens of thousands of Arab and Persian Muslims, Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians in a classic case of economic woes scapegoated on immigrants. For fifty years the port remained shut.

These pulses of opening and closing continued for centuries. Under the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, whose global networks for the first time brought non-Han Tibet, Yunnan, Mongolia and Manchuria into Chinese-orbit, Guangzhou was visited by the famous Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta who stayed with Muslim merchants in the city for two weeks; he would go on to visit other Muslim communities in Quanzhou, Fuzhou and Hangzhou. Barely a century later, the Ming Dynasty restored Han rule to China, but under the 15th century Yongle Emperor issued a devastating proclamation to shut the Empire’s ports to the world – with repercussions far beyond the rotting treasure junks in Chinese harbours.

Church of the East

Alongside Muslims, for centuries Christians had made their homes in Guangzhou. The victims of the Guangzhou Massacre counted many among their number. Throughout China the Nestorian Church had been making inroads for centuries (see previous blog), leaving their mark in south China with funerary stelae.

Tolerance for Nestorian Christianity and other denominations was marked under the Mongols, and included a Roman Catholic Archdiocese in the capital Khanbaliq, present Beijing. This was repudiated by the Ming as part of their Sinicizing retrenchment, pulling back a tide that would not wash back until Jesuit missionaries in the 16th and 17th centuries.

 

Guangzhou was no exception. In the 1320s the enterprising Franciscan friar and missionary Odoric of Pordenone made his way to the Pearl River Delta on the trail of Franciscan missionary stations; he recorded a Guangzhou thrice the size of Venice. And in 1582 the founder of modern Christianity in China, Matteo Ricci, landed in Guangzhou.

But Guangzhou’s opening – and our thread of its towers – took a backseat during the Ming and early  Qing, the Manchurian nomads who swept into the country in 1644 and placed their Tunguskic ruling class and language over the conquered populace. But the world continued to move on as the Age of Navigation brought European sailors to East Asia – the first Portuguese arriving in the early 16th century to persistently antagonise the population of Guangzhou before settling on Macao as their hub, gradually being welcomed alongside Dutch, British, French and other merchants as part of the famous ‘Canton System’ of limited international trade with Qing China. Through this system, from 1757 all foreign trade was organised through a series of 行 hong (Cantonese), associations of Chinese merchants exclusively operating from Guangzhou (Canton).

It was in this context that the final towers of our tale appear. As the Canton system broke down, French and British forces ushered in the Opium Wars to blast back open the doors of trade in Canton and China – the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ which would fatally cripple Qing China. In 1841 British forces overran gun emplacements in the Pearl River and stormed Guangzhou, forcing it to be opened up by treaty the following year. With land captured by British forces and under terms of reparation granted to them, the French Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris acquired prime real estate in south Guangzhou on which they built one of the county’s most spectacular Cathedrals. Started in 1861 with granite shipped from Kowloon in Hong Kong (making it, along with Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey, one of only three granite cathedrals in the world), the twin Gothic spires of 圣心 shengxin Sacred Heart Cathedral loomed above the low-lying Qing city as their modern analogues do over today’s Zhujiang New Town –  matched only by Huaisheng Mosque to their west, and Six Banyan Temple to the north.

 

Epilogue

As the 20th century rolled along the towers of Guangzhou met further depredations as the country once again closed itself up after 1949, expelling the foreign community, businesses and consulates which looped around its southern edge on Shamian Island. Sacred Heart was vandalised by Red Guards and turned into a warehouse in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution; Huaisheng Mosque similar victimised during the reign of Mao’s revolutionaries; and Banyan closed alongside hundreds of other destroyed traditional temples in the campaign against the four olds.

Only with 1979 and Deng’s policies of reform and tolerance were they gradually restored and reopened, and slowly repopulated by both local believers and immigrants. On my last visit Sacred Heart was filled with Korean devotees taking part in a weekly Korean-language service; and Huaisheng plays host to the new generation of Middle Eastern and African  Muslims who have come to trade in a new Guangzhou famed for its textile and manufacturing exports. And so as the old towers of are left in the leafy suburbs of old Yuexiu District, saved from the highways which tie it to the new city with its towers of glass and steel to the east, the wheel of Canton’s history continues to turn.

 

All photos taken by the author