Dōngguǎn

Dōngguǎn lies on the eastern side of the Pearl River Delta, where low hills, tidal channels and fertile alluvium meet the approaches to Guangzhou. The county took the name Dongguan in 757, and an older written form of its second character, with a bamboo radical on top, recalls the state salt monopoly of the district. Under the Song it gave up its Xiangshan district to a new county in 1152.

In the Ming, Dongguan's coast became a frontier of overseas contact. In 1521 the Ming fleet beat Portuguese ships off the Dongguan coast at Tunmen, and in 1542 a stele at the Que Jin Pavilion was raised for the Panyu magistrate Li Kai, who refused payment when he came to Dongguan to deal with the Siamese merchant ships. The county's incense, harvested in the hills, was shipped as far as Suzhou. In 1573 the Dongguan garrison and fifty-six registered districts were set off as Xin'an County. Ming and Qing Dongguan remained a county of clans, market towns and landed estates, growing rice, fruit and sugarcane, fishing the tidal rivers and making salt along the coast. Its long coastline and many estuaries made smuggling hard to control.