Pānyú

Pānyú, one of the oldest county names in the south, governed the eastern half of Guǎngzhōu city, Nánhǎi holding the western half, and stretched east and south across the Pearl River delta. Under the Míng its five patrol offices, among them Lùbù, Jiāotáng and Shāwān, watched over a country of rice fields, fish ponds and newly diked sand flats, and great lineages such as the Hé of Shāwān grew powerful on the rents of reclaimed land.

Pagodas marked the river approaches to the city: the Pázhōu Pagoda went up in 1600 and the Liánhuā Pagoda in 1612. The Qīng conquest fell hard on the county. Guǎngzhōu was stormed in 1650 after a ten-month siege, and in 1664 the coastal villages of Jiāotáng and Shāwān were emptied under the coastal evacuation. When Canton became the only port open to Western ships in 1757, their anchorage lay at Huángpǔ, in Panyu's Jiāotáng district, and more than five thousand foreign ships called there between 1758 and 1837. The poet Qū Dàjūn, whose family came from Shātíng in Panyu, described his province in the New Words of Guǎngdōng.