Travel Guide Shantou 汕 塾頭

Shantou belongs to the four special economic zones of South China (such as Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Xiamen). In their image, this industrial city has little interest in the traveling traveler. It is mainly for businessmen. Its history disappears beneath the visible traces of its economic boom. The city is a transit point on the road between Guangdong and Fujian.Under the Qing, Shantou became a garrison city; The imperial troops settled there in 1717 and had been built there. From the seventeenth century, merchant ships from South East Asia and the Indes were calling. In 1861, the city opened up to the West after the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin and the Second Opium War. The British were the first to settle: first on the island of Mayu, where they established the first customs administration in the city; and then in the old Chinese quarter, southwest of the city. Shantou pronounced "Swatow" in the local dialect, hence the western transcript that prevailed until very recently. At that time, Shantou developed an export-oriented economy. Shantou was one of the main ports of emigration from overseas Chinese. The Chaozhou (or Teochew, the name of the dialect throughout this region) formed a significant part of the Thai and Cambodian population.From the 1980 s, with the opening, these overseas Chinese, income for some of them in the region, were the first to come to invest in the new special economic zone.Shantou's major handicap was his terrible enclave, which only ended very recently: at the end of 1995, the new railway-Shantou railway reconnected this port with the rest of China. Today, the city has a population of 5 million, including 900,000 inhabitants in the city center.