Nantong

Nantong, where the Yangtze meets the sea, was China's laboratory of modernity. Zhang Jian — scholar, top graduate of the imperial examinations, and then, astonishingly, industrialist — chose his hometown around 1900 for an experiment: a Chinese city modernised by Chinese hands. He built cotton mills, schools, land reclamation companies, a normal college — and, in 1905, the Nantong Museum, the first museum founded by a Chinese citizen in China, a distinction the city guards the way other towns guard cathedrals. For a generation Nantong was known as "the first modern city of China", planned with parks, theatres and clock towers on the profits of its own spindles.

The textile inheritance continues — Nantong remains a national capital of home textiles — and the city has grown into a Yangtze-delta metropolis of bridges, its riverfront facing Shanghai across the estuary. The Hao river, the old moat, rings the historic core like a green ribbon, and Langshan, the "Wolf Hill" above the Yangtze, stacks its temple terraces over the shipping lanes.

Zhang Jian built theatres too, and his city keeps the habit: the Nantong Grand Theatre, the venue documented in the concert record, is the modern flagship where opera, symphony and touring productions play to the delta's audiences. A museum before Beijing had one, mills that paid for schools: Nantong is what one determined scholar could do with a hometown.