Yancheng

Yancheng means "Salt City", and the ledger goes back two millennia: the flats along the Yellow Sea made this stretch of Jiangsu the empire's salt-works, a state monopoly harvested from the tide. The salt offices are museums now, and the tide has revealed its second treasure: the coastal wetlands of Yancheng — the largest intertidal mudflats on earth — were inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 as China's first coastal World Natural Heritage site, the crucial refuelling station of the East Asian flyway. The numbers are imperial in their own way: the world's largest wintering grounds of the red-crowned crane, the bird of longevity in Chinese art, and at Dafeng the world's largest herd of milu — Père David's deer, extinct in China for a century and returned from European parks to multiply on the marshes. In season, the sky over Yancheng is the busiest stage in the province.

The city itself is a delta workhorse — automobiles, wind power off the shallow sea, canals threading a flat green countryside — with a centre rebuilt around water and parks. Its concert life gathers at the Yancheng Cultural and Arts Center, the venue documented in the concert record, where touring ensembles and local seasons serve a public otherwise occupied with cranes. Salt for the empire, mudflats for the planet, a hall for the winters: Yancheng's wealth was always what the sea left behind.