Zhongshan

Zhongshan is the rare Chinese city named after a person — and it chose well. Formerly Xiangshan, "Fragrant Hills", the county was renamed in 1925 to honour its greatest son: Sun Yat-sen — Sun Zhongshan — the founding father of modern China, born in the village of Cuiheng, where his boyhood home and memorial now anchor the region's most visited historic site, honoured across every political divide of the last century.

The same delta soil produced China's first cosmopolitans: Xiangshan men emigrated early to the goldfields of California and Australia, and those who returned brought the modern world in their luggage — the founders of Shanghai's four great department stores, the pioneers of Chinese retail and hotel-keeping, were sons of this county, and their mansions still ornament the villages. Today's Zhongshan is a Pearl River Delta manufacturer of genial prosperity — lighting from Guzhen, the "lamp capital", brightens rooms worldwide — with a green, low-rise centre along the Qijiang river, and Sunwen West Road's arcaded shophouses keeping the returned-emigrant architecture in daily use.

Its cultural seasons run through the Zhongshan Arts Centre, the venue documented in the concert record, a modern complex whose halls host the touring orchestras, opera and dance of the delta circuit. A revolutionary's birthplace, a merchants' diaspora, a city of lamps: Zhongshan has been lighting things — dynasties ended, shops opened, stages lit — for a hundred years.