Shaoguan

About Shaoguan

Shaoguan is a prefecture-level city in northern Guangdong Province (Yuebei), South China, bordering Hunan to the northwest and Jiangxi to the northeast. It is home to the mummified remains of the sixth Zen Buddhist patriarch Huineng. Its built-up (or metro) area made up of Zhenjiang, Wujiang and Qujiang urban districts was home to 1,028,460 inhabitants as of the 2020 census.

Shaozhou or Seochew was a prefecture under the Tang and Song.

In 1589, Matteo Ricci relocated his mission house – the first ever Jesuit mission in mainland China – to Shaoguan after a fallout with the authorities in Zhaoqing. He remained in Shaoguan for a few years, eventually benefiting from Shaoguan's location on the important north–south travel route to establish connections with traveling dignitaries that allowed him to move north, to Nanchang, Nanjing, and Beijing.

During World War II the city, then called Kukong, was the temporary capital of Guangdong Province.

In June 2009, Uyghurs and Han workers clashed at a toy factory in Shaoguan (Shaoguan incident), which was followed by the Ürümqi riots in July.

The main languages spoken are Hakka and Shaozhou Tuhua, related to Ping Chinese...

Overview adapted from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA. Photography via Wikimedia Commons.