Gaozhou City

I did a bit of research and came up with a very brief history of Gaozhou. A good portion of the material came from an article I found written by a man who was born and lived in Gaozhou before moving to the USA.

Gaozhou is a city with over a thousand years of history. It’s located in the western region of the Guangdong province, next to the Guangxi province. The region is called the Yue Xi region. Yue is the nickname for Guangdong and Xi means west.

Gaozhou City’s downtown was built in the Shui Dynasty (598). It's been the region headquarters for hundreds of years and is considered the cultural center for this region.

At the end of 1995, Gaozhou had approx 1.5 million people living there and was comprised of 27 small towns. The Gaozhou downtown has 6 districts and about 1,461 people per square km.

Most of the Gaozhouese are Han people. The male to female ratio is 5.2 to 4.8. The average age 71.6 and Gaozhou people, like most of the Guangzhou people and southern China people, are not very tall.

Gaozhouese, a Cantonese dialect, is the primary language spoken in the city. It’s sometimes referred to as Gaozhou Bai Hua (White Language) with over 2000 years of history. The current standard Cantonese is based on the Yue Hai dialect spoken in Guangzhou. Mandarin is the national standard. It's based on the language people speak in Beijing city. There is big difference between Cantonese and Mandarin, e.g, Cantonese has 9 tones while Mandarin only has 4 tones. The same Chinese character will sound different and has different grammar too. Most people in Guangdong, Guangxi, Hong Kong, Maccao, and Chinatown in the US speak Cantonese.

In Gaozhou city, the Gaozhou dialect has a slightly difference accent from town-to-town. Only local people can tell the difference. There are some people who speak Mandarin, Kejia, Li Hua, depending on where they’re from within the region. Gaozhou is well known as a county of fruits. The most famous are bananas, Li Zhi (Lee Chee), and Long Yan (Dragon Eye). There is a Li Zhi festival around June each year which began back in the early 90s.

Guang Shan (Shan means mountain in Chinese) is a small mountain near the old bridge on the other side of the Jiang River. It is only 64.5 meters high. In a story from the West Jun dynasty, there was a Taoist called Pan Maoming (Pan is the last name). When he was a small child, he visited this mountain and saw two Taoists playing Chinese chess. They liked Pan and thought he could be enlightened, so he became their student. Pan practiced meditation on this mountain for 20 years. He also made some pills which helped the local people fight an epidemic. He finally became “enlightened” on this mountain and flew "to the heaven" to become a heavenly being (or God, angel, etc.) with eternal life. This story makes this small mountain very famous. For this reason, Gaozhou also has a nickname called Pan Zhou (Zhou means state in Chinese) and Gaozhou was actually called Panzhou for a period of time in ancient history. The park in downtown Gaozhou is called Panzhou Park. Maoming city was named using Pan's first name. This explains why both Gao and Pan are used to name the Gao children in Gaozhou orphanage.