The Port That Was There First

Tanggu grew where the Hai River stops being a river. It was a fishing and shipping settlement before it was anything administrative, and in the first half of the twentieth century Tanggu, Hangu and Dagu together formed the port and industrial base of the lower river. The town's own account of its history begins with that function and only later turns to boundaries. What is easy to miss on a modern map is that the whole apparatus of the Binhai New Area sits on top of three older places, and Tanggu is the one that had a working harbour before the planned zones existed.

In October 1952 Tanggu New Port opened, and the first 10,000-tonne vessel arrived at Newport Pier. For a river-mouth port that had spent decades constrained by silting and by winter ice, the arrival of a ten-thousand-ton vessel was the point of the whole exercise. The town then acquired a technical identity as well as a commercial one: in 1992 the Tianjin Tanggu Marine High-Tech Development Area was established, and in 1995 the State Council raised it to national level. A place that had grown up around fishing and freight began to be described in the language of marine technology.

On 9 November 2009 Tanggu District was merged with Hangu and Dagang into the new Binhai New Area, and the name Tanggu became a group of subdistricts inside a larger unit. The change was administrative, but it had an effect on how the place is described: a town with a continuous history as a port is now an entry in a list of subdistricts that also includes Hangzhou Dao, Xinhe, Dagu, Xinbei, Beitang, Xingang and Xincun. The railway station named Tanggu still sits in the port area, and the expressways that leave it are still named for the town, so the older geography remains legible under the newer one.