Drill Ground and Rice Field

Xiaozhan's military reputation was made in a short period at the end of the Qing. After Tianjin was opened as a treaty port in 1860, nine foreign powers established concessions and the Qing modernisers built industry in the city, which turned Tianjin into the base of the Self-Strengthening movement. Li Hongzhang founded the Tianjin Naval Academy and the Beiyang Military Academy as part of that programme, and Yuan Shikai later trained his new troops at Xiaozhan. The officers who came out of that training formed the cadre of the Beiyang military and political faction, which is why a town in Jinnan District appears in the political history of the whole republic.

The other reputation is agricultural and much quieter. Xiaozhan rice appears in the city's account of its own cooking among the products attributed to Tianjin's geography and climate, in a list that also includes chestnuts, pears, winter vegetables, cabbage, Chadian grapes and the Shawo radish. Rice in a northern municipality is not obvious, and the fact that a town name attached itself to a rice variety suggests how local the crop became. In 2024 the Shawo radish was described as the second Tianjin farm brand to enter the national programme after Xiaozhan rice, which is a measure of how firmly the rice sits in the city's own sense of its produce.

Xiaozhan is one of the towns of Jinnan District, recorded in the district's administrative list alongside Xianshuigu, Gegu, Shuanggong, Xinzhuang, Shuangqiaohe, Balitai and Beizhakou. Jinnan was called Nanjiao until 1992, when Tianjin's four ring districts were renamed, and it sits on the west bank of the lower Hai River facing Dongli across the water. At the 2020 census it had 928,066 residents. The district's newer identity is educational: the Haihe Education Park, also called Beiyang Yuan, holds the new campuses of Nankai University and Tianjin University on ground between the old city and the coast.