Why it looks like this

Changsha has been inhabited on the same site for some three thousand years, and the Xiang River — with the narrow, four-kilometre Orange Isle in midstream — has always been its axis. But in 1938, as Japanese forces approached, the city was set on fire in a disastrous scorched-earth order; most of old Changsha burned in days.

So the map is a paradox: an ancient city made of 20th-century streets, rebuilt and then rebuilt again as the capital of Hunan boomed, spreading from the river's east bank across to the west.