Why it looks like this

Fuyang is a plains city in northwestern Anhui, at the meeting of rivers that drain toward the Huai. The land is flat, fertile and crowded — the surrounding prefecture holds millions of people, many of whom work in China's coastal cities and return home each new year through Fuyang's famously busy railway station.

The street map is what the plain allows: a dense older core, ring roads, and straight new avenues extending the grid outward across former farmland.