Why it looks like this

Guizhou is China's karst province, a landscape of limestone cones and sinkholes, and its capital Guiyang had to fit itself into that terrain. Green hills stand inside the city like islands; roads loop around them, and parks occupy the peaks that buildings could not.

The city grew fast in recent decades — big-data centres and new districts on whatever flat land the valleys offered — which makes the map a patchwork of grids interrupted, again and again, by round green hills.