Why it looks like this

Nanchang is the capital of Jiangxi, set where the Gan River approaches the vast, fluctuating Poyang Lake. The old city grew on the east bank; the modern city leapt the river to build the high-rise Honggutan district opposite.

Its most famous address is the Tengwang Pavilion, first raised in 653 and celebrated in one of China's best-known poems. War, fire and flood have taken it again and again — by traditional count it has been rebuilt twenty-nine times, most recently in the 1980s — a fixed point the city keeps restoring.