Why it looks like this

Nanning sits on the Yong River in the karst country of China's far south, closer to Hanoi than to Guangzhou. Long a frontier market town, it boomed after becoming the permanent host of the China–ASEAN Expo, the trading fair linking China with Southeast Asia.

The city is known in China for its greenery — subtropical trees shade nearly every street — and its map shows a river city growing in all directions at once, with new districts across the Yong and rail lines running south to the Vietnamese border.