Why it looks like this

While foreign powers were laying out China's treaty ports, the scholar-industrialist Zhang Jian did something different at his home town on the Yangtze's north bank: from the 1890s he built cotton mills, a normal school, parks, land reclamation and in 1905 the Nantong Museum — the first museum founded by a Chinese citizen — deliberately designing a modern city under Chinese direction.

His 'one city, three towns' layout separated industry from the old moated core. Modern Nantong, now tied to Shanghai by long Yangtze bridges, still centres on the moat-ringed old town Zhang Jian modernized.