Why it looks like this

Wenzhou fills a pocket of coastal plain on the Ou River, walled in by mountains on three sides; until the railway finally arrived in the 1990s, the easiest way in or out was by water. That isolation preserved one of China's most impenetrable dialects and bred a culture of going out to trade.

When reform began in 1978, Wenzhou's families turned their homes into workshops — buttons, shoes, lighters, eyeglasses — creating the 'Wenzhou model' of private enterprise and one of the country's densest self-made cities, its streets packed between river and hills.