Sleepy may be perhaps once have been the best word for laid-back Taizhou in Jiangsu Province.
More than 700 years ago, Marco Polo toured Taizhou and praised as a city which is is “not very big, but where there is much earthly happiness”. Indeed, even the name, Taizhou, can be interpreted to mean “A peaceful place where people are safe”.
Former President of China, Hu Jintao, hailed from the Taizhou area, while today there is even a museum to his birthplace in the city’s Jiangyan District.
Taizhou is also a place where can be found the celebrated and unique species of deer, the “milu”. The Père David’s Deer Reserve, also in Jiangyan District, remains the biggest reserve for the web-footed deer outside of Dafeng in Yancheng City.
That little happened in Taizhou until recently may be put down to it perhaps being a city of thinkers, rather than doers. As a highly innovative school in the history of Chinese thought, the long-standing and well-establish Taizhou School served as a link between the past a future, and brought to the forefront a new style of Confucianism in China history. It was the first enlightenment school of thought in late feudal China.
Today though, Taizhou is waking up. In 2021, the City boasted a GDP gain which was the highest in all of Jiangsu, at 10.1 percent.
Economic activity is also being given a future boost with construction on track for a 30-minute link across the Yangtze River with Changzhou. Called China’s first “three-in-one” bridge over the Yangtze, the engineering marvel will combine expressway, highway and and inter-city railway on what will also be the cable-stayed bridge with the world’s longest span, at 1,176 metres. The bridge is expected to open by the end of 2024.
Such a transportation link shall also be crucial in realising the Wuxi-Taizhou-Changzhou city cluster, one of several initiatives which shall bring about greater economic and social connectivity between cities across the Yangtze River Delta.
Then there is Taizhou’s China Medical City, in which more than 800 pharmaceutical enterprises have set up shop since the specialist development zone was established in 2010. Long then, COVID vaccination pioneer, AstraZeneca; as well as the world’s largest private pharmaceutical firm, Boehringer Ingelheim.
Taizhou is 1.5 hours by high-speed train from Nanjing and a bit over 2 hours from Shanghai. Taizhou shares an airport with neighbouring Yangzhou City, the Yangzhou Taizhou International Airport, often simply called Yangtai Airport, only 20 kilometres from downtown Taizhou.
