Location: Puning 🌎

Puning (Chinese: 普宁 / 普寧; Mandarin: Pǔníng; Teochew: Pou2 leng5), officially Puning City, is a county-level city located in Eastern Guangdong, China, under the administration of the city, Jieyang. Nevertheless, its administrative power in economic matters is comparable to that of prefecture-level cities. Puning is geographically situated on the west rim of Chaoshan Plain, leaning against the stretching branch of the Lianhua Mountains at its southwest border, and 90 percent of its territory sits on the south of the Tropic of Cancer. The city has a population of 2.5089 million under its household registration system hukou, marking the largest in all county-level cities in China. Puning’s downtown residents amount to 581,900, behind Yiwu, while the entire city’s resident population of 1.9986 million is second to cities Kunshan and Jinjiang. It is concurrently the ancestral hometown of 1.95 million overseas Chinese people and 1.4 million ‘returned overseas Chinese people’ (overseas Chinese who ‘returned’ to China and/or regained Chinese citizenship) and family members of overseas Chinese people. Puning, having been a key trade hub in eastern Guangdong, was upgraded from county to city status in 1993. It is one of the first ‘Chinese textile cities’ and where the project ‘Chinese TCM Cities’ was first launched. Textile and apparel and medicine industries are local pillars, topping or coming second in Guangdong county economies since 2003. It also entered the list of the One Hundred Best Counties and Cities for Health Industry in 2020 by Xiaokang series of Qiushi magazine.Historically, Puning was one of the eight counties of Chaoshan. In the mid-1900s, the Hakka region, which was historically part of the Huizhou Prefecture, was incorporated into Puning’s territory. Subsequently, the city also welcomed back ‘returned overseas Chinese’ and ‘family members of overseas Chinese’ due to the political situation in Southeast Asia. The cultures of the various clans formed the multilingual, multicultural landscape of Puning, where customs and traditions differ across the towns and villages. It is recognised as a Chinese Folk Cuture Art Village by the Ministry of Culture, China.