Before the military academy, before the revolutionary politics, there was the anchorage. The Whampoa or Huangpu anchorage — the stretch of Pearl River around Changzhou and nearby Pazhou Island — was, under the Canton System, the designated stopping point for all foreign trading ships approaching Canton. Ships had to anchor here before their cargo could be moved inland by smaller boats.

Danish crews, among others, used Changzhou Island for practical purposes during this era: repairing ships, burying their dead. The island appears in a nineteenth-century painting by the Chinese artist Sunqua, who depicted the foreign cemetery there — a quiet patch of ground where sailors from northern Europe were laid to rest far from home, overlooking the river that had brought them to the other side of the world. The Canton trade era produced this kind of layered geography: commercial, practical, quietly mournful.

Sun Yat-sen founded the Whampoa Military Academy on Changzhou Island in 1924. It was established to create a professional officer corps for the National Revolutionary Army — the military arm of Sun's Nationalist movement, the Kuomintang (KMT). The academy was designed with Soviet assistance and was modeled in part on Soviet military institutions of the era.

The academy's first commandant was Chiang Kai-shek, then a rising figure in the Nationalist movement. Its political commissar was Zhou Enlai, who would go on to serve as the first Premier of the People's Republic of China. The student officers who trained here came from across China, motivated by a range of political convictions — Nationalist, Communist, and everything in between. The academy operated in the context of the First United Front, an alliance between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party that was, even as the academy opened, already under strain.

In March 1926, Changzhou Island was again at the center of events. The Zhongshan Incident — named for the gunboat Zhongshan — unfolded at the Whampoa anchorage and had immediate and lasting consequences. Chiang Kai-shek used the incident, in which the gunboat was moved to Whampoa under circumstances that remain disputed, as a pretext to declare martial law and move against Communist influence within the Nationalist movement.

The result was decisive. Chiang consolidated his position as the dominant military leader of the Kuomintang, outmaneuvering both the Communists within the movement and Nationalist rivals who had questioned his authority. The First United Front began to fracture. Within a year, Chiang would turn the National Revolutionary Army against Communist-aligned forces in the April 12 Incident of 1927, effectively ending the alliance and beginning the long civil conflict between the KMT and the Communist Party of China. The small island in the Pearl River had, again, been the setting for something enormous.

Changzhou Island is now administered as part of Guangzhou's Huangpu District. The island — 11.5 square kilometers in total, 8.5 square kilometers of dry land — is linked to Guangzhou's road network by a bridge to neighboring Xiaoguwei Island. A future extension of Guangzhou Metro Line 7 is planned to serve the area.

The Whampoa Military Academy site on the island has been preserved and operates as a museum. Visitors can see reconstructed buildings from the 1920s campus and exhibitions on the academy's history and the political figures who passed through it. The Pearl River still surrounds the island as it always has, carrying container traffic and ferry boats past the same banks where Danish sailors once made repairs and revolutionary officers once drilled. Changzhou is easy to overlook on a map. On the ground, the layers of history press in from every direction.