Nantong, city, eastern Jiangsu sheng (province), China. It is situated on the northern shore of the head of the Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) estuary. Northward, it is connected with the Tongyang and Tonglü canal systems, which serve the coastal zone of Jiangsu north of the Yangtze and connect westward with the Grand Canal. Tiansheng port, about 7.5 miles (12 km) to the west, and Nantong port provide Nantong with ports on the Yangtze. Another port at Langshan, some 8 miles (13 km) south of Nantong, has been developed since the 1990s; this facility has greatly expanded the handling capacity of the ports group administered by the city and has made Nantong one of the largest ports along the Chinese coast.
During the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce), and even as late as the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) periods, the seacoast was much farther west than at present, and the area now called Nantong was an outlying county, Hailing, subordinate to Yangzhou. It grew into a commercial, communications, and strategic centre and became a prefecture (zhou) under the name of Tong in 958. After 1368 it lost its prefectural status and again became a county subordinate to its wealthy neighbour, Yangzhou. In 1724, however, it was again created a prefecture and was given the name Nantong (“Southern Tong”) to avoid confusion with Tongzhou, near Beijing. After 1912 it became a county, retaining its old name.
The coastal area to the east and northeast has always been known for salt production, and the inland area to the north and northwest is a rich rice- and cotton-growing region. It is above all on cotton that Nantong’s prosperity has depended. Domestic-scale spinning and weaving of cotton had long been established, but the modern industry was almost entirely the creation of a statesman and modernizer named Zhang Jian (1853–1926), who was a native of the district. After the disasters of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, Zhang decided to abandon politics and to devote himself to developing Nantong into a model district. In 1895 he founded the Dah Sun Cotton Mill (Dasheng Sha Chang) at Tangzha, some 5.5 miles (9 km) west of Nantong. This mill came into production in 1899 and proved more efficient than any other private textile firm of the same period. Out of its profits, Zhang, between 1900 and 1905, built up an industrial complex in Nantong that included flour and oil mills, a modern factory for reeling silk, a distillery, and a machine shop. He also founded a shipping line and, after 1901, formed the Tonghai Land Reclamation Company—the first of a number of such companies that brought much of the saline northern coastal zone of the Yangtze estuary under cotton cultivation.
Zhang also founded the first teacher-training colleges in China—the Nantong normal schools—which staffed hundreds of primary schools. Later he founded an agricultural college, a textile school, and a medical college (1910–12), which eventually merged to form Nantong University. In addition, he established museums, libraries, and theatres, and Nantong became an important cultural centre as well as a prosperous industrial town. In the early republican period (after 1911), Nantong was commonly called “Zhang Jian’s Kingdom,” or the “Model County.”
Like all centres of cotton manufacture in China, Nantong suffered seriously during the years of economic depression in the 1930s, after which the area came under Japanese occupation for a time. The contemporary city has remained heavily dependent on the textile industry and on cotton. In 1984 Nantong was designated one of China’s “open” cities in the new open-door policy inviting foreign investment. Since then, the city has undergone tremendous economic growth, forging to prominence as a new industrial centre and foreign-trade port north of the Yangtze estuary. While the textile industry has continued to flourish in Nantong, factories producing machinery, electronics, and chemicals also have been established. The six-lane Sutong Bridge across the Yangtze, the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world (completed in 2008), provides the city much quicker expressway access to Suzhou and Shanghai. There are scheduled flights from Nantong to Beijing, Canton, and Amoy. Pop. (2002 est.) city, 564,713; (2007 est.) urban agglom., 947,000.