WATCH: Fascinating Footage of Guangzhou 30 Years Ago

Flashback Friday alert! Today we want to share with you a fascinating video we stumbled across this morning: footage of Guangzhou taken in 1990. 

In 1990, Guangzhou had an urban population of 3,072,000, according to World Population Review, compared to 13,659,000 today (although other estimates put the city's current population much higher). At the time, Yang Shangkun was president of the PRC, the first McDonald’s was a year away from opening in Beijing and China was still four years away from being permanently connected to the Internet. Oh, how the times have changed.

Admittedly, we aren’t 100 percent sure where in the city the video was filmed (a lot can change in 27 years…), but one netizen mentioned that both Dongfeng Lu and the Ximenkou area make an appearance in the footage.

We find the following clip enthralling for a number of reasons, most notably: it shows how much Guangzhou – which was recently named one of Chinese mainland’s most livable cities – has evolved in the past several decades.  

Watch below (VPN off):

Outside China? Watch on YouTube.