Capital of the Province of Hebei
Area: 284sq.km/110sq.mi
Shijiazhuang lies in the southwest of the Hebei province, 280km/174mi to the southwest of Beijing.
Until the beginning of the 20th C Shijiazhuang was just an unimportant village. From 1902, when the railroad from Beijing to Wuhan came into
being, it gradually grew in size to become a small city. Five years later the building of a second railroad between Zhengding and Taiyuan accelerated the expansion of Shijiazhuang. In 1926 it finally reached the size of a major city and in 1947 its name was changed to Shimen.
Since the end of the 1940s Shijiazhuang developed so quickly that it not only became the present political, economic and cultural center of the Hebei province, but is now also one of the most important industrial metropolises in the north of China.