The Guandong province of China is the most populous province in China since 2005. During the last census conducted in 2020, there were over 126 million inhabitants within the region. Officially, statistics have placed the province as the fourth-most populous province in China because it has 80 million permanent inhabitants, but due to a large influx of temporary workers, new settlers, and migrants, the population has increased by about another 30 million people.
Due to a large number of migrant workers coming and going from the province, they have been dubbed the "floating population", meaning that they have no permanent abode, but work the majority of their hours within the Guangdong province. This is because of the province's booming economy, which has a very high demand for labor. If Guangdong was considered a nation independent of the People's Republic of China, it would be among the twenty largest countries in the world by the number of inhabitants. Even though it has a modern and booming economy, almost 30% of the population is located in rural areas.
Guangdong's 2021 year-end population neared 127 million people, adding 600,000 people when compared to the 2020 census. Although this is only a slight gain when compared to many other years, hundreds of thousands of people still flood the province to participate in the economic bolstering. The majority of the population, like most other provinces, is Han Chinese. Within this ethnic majority, most of the Guangdong sub-sect of people are Cantonese, speaking the Cantonese dialect. Guangdong has the highest imbalance of genders of any other province, where the ratio is 1.3:1 for every boy to girl between the ages of 1-4.
Guangdong is an Asian coastal province in South China, which is sometimes Romanized as Canton or Kwangtung. The capital of Guangdong is Guangzhou and is considered the most populous province in China. Its economy is larger than any other province in the People's Republic of China and is considered the third-largest sub-national economy of another country in the world - with a GDP of almost 2 trillion USD. The province of Guangdong surpassed the Henan and Shandong regions to become the most populous province in 2005, which had around 80 million residents, but about 30 million migrant workers. This had tipped the scales in Guangdong's favor seemingly overnight.
The economy of Guangdong is diversified and is known for being the starting area for the Silk Road of ancient China into the rest of the world, particularly the European nations.
Since the 16th century, the province of Guangdong has had an extensive trade route that spanned the rest of the world. European merchants came through the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea, with the most notable trade partners at the time being the British and Portuguese empires. The first European settlement in the province, Macau, was established in 1557. Europeans established a majority of the now-western colonies of Zhanjiang and Hong Kong during the First Opium War of the 19th century.