Quanzhou

In the thirteenth century, the port that Arabs called Zayton was one of the largest in the world. Ibn Battuta described it as one of the biggest harbours he had ever seen. Marco Polo marvelled at its volume of pepper alone. Buddhist temples, the Qingjing Mosque — China's oldest surviving mosque, built in 1009 and modelled on the Great Mosque of Damascus — Hindu shrines, Nestorian churches, and a Franciscan cathedral stood within walking distance of one another. Then in 1357, a Persian military revolt seized the city. When imperial forces retook it nearly a decade later, they massacred the foreign merchant communities. The Ming dynasty sealed the coast. The harbour silted up. Quanzhou entered five centuries of economic dormancy.

Cichlids in Africa's Great Lakes are the fastest-diversifying vertebrates on record. From a single ancestral lineage, over 500 species evolved in Lake Victoria in roughly 15,000 years — an explosion of form and function from one shared substrate. The key was not isolation but proximity: living in the same lake, feeding on different resources, each species carved a slightly different niche without ever leaving.

When China reopened its economy after 1978, Quanzhou's dormant entrepreneurial substrate — Hokkien trading networks, diaspora capital, a culture that had once connected the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea — did not gradually revive. It underwent a phase transition into an alternative stable state. The city became the sneaker capital of the world. Anta Sports, Peak, and Xtep were all founded within a few kilometres of each other from the late 1980s through the early 1990s by local entrepreneurs, and 361 Degrees followed shortly after. Western brands like Nike had already seeded the region with OEM factories, catalysing the radiation. The majority of China's leading domestic athletic shoe brands now call this cluster home. The city produces over 40 per cent of all athletic shoes manufactured in China, and its firms have supplied sportswear for multiple Olympic delegations.

The adaptive radiation mirrors the cichlid pattern: a single geographic cluster generating dozens of competing species that diverge into adjacent but distinct market niches — Anta through premium acquisitions, Peak through Olympic sponsorship, 361 through mass-market pricing, Xtep through fashion-sport crossover. Private enterprises generate over 80 per cent of the city's GDP and roughly 90 per cent of urban employment. The substrate that produced medieval Zayton's cosmopolitan port produced modern Quanzhou's manufacturing cluster. Different species. Same lake.