Songjiang is a suburban district (formerly a county) of Shanghai. It has a land area of and a population of 1,582,398 (2010). Owing to a long history, Songjiang is known as the cultural root of Shanghai. Songjiang Town, the urban center of the district, was formerly the major city in the area. It is now connected to downtown Shanghai by Line 9 of the Shanghai Metro. History The prehistoric coastline of the East China Sea was much farther inland, at Xinzhuang near Songjiang's current eastern border with Minhang District. It was only gradually that silt from the Yangtze River filled in downtown Shanghai about 2000 years ago and then Pudong and Chongming Island over the last 1000 years. Modern archaeology has established a chronology of the main cultural groups who lived in the present area of Songjiang District in Neolithic China: the Majiabang in the 5th millennium ), the Songze in the 4th millennium), and the Liangzhu in the 3rd millennium. The Majiabang were among the first harvesters of rice and kept domesticated pigs while still frequently hunting deer. The Liangzhu possessed a high stratified society that almost certainly represented one of the earliest states in East Asia. The Liangzhu site at Guangfulin in Songjiang has been developed into Guangfulin Relics Park, an expansive museum and tourist attraction. Traditional Chinese historiography only recorded these people as among the Baiyuethe "Numerous Southern Barbarians"until the growth of the siniticized Wu Kingdom at Suzhou in the 1st millennium. During the Spring and Autumn Period at the end of the Zhou and under the Warring States, the area of present-day Songjiang passed from Wu to Yue to Chu before the unification of China under Shi Huangdi of Qin in the 3rd century. In the Three Kingdoms Period that followed the end of the Han in the 3rd century, Sun Quan's Wu Kingdom helped develop and further sinify the area. Another boost came from the completion of the Grand Canal under the Sui, linking Songjiang with Hangzhou, Shaoxing, and Ningbo in the south and Suzhou, Luoyang, Xi'an, and Beijing in the north. By the mid-Tang, the region had developed enough that it was organized in 751 into Huating County, the first county-level administration within modern-day Shanghai. In the 1250s at the end of the Southern Song, the 10-year-old Songjiangese girl Huang Daopo fled her hometown and an arranged marriage to live with the Hlai on