"The posthumous account's translation of the name as "Son of the Ocean" shows that Ricci, who by the end of his life was fluent in literary Chinese, was introduced to it as the homophonic rather than the 'proper' .Further, although railroads and the Shanghai concessions subsequently turned it into a backwater, Yangzhou was the lower river's principal port for much of the Qing dynasty, directing Liangjiang's important salt monopoly and connecting the Yangtze with the Grand Canal to Beijing.