Yanji

Yanji is a county-level city in the east of Jilin Province in northeastern China and the seat of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, which makes it the political, economic and cultural centre of that prefecture. It sits among foothills, with its main urban area on a small, very flat plain ringed by mountains and by small farming communities. A large share of its people are ethnic Koreans, and Chinese and Korean are both treated as official languages of the city, so official signs are bilingual. Settlement here is recent: the area was largely unpopulated until the 1800s, when the Qing dynasty encouraged migration into Manchuria, and the city served as seat of Jiandao Province in the Manchukuo state from 1934 to 1943 before becoming part of Jilin Province after 1949. Today it is a hub of transport and trade between China and North Korea and is home to Yanbian University.