This research contrasts the longue durée of the researcher's ancestral home with the more recent spatial developments and rapid urbanization of Nanhai, a region situated in the highly urbanized Pearl River Delta (China), by developing a series of landscape biographies for this district. Each biography is conceived as a form of countermapping, applying a distinct, custom drawing method to a specific set of source materials. These visual and written portraits, which build both on archival research, literature review and fieldwork that, due to the nature of the research, necessarily had to be conducted - in part - on site, aim to interrogate dominant narratives in the literature surrounding modernization in the Pearl River Delta.