Shunde - better known in Cantonese as Shun Tak - is a substantial city on the West River, about an hour's drive north of Macau. Heavily industrialised, like most of the Pearl River Delta, Shun Tak nevertheless remains distinct.
While Foshan makes a large proportion of the world's tiles and sanitary fittings (and its kilns contribute significantly to the region's poor air quality), and Dongguan specialises in electrical goods, Shun Tak produces much of the world's cheap furniture. Aeroplane hangar-sized warehouses, piled high with sofas, tables, chairs, beds and other everyday items, are a common sight. The quality is reasonable - if you don't expect to get an eventual family heirloom - and hotel chains frequently order several thousand identical items at a time.
In years gone by, Shun Tak's most famous exports were high-quality silk floss and its entrepreneurial, hard-working women. Silk floss was exported to Japan in the 17th-century. The Japanese wove the silk into high-quality fabrics - far better than the Chinese product, in some instances - but produced little raw silk themselves. This had to be imported - and Shun Tak produced the best.
Shun Tak's female-dominated silk production contradicts contemporary assumptions about the role of women and their economic situation in pre-modern China. For centuries, Shun Tak's silk industry was controlled by women and they used the proceeds as they saw fit.
Accustomed to relative economic independence and the personal freedom that followed, many Shun Tak women chose not to marry. And why would they, when they had a viable alternative to the average Chinese woman's fate: being married off to a stranger, having untold numbers of children and - quite possibly - being victimised by an uncaring mother-in-law?
Those who chose the single life went through a ritual known as sor hei ('pinning up the hair'), when they swore to remain celibate before an image of Kwun Yum, the bodhisattva goddess of mercy, and joined sororities for mutual aid in sickness and old age. On becoming sor hei, the women wore their hair in a distinctive long plait and partly because of this became popularly known as mah jeh. Literally 'mother sisters', mah jeh is sometimes punned in Cantonese as 'horse sisters' - a reference to their long, braided 'tails'.