From liquor to lithium: the revival of the first city of Yangtze

CHENGDU, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- Marco Polo may have been the first Westerner to set foot in Yibin in southwest China in the late 13th century, but it is said that "the first city on the Yangtze River" was coined by American archaeologist and anthropologist David Crockett Graham, who resided in Yibin during the 1910s and 1920s.

Local historians, however, dispute this claim, arguing that the name has a much longer his