My hometown is a beautiful place with a population of eight million. It stands beside the Gulf Bohai. Tianjin has many high office and commercial buildings and wide treelined streets. Several excellent worldfamous institutions of higher learning are located here, namely Nankai University and Tianjin University. As a most important industrial center for North China, her hundreds of factories and joint ventures with foreign companies manufacture a wide range of topgrade and high-tech products or consumer goods. Many of these products have attained or surpassed world levels. Markets and department stores, big or small, are well-stocked with all kinds of goods, which are high in quality but low in price. But in the old days,Tianjin used to be a poor and backward city characteristic of semi-colonialism and semi-feudalism. The few rich persons lived in luxury houses while the majority of the working people lived in old, shabby huts or buildings on narrow and muddy streets. The working class led a very miserable life. Today people in Tianjin are going all out to build their city into a beautiful and prosperous place to live in.。