碧海银沙网

~ the obit ~

碧海银沙 means blue sea, silver sand. It is a description of Zhanjiang, a port city at the bottom of Guangdong that looks across the strait at Hainan, and it was the name of that city's portal from 1996 until 2017. The site belonged to the local branch of the phone company. That was an ordinary arrangement in China at the time, and here it produced the largest portal in western Guangdong, serving a region of several million people who got their first web page from whoever sold them the dial tone.

It was a portal in the full 1990s sense, meaning it tried to be everything. Chat rooms, greeting cards, a section for original fiction, personals, diaries, photo albums, a flea market, local tourism pages and a photography section that existed mostly so people could post pictures of Zhanjiang to each other. Some of it grew into properties with their own names. 碧聊 took the chat. 心意坊 took the electronic greeting cards. 且听风吟 carried the fiction, under the standard Chinese title of Murakami's first novel.

None of that is unusual on its own. What is unusual is that this particular arrangement lasted twenty-one years, through the arrival of QQ and the blogs and the whole Chinese social web, and still had people paying it money on the last day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the chat rooms ~

碧聊 outgrew the site that made it. It ran voice and video chat back when most Chinese users had neither the bandwidth nor a microphone, and it became one of the earliest chat services in the country to reach genuine scale. More than fourteen million accounts were registered to it across its life, and at peak it held over forty thousand people online at the same moment. The room names read now like a period document: 缘分天空, the sky of fate. 心灵港湾, the harbor of the heart.

It closed on 28 April 2011, six years ahead of the site hosting it. By then QQ had absorbed everything a general-purpose chat room used to do, and a provincial telco's voice service had nowhere left to stand. The portal went on without it for another six years, which is a long time to keep operating a front page whose main attraction has already been switched off.

~ what a phone company's front page was ~

The ISP that also ran your portal was a global pattern rather than a Chinese peculiarity. Turkey had the same arrangement. You bought a connection from TTNet or Superonline and the browser opened on something they owned, stuffed with news and a chat service nobody had asked for. Nobody chose those pages. They were simply what loaded, and for a large share of users in their first years online, whatever loaded was the internet.

What the Turkish ones did not have was twenty-one years. 碧海银沙 outlasted the arrangement that created it by more than a decade. It carried a city's forum culture through the entire rise of the Chinese social web, and it still had subscribers on paid channels on the day it was told to stop.

~ the directive ~

On 13 September 2017 China Telecom's Guangdong company issued an instruction to close four of its portals: 广州视窗 in Guangzhou, 珠海视窗 in Zhuhai, 中山国际 in Zhongshan and 碧海银沙 in Zhanjiang. The stated reason was an information security risk assessment and remediation exercise. What that meant in practice is that a state telecom operator had decided it no longer wanted to be the party responsible for user-generated content at provincial scale.

The site stopped serving on 27 September, fourteen days later. The notice said operations would cease in full and that access would not continue, and it offered refunds against unused paid channel subscriptions and against whatever remained in account balances. Twenty-one years of a city's internet, closed by internal memo and settled with a refund window.

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