Chongming District is northernmost district of the provincial-level municipality of Shanghai. Chongming consists of three low-lying inhabited alluvial islands at the mouth of the Yangtze north of the Shanghai peninsula: Chongming, Changxing, and Hengsha. Following its massive expansion in the 20th century, Chongming is now the 2nd-largest island administered by the People's Republic of China and the 3rd-largest in Greater China, after Taiwan and Hainan. Chongming does not, however, administer all of the island: owing to its continual expansion from sediment deposited by the Yangtze, it has merged with formerly separate islands and now includes Jiangsu province's pene-exclave townships of Haiyong and Qilong. Chongming proper covers an area of 1,411 km2 and had a population of 704 000 at the time of the Sixth National Census in 2010. The county was established in 1396, the second year of the Ming dynasty's Hongwu Emperor. With the completion of the Yangtze and Chongqi Bridges, it is now connected to both the rest of Shanghai and southeastern Jiangsu province along the Hushan Expressway. Further development is now proceeding according to an urban and agricultural master-plan led by Philip Enquist of SOM, although ambitious plans for an ecocity named Dongtan have been shelved since the 2006 ouster of mayor Chen Liangyu and other neighborhoods have swelled with immigration from people relocated from central China following the completion of the Three Gorges Dam.
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