The Consulate General of United States, Guangzhou (Chinese: 美国驻广州总领事馆) is one of seven American diplomatic and consular posts in China.

The consulate general is also the only U.S. mission in mainland China to process American adoptions and immigrant visas, making it one of the U.S. Department of State’s busiest consular-related posts.

In 1784, the American merchant ship Empress of China reached what was then known as the port of Canton transporting ginseng to trade for Chinese black tea.

The ship also carried on it Major Samuel Shaw, a 29-year-old former Revolutionary War artillery officer, who served as the business agent for this first American trade effort to the "Middle Kingdom."

"Such officers," he noted, "would have a degree of weight and respect which private adventurers cannot readily acquire, and which would enable them to render essential services to their countrymen."

Major Shaw was appointed the first American consul to China, although he would serve "with neither salary nor perquisites but with the confidence and esteem of the United States."

In the wake of the Opium War between China and Great Britain, however, the Chinese government was compelled to expand trading opportunities beyond Canton.

With the concurrence of the British government, the U.S., in 1873, built a consulate on Shamian Island, a sandy one kilometer long strip of land around which a man-made canal had been dug ten years before to separate it from the rest of the city.

For several months in 1949, after the Chinese Nationalist government moved its headquarters from Nanjing to Guangzhou, Shamian Island served as the site of the State Department's "Office of Embassy."

Consulate Canton itself was closed in August 1949, and diplomatic relations between the communist government of mainland China and the United States ceased shortly thereafter.

In order to better accommodate the rising number of applicants, on August 6, 2005, the consular section moved to a more spacious office facility at the Tianyu Garden Building on Linhe Zhong Road in Tianhe District.

Since 1980, the GDP of the Pearl River Delta region has grown annually at 16 percent and about 1/3 of all of China's global exports originate from this area of 35 million people.

The State Department spent $267 million on the project,[5] as part of a multi-year, $1.5 billion building plan for the American missions in China.