How is a city’s international visibility historically formed? Applying a novel approach based on the Google Books N-gram corpus, we conducted the first empirical study to examine the pattern of and factors shaping the accumulation of international visibility by 294 major Chinese cities between the years of 1700 and 2000. We analyse the usage frequency of city names in Google English-language books to capture the international visibility of these major Chinese cities, and the appearance of these city names in the New York Times to capture media quotation over a definable number of years. Further, we performed the Granger causality test to see if media coverage helps to predict international visibility. The findings of this study demonstrate that the global fame of cities in mainland China is influenced by their exposure in media communications with the rest of the world. However, this media effect is not statistically significant for several former colonial cities, which are more likely to attain global fame through economic exchange in the global market.