The Port of Dalian is China’s most northerly ice-free seaport, spread around the bays at the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula in Liaoning province, where the Yellow Sea meets the Bohai Strait. Founded by Russian engineers in 1899, it handled about 306 million tonnes of cargo in 2022 (18th in the world, according to the Shanghai International Shipping Institute) and about 5.03 million TEU of containers in 2023, 38th in Lloyd’s List’s One Hundred Container Ports. It matters because it is the sea gateway for Northeast China: it is the largest multi-purpose port in the region, with trading links to more than 300 ports, spread across eight port areas and 346 km² of water.
The easiest way to understand a port this spread out is to move through it. What follows is a route from the old wharves by the city centre, past the shipyard and the inner harbour districts, north-east to the container terminals at Dayaowan, and finally out across the strait on the train ferry to Shandong.
Starting at the Russian-Built Wharves of Dalny
The tour begins where the port itself began, on the south shore of Dalian Bay a short walk from Zhongshan Road. After the Triple Intervention of 1895 forced Japan to hand the Liaodong Peninsula back to China, Russia pressed the Qing court for a lease, and the Pavlov Agreement of 1898 gave it Dalian and Lüshun for 25 years. Russia wanted what its Pacific coast lacked, a harbour that did not freeze. It spent more than 10 million gold rubles on a planned commercial city named Dal’niy, and by 1902 the new wharves were linked to the Trans-Siberian Railway through the Chinese Eastern Railway branch via Harbin.
Russia kept the place for only a few years. After the siege of Port Arthur (today’s Lüshunkou district, about 40 km to the south-west) ended in January 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth handed the lease to Japan, which renamed the city Dairen and made it the main trading port between Manchuria and Japan. From 1905 the rail line feeding the wharves was run by the Japanese South Manchurian Railway, and in 1937 Japan enlarged the leased territory into two cities, Dairen in the north and Ryojun, the old Port Arthur, in the south.
Soviet forces took the city on 22 August 1945, and the Soviet government rented the port while Soviet and Chinese Communist officials rebuilt its industry. The USSR returned the city to Chinese administration in 1950, and Soviet troops left in 1955. Dalian and Lüshun were merged that year as Lüda, a name that lasted until 5 March 1981, when the State Council restored the name Dalian. Today the old harbour is represented by the Daliangang and Dalianwan port areas, the two that carry the city’s own name.
Past the Shipyard Where Varyag Became Liaoning
A short distance along the waterfront the skyline changes from office blocks to cranes. The shipyard here is as old as the Russian city: Russia started building a yard next to the port in June 1898, Japan expanded it after 1905, and the Soviet Union ran it jointly with China after 1945 before it became the China Shipbuilding Company in 1955. In the 1960s it built China’s first guided-missile submarine, and in the 1970s the first guided-missile destroyer. Since a December 2005 merger it has traded as Dalian Shipbuilding Industry Company, with two yards covering 3.4 km² and about 15,000 employees at the time.
The yard’s best-known job arrived under tow. The unfinished Soviet carrier Varyag, bought from Ukraine as a stripped hulk in 1998, was dragged 15,200 nautical miles around the Cape of Good Hope because the Suez Canal does not admit ships without their own power. It reached Dalian on 3 March 2002, entered dry dock in June 2005, and after rebuilding left for its first sea trials on 10 August 2011. It was commissioned on 25 September 2012 as the Liaoning, the first aircraft carrier to serve in the People’s Liberation Army Navy, and the refit gave the port a place in naval as well as commercial history.
Through the Inner Harbour from Xianglujiao to Si’ergou
Beyond the shipyard the port splits into working districts that most visitors never see: Xianglujiao, Nianyuwan, Ganjinzi, Heizuizi and Si’ergou, strung around the inner shores of Dalian Bay. Together with Daliangang, Dalianwan and Dayaowan they make up the eight port areas owned and run by the state company that is now Liaoning Port Co., listed in Hong Kong since 2006, when its retail offer was 851 times oversubscribed.
The scale is easiest to grasp in its support network rather than its quays. The port has about 160 km of dedicated railway line and more than 1,000 pieces of loading and handling equipment, with lifting capacities from 3 to 120 tonnes. Its land area is only about 15 km², which explains why the port has kept moving outward along the coast rather than growing in place. It has 80 production berths, 38 of them deep-water berths for ships over 10,000 deadweight tonnes, and it handled 64.17 million tonnes in 1995.
Oil shaped the port as much as containers did. A tanker harbour at the end of a pipeline from the Daqing oilfield in Heilongjiang was completed in 1976, and Dalian became a centre of refining and chemicals. By 2016 total throughput had reached 355 million tonnes, more than five times the 1995 figure.
Out to Dayaowan on the Dagushan Peninsula
The route now leaves the city and heads north-east along the expressway to the Dagushan Peninsula, where Dayaowan Port was completed in 1993 in the city’s northern suburbs, handling mining and oil products as well as the container traffic that the old harbour had no room for. Dalian has a long lead in that business: in 1972 the first container ships entered the port and opened China’s first container routes, the year before the port handled 21.5 million tonnes of cargo.
For decades three separate companies worked the container berths. Dalian Container Terminal ran seven, Dalian Port Container Terminal five and Dalian International Container Terminal two, each with foreign partners that included Japan’s Nippon Yusen, Singapore Dalian Port Investment and PSA China. As part of the national consolidation of port companies they were merged into a single operator under the Dalian Container Terminal name in August 2017. Alongside depths at these berths range from 9.8 m to 16 m. From here ships sail to more than 300 ports in about 160 countries and regions; the run to Geoje in South Korea, about 504 nautical miles, takes roughly a day.
The chart shows why Dalian has slipped down the world rankings. Lloyd’s List figures put it at around 10 million TEU a year between 2017 and 2019, then about half that from 2020, a period in which Liaoning’s ports were being brought under one provincial company with state-owned China Merchants Group lined up to buy a controlling stake. By 2023 it had recovered to about 5.03 million TEU, enough for 38th place worldwide. Cargo tonnage held up far better: 306 million tonnes in 2022 kept Dalian in the global top 20 by weight.
Xingang Harbour and the Oil Spill of July 2010
One more stop belongs on any honest tour: the oil storage at Xingang Harbour, scene of one of the worst recorded oil spills in China’s history. In July 2010 two crude pipelines running to a China National Petroleum Corporation depot ruptured and exploded during a desulphurisation process. The fire burned for 15 hours and brought down a storage tank with a capacity of 90,000 tonnes.
The official estimate was 1,500 tonnes of oil spilled; the marine conservationist Rick Steiner put it at 60,000 to 90,000 tonnes, a figure the city disputed. Either way the slick grew from 180 km² to 946 km² by 21 July and stretched about 90 km along the coast. Beaches closed, aquaculture was damaged, and a firefighter, Zhang Liang, was swept overboard and killed during the cleanup on 20 July. Two months earlier the port had drawn a very different kind of attention: in May 2010 North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il toured it, part of a Chinese effort to show him the results of reform and opening.
Across the Bohai Strait on the Train Ferry to Yantai
The last leg leaves Dalian by sea, and on an unusual vessel. Since 2007 the Bohai Train Ferry has carried freight wagons, lorries and passengers 184.8 km across the Bohai Strait to Yantai on the Shandong Peninsula. Its ships, the Sinorail Bohai No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, are 182.6 m long and each can load up to 50 railway freight cars. It was the second ocean-going train ferry in China after the Guangdong–Hainan crossing, and it is the longest in the country. The project was approved nationally in December 2003, built from October 2004 and tested from November 2006. The crossing follows an old migration route: from the late 19th century many people from Shandong moved to Northeast China in the Chuang Guandong, and ideas for bridging or tunnelling the strait have been discussed since then. The Dalian terminal, Lüshun West, lies about 35 km west of downtown and has no platforms, because no passenger trains run through it.
From the ferry’s stern the whole arrangement is visible at once: the Russian grid of the old city, the shipyard cranes, the tank farms and the gantries of Dayaowan, all facing open water that stays navigable when ports further up the Bohai coast are fighting ice. That single advantage, the reason Russia came here in 1898, still defines the port. For the sea it opens onto, see our guide to the Yellow Sea, and compare Dalian with its northern Chinese rivals at the Port of Tianjin and the Port of Qingdao.