The Port of Kaohsiung is Taiwan’s largest harbour, a former lagoon on the island’s southwestern coast facing the Taiwan Strait, wrapped around the centre of Kaohsiung city. It handled about 9.2 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containers in 2024, which placed it 21st in the world in Lloyd’s List’s One Hundred Container Ports ranking. It opened to Western traders as the treaty port of Takau in 1864, and it matters because the long, narrow island of Cijin shelters its basin from the open sea, giving Taiwan a deep, protected gateway for exports on the busy shipping lanes between Northeast and Southeast Asia.
Cijin Island, the Sandbar That Built a Harbour
Everything about Kaohsiung’s port begins with Cijin. The island is a thin strip of sand about 8.5 km (5.3 mi) long and on average only 400 m (1,300 ft) wide, lying parallel to the mainland shore. Behind it lay a natural lagoon. That lagoon was calm water on a coast exposed to typhoons coming in from the Pacific and the South China Sea, and the island acted as a ready-made breakwater; it is the reason a harbour grew here rather than on the straighter, open shore to the north or south.
The strip is still inhabited. Cijin District covers just 1.46 km² and had 26,282 residents in October 2023, a density of about 18,400 people per square kilometre; it is the second-smallest district in Kaohsiung after Yancheng. Local tradition credits its founding to a fisherman, Hsu Ah-hua, who sheltered here from a typhoon in the mid-17th century and returned with settler families and an image of the sea goddess Mazu. The shrine they built grew into the Cijin Tianhou Temple, and the town grew up around it. Most residents still work in shipping, and the island is linked to the mainland by a tunnel under the harbour and by the short ferry crossing from Gushan.
The other half of the natural frame is Shoushan, the hill that rises immediately north of the main harbour entrance. Dutch sailors in the 17th century called it Ape Hill after the Formosan rock macaques that still live on it, and it is now part of Shoushan National Nature Park. Between Shoushan and the northern tip of Cijin, the lagoon opens to the sea through a single narrow gap. That gap, guarded by high ground on both sides, became the First Harbour Entrance, and until the 1960s it was the only way in.
Takau: Dutch Traders to an 1864 Treaty Port
By the 16th century, villages already stood on the shore of the lagoon, which local people called Takau. Traders of the Dutch East India Company arrived in the 1620s and began to use the anchorage, and the harbour developed slowly through the Dutch period, the Koxinga era and the early Qing dynasty. For more than two centuries it remained a modest regional anchorage, reached only through the narrow gap beneath Ape Hill.
The turning point was the Second Opium War. Under the Treaties of Tianjin signed in 1858, the Qing government agreed to open ports on Taiwan to foreign commerce, and Takau officially opened to Western traders in 1864. The British diplomat and naturalist Robert Swinhoe, appointed the first British vice-consul in Taiwan in 1861, had set up his office at Tamsui; in 1864 the consulate moved to Takau because the southern port was becoming the more important trading post. The consular residence that still stands was completed in 1879 by the trading firm McPhail & Co. on Shaochuantou hill, where it overlooks both Sizihwan Bay and the harbour mouth.
The entrance also needed defending and lighting. The first fortifications on the Cijin side, Cihou Fort, date from 1720; after a Japanese expedition to Taiwan in 1874, the Qing authorities built a modern fort there and installed Armstrong guns in 1880. British engineers built a red-brick lighthouse on the hill above the southern side of the entrance to guide the growing number of merchant ships. When Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895, local troops fought on, and the forts saw action: on 13 October 1895 a Japanese squadron bombarded the Takau batteries from about 6,000 yards, and after half an hour their guns fell silent.
Japanese Dredging and the Love River Canal
Under Japanese rule the colonial government set out to turn the lagoon into a modern deep-water harbour. It rebuilt the port in three stages: the first was finished in 1908, the second in 1912, and the third was halted part-way when the Second World War began. The lighthouse was rebuilt in 1916 as part of the harbour works and renovated in 1918 into the tower, with its Baroque-style base, that stands on Cijin today; it was designated a Historical Building in 1985, and its tower offers a view over the entire port.
The Japanese also reshaped the river that flows into the harbour. The Love River rises in Renwu District and runs about 12 km (7.5 mi) through the city to Kaohsiung Harbour. Known in the Qing period as the Takao River, it was dredged into a canal after 1895 so that timber from Southeast Asia could be floated inland, and levees were built along its banks. The waterfront quarter at the foot of Shoushan became Hamasen, from the Japanese for “beach railway line,” after the two rail lines that ran to the quays. Hamasen was where Kaohsiung got its first modernised street, piped water and electric lighting, and for decades it was the city’s hub for rail freight, fishing and ocean cargo.
That concentration of industry made the port a target. During the Second World War it was heavily bombed by the Allies, and the harbour had to be cleared and rebuilt after 1945.
Cutting Cijin: The Second Harbour Entrance
As post-war trade grew, the single entrance became the port’s main constraint: every ship bound for the southern end of the lagoon had to pass through the northern gap and travel the length of the basin. The solution was to cut through the sandbar itself. Cijin had been joined to the mainland at its southern tip, and in 1967 that link was severed; the Second Harbour Entrance built there was completed by 1975. Cijin became an island in the literal sense, and the port gained a second, deeper route to the sea at the Siaogang end.
The southern entrance changed the geography of the port. Container berths could now be built at the far end of the lagoon, close to open water, while the old northern basin near Gushan and Yancheng kept the fishing harbour, the Cijin ferries and the commercial quays. Beside the Second Harbour Entrance now stand the Intercontinental Container Terminal, known as Terminal 6, and a museum and park recording the history and clearance of a sizeable residential community that was moved out to make way for the port’s expansion.
9.2 Million TEU in 2024: Two Decades Near 10 Million Boxes
Because it grew inside a lagoon, the port is enclosed by the city on all sides. It is ringed by the districts of Gushan, Yancheng, Lingya, Cianjhen, Siaogang and Cijin. It is not run by the city government but by the state-owned Taiwan International Ports Corporation, which completed a major expansion of container and passenger facilities in 2017.
Container throughput has hovered close to 10 million TEU for two decades. Lloyd’s List figures, as compiled on Wikipedia, put Kaohsiung at about 9.7 million TEU in 2004 and 10.3 million in 2007. Volume dipped to 8.6 million in 2009 during the global recession, peaked at about 10.6 million in 2014 and stayed above 10 million until 2019. After a pandemic-era plateau it fell to about 8.8 million in 2023, before recovering to about 9.2 million in 2024.
Those flat numbers hide a sharp fall in rank. In 2004 Kaohsiung handled more containers than Qingdao (5.1 million TEU), Ningbo-Zhoushan (4.0 million) or Xiamen (3.3 million); by 2024 those three mainland Chinese ports handled 30.9 million, 39.3 million and 12.3 million TEU respectively. By 2024 Kaohsiung stood 21st, one place behind Laem Chabang in Thailand and one ahead of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. The port is also part of the Maritime Silk Road route that runs from the Chinese coast past the southern tip of India and through the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean.
Operating in a crowded lagoon has its hazards. In 2018 a large cargo ship struck the stern of the Evergreen container ship Ever Laden as it arrived, with no deaths or injuries reported, and on 3 June 2021 a docking ship operated by OOCL hit another vessel and a container crane, bringing the crane down and damaging a second.
Pier-2 and the Cruise Terminal: The Old Harbour Returns to Kaohsiung
As cargo moved south towards the Second Harbour Entrance, the old northern quays lost their purpose, and the city began reclaiming them. The Pier-2 warehouses in Yancheng District, built in 1973 and later abandoned as Kaohsiung shifted from heavy industry to services, were taken over in 2006 by the city’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs and turned into the Pier-2 Art Center. One warehouse now houses the Hamasen Museum of Taiwan Railway, and since 2017 two stations of the Kaohsiung light rail serve the site.
The largest new building on the waterfront is the Kaohsiung Port Cruise Terminal in Lingya District, part of the Asia New Bay Area project. Designed by Taiwan’s Zong Mai Architects with Reiser + Umemoto of the United States after a competition decided in 2010, it was begun on 9 November 2013 and opened on 6 March 2023. The building, shaped like a silver-white hull with a tall chimney, has about 80,774 m² of floor space on 15 storeys above ground, and its quay can berth two cruise ships of up to 225,000 tons at once.
The result is a port read in layers from north to south: the narrow First Harbour Entrance under Shoushan, with the old consulate and Cihou lighthouse looking down on it; the arts district and cruise terminal where timber and rail freight once landed; and the cranes of the container terminals stretching towards the entrance cut through Cijin. To see how Kaohsiung compares with the giant ports across the Taiwan Strait, or how the island’s coastline shaped its cities more broadly, read our guide to the geography of Taiwan, and then look at where Kaohsiung falls among the world’s busiest ports.