The Port of Shanghai is China’s largest container port and the busiest in the world: it handled about 51.5 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) in 2024, top of Lloyd’s List’s ranking, and on 22 December 2024 it became the first port ever to pass 50 million TEU in a single year. It sits where the Yangtze River meets the East China Sea, with Hangzhou Bay to the south, and works as three zones: river wharves on the Huangpu, terminals on the Yangtze estuary, and the offshore Yangshan Deep-Water Port, whose first phase opened in 2004 on islands in Hangzhou Bay. Shanghai has been a treaty port since 1842, but it has only been the world’s busiest container port since 2010, and the reason is an engineering fix for one problem: the water near the city is too shallow for modern container ships.
Why the Huangpu and the Yangtze estuary ran out of depth
Old Shanghai grew along the Huangpu, a river 113 km long that flows north through the city into the Yangtze estuary. The Bund and Lujiazui face each other across it. It averages about 400 m wide but only about 9 m deep, which was enough for the ships of 1842, when the Treaty of Nanking opened Shanghai to foreign trade, and of the early 20th century, when Shanghai was the largest port in East Asia. It is far too shallow for today’s largest container ships, which need berths of around 15 m.
The Yangtze estuary downstream is wider, but it did not offer deep berths either. Before Yangshan was built, the port depended on terminals near the mouth of the Huangpu and on mid-stream operations in the estuary, loading and unloading ships at anchor. Deep-draught vessels often had to wait for high tide to come in or leave, which put a hard ceiling on how much the port could handle. The site has three waterways meeting at it: the Yangtze, the Huangpu flowing into it, and the Qiantang River entering Hangzhou Bay to the south, and none of them offered deep water close to the city. Politics had held the port back as well. After the Communist takeover in 1949, overseas trade through Shanghai was cut sharply, and early economic policy starved the city of investment for decades. By the late 1990s, with trade growing again after Shanghai’s reforms began in 1991, the choice was to dredge for ever or to build somewhere else.
Yangshan: a container port built on the Zhoushan islands
Shanghai chose to build somewhere else. At the mouth of Hangzhou Bay, south of the Yangtze estuary, lie the northwestern islands of the Zhoushan archipelago, where the water is naturally deep. Between 2000 and 2001 the government committed to a four-phase port there. Engineers used land reclamation to join Lesser Yangshan Island to a string of smaller islands, creating a long, continuous quay with berths up to 15 m (49 ft) deep, enough for the largest container ships in service.
The phases came in quick succession:
- Phase I (2004): capacity for about 2.2 million containers a year, worked by 10 quay cranes.
- Phase II (December 2006): a 72-hectare terminal with 15 quay cranes. Phases I and II together have nine berths along a 3 km quayside.
- Phase III (completed 2010): seven further berths, opened in stages.
- Phase IV (trial operation from 10 December 2017): a further terminal adding about 4 million TEU of annual capacity.
The total cost of the port may reach US$12 billion over 20 years. One administrative detail shows how unusual the site is: the port is part of the Port of Shanghai, but the islands around it, including Greater Yangshan Island where the local population lives, belong to Shengsi County in neighbouring Zhejiang province.
The full plan is bigger still. When all phases are finished, Yangshan is designed to have 30 berths able to handle about 15 million TEU a year on their own. That capacity was the point of the project: it let the Port of Shanghai keep growing without dredging the Huangpu or the estuary to depths they could not hold.
The 32.5 km Donghai Bridge link to Pudong
An island port is only useful if boxes can reach the mainland, and at Yangshan they do so almost entirely by lorry. The Donghai Bridge, completed in December 2005, runs 32.5 km (20.2 mi) from Shanghai’s Pudong New Area to the port. About 6,000 workers took two and a half years to build it, and when it opened it was the world’s longest sea bridge. Most of it is a low viaduct just above the waves, rising to cable-stayed spans where ships must pass underneath; the largest span is 420 m. It carries six lanes as part of the S2 Hulu Expressway, and it is closed to vehicles that exceed its weight limits.
There is no railway to Yangshan. The nearest station, Luchaogang on the Pudong Railway, opened in 2005 near the mainland end of the bridge, so containers going by rail must be trucked across first. On 29 January 2014 Shanghai’s planners announced a second road-and-rail bridge to relieve the single link, and plans from 2019 would continue it to Ningbo by way of Yangshan. The bridge corridor has also become an energy site: the 102 MW Donghai Bridge Wind Farm beside it, China’s first commercial offshore wind farm, began sending power to the mainland grid on 6 July 2010.
ZPMC cranes and SIPG: the machinery behind 51.5 million TEU
Inside the terminals, the work of moving boxes is split into three machines. Ship-to-shore gantry cranes lift containers from the ship’s holds; vehicles carry them along the quay; and yard cranes stack them in blocks until a lorry, barge or another ship collects them. Every one of those moves is timed against the ship’s schedule, because a large vessel may exchange thousands of boxes in a single call and the quay cranes set the pace for everything behind them.
Much of that machinery is made in Shanghai. Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, known as ZPMC, was founded in 1992 and is the world’s largest maker of cranes and large steel structures; in 2015 it held about three-quarters of the world market for container cranes, and its cranes work in around 120 large ports. Every public terminal in the port is operated by one company, Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG), which replaced the Shanghai Port Authority in 2003 and is majority state-owned. SIPG has also gone abroad: in 2015 it won a 25-year concession, starting in 2021, to run the new Bay Terminal at Haifa in Israel.
The chart shows what the new deep water did. Throughput roughly tripled between 2004, the year Phase I opened, and 2020. In 2010 Shanghai handled 29.05 million TEU, about half a million more than Singapore, and took the title of the world’s busiest container port, which it has held every year since. Because most boxes are 40-foot units counted as two TEU, the number of physical containers is only about 55 to 60% of the TEU figure, so the 2024 total means something like 28 to 31 million individual boxes lifted on or off ships. It reached 43.3 million TEU in 2019 and crossed 50 million in December 2024. The only visible dip came in 2009, during the global financial crisis, which cut throughput to about 25 million TEU from 28 million the year before.
What the port means for the Yangtze River Delta
The engineering matters because of what sits behind the port. The Yangtze, China’s longest river at about 6,236 km, drains a basin covering a fifth of China’s land area and home to nearly a third of its people. The Yangtze Delta alone produces as much as 20% of China’s GDP. Shanghai is the main foreign-trade gateway for that hinterland, serving Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Henan. River barges bring exports down the Yangtze to the estuary terminals, where boxes are transferred to coastal feeders or to lorries for the run over the Donghai Bridge.
That same geography puts Shanghai’s nearest rival directly across the bay. The Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, on the southern side of Hangzhou Bay, is the busiest port in the world by cargo tonnage, having passed Shanghai on that measure in 2012, and it was the third-busiest container port in 2024 with about 39.3 million TEU. The two ports drew on the same deep water around the Zhoushan islands, and the planned bridge from Shanghai to Ningbo by way of Yangshan would join them by land.
The port also changed Shanghai’s own map. The authorities used Yangshan as the anchor for a heavy-equipment manufacturing zone and a new town near the mainland end of the bridge. Container traffic that once crowded the Huangpu now moves to berths at the far end of a 32.5 km bridge, and the port is one of only four in the world classed as a large-port megacity, combining very high cargo volumes with a very large urban population.
For the river that makes the whole system work, see our complete guide to the Yangtze; the neighbour across Hangzhou Bay is covered in our article on the Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, and the port Shanghai overtook in 2010 is traced from 1819 onward in our history of the Port of Singapore.