The Port of Tianjin was largely made by dredgers. The largest port in northern China and the main sea gateway to Beijing, it lies on the western shore of Bohai Bay at the mouth of the Haihe River, 170 kilometres southeast of the capital and 60 kilometres east of central Tianjin, inside the city's Binhai New Area. At the end of 2010 it covered 121 square kilometres of land, much of it reclaimed from the sea, with 31.9 kilometres of quays and 151 production berths, making it the largest man-made port in mainland China. In 2022 it handled 21.02 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containers, eighth in the world according to Lloyd's List, and in 2013 it moved about 500 million tonnes of cargo, fourth in the world by tonnage. The modern seaport, Xingang ("New Port"), was begun in 1940 and reopened to traffic on 17 October 1952. It matters because it serves a hinterland that covers about half of China's land area, from Beijing and Hebei to Xinjiang. To understand how it works, start with the seabed.
Building a Port on the Bohai Mudflats
Before development, the Tianjin coast was mudflats, salt marshes, salt pans and shallows, sloping very gently out into Bohai Bay. The intertidal flats reach 3 to 8 kilometres from shore. The 5-metre depth line lies 14 to 18 kilometres out, and the 10-metre line 22 to 36 kilometres out. No natural harbour exists, so the port had to be dug. Channels are dredged out to deep water, and on such a shallow coast, reclaiming land is a cost-effective way to create space for wharves and yards.
For most of history, ships stopped short. A sandbar called the Taku Bar blocked the mouth of the Haihe, and after the Second Opium War ended in 1860, the riverside port of Tanggu became a transshipment point where ocean ships lightened their cargo to cross it. In 1940 the Japanese occupation forces began building a new seaport outside the river mouth. It was unfinished in 1945, damaged in the civil war and unusable when the Communists took it in 1949. When Tanggu New Port reopened on 17 October 1952, its main channel was dredged to just 6 metres, it could take ships of up to 7,000 deadweight tonnes (DWT), and it handled 800,000 tonnes a year.
Since then the dredgers have never stopped. The Tianjin Dredging Company, part of Tianjin Port Group, had 100 vessels in January 2010 and the largest dredging capacity in China, about 300 million cubic metres. Construction is led by CCCC First Harbor Engineering, whose main marine company alone ran 74 work vessels in 2010; in 2008 a total of 418 construction vessels were at work in the port, 236 of them sand barges and river workboats. Because the channels silt up constantly, the Tianjin Marine Survey and Charting Center, with two survey ships, underwater robots and drones, keeps sounding them.
Channels, Locks and the Haihe Barriers
The Xingang fairway and its anchorages
Ships reach the port along the Tianjin Xingang Fairway, made up of the Main Shipping Channel, the Chuanzhadong Channel and the Northern Branch Channel, with the Dagusha Channel serving the southern Dagukou area. Getting there is a trip across a crowded inland sea. The main deep-water route into the Bohai, six nautical miles wide, runs west from the Laotieshan Channel to a traffic separation scheme south of Caofeidian. The Vessel Traffic Service Center watches every ship from an 88-metre control tower at the eastern end of the East Pier, with a range of 20 nautical miles.
The port has six main anchorages and two temporary ones, all open to the weather. Winter adds ice: anchored ships are told to keep five cables' clearance because drifting ice can drag an anchor 5 to 10 nautical miles in a day. In the hard winter of 2010–11, port authorities counted 16 vessels able to break ice, 10 of them belonging to the Tianjin Port Tug and Lighter Company, which normally runs 26 harbour tugs and five pilot boats.
Shiplocks and tidal barriers
Three structures separate the Haihe River from the sea channels. The Xingang Shiplock, on the northern side of the estuary, is the main route for ships into the river. The Haihe Tidal Barrier, built in 1958 and refurbished in 1999, acts as a dam, flood sluice and storm-surge gate at the river mouth. The Tanggu Fishing Boat Lock sits at the western end of the channel between Donggu and Lanjingdao Island.
Further upstream at Dongnigucun, in Jinnan District, stands the Haihe Second Barrier, an open sluice with eight vertical-rising gates that pass an average of 1,200 cubic metres of water per second. When it opened in July 1984 it closed the river to ships heading up into central Tianjin, and 29.3 kilometres of navigable channel were abandoned. The river still has to be kept clear for floods: the Tianjin Municipal Water Management Bureau dredges the Haihe channel to maintain a flow capacity of 800 cubic metres per second, working from wharves at the two barriers.
Beijiang, Nanjiang and Dongjiang: Nine Port Areas
The port is divided into nine areas. At its core, grouped around the Xingang fairway, are Beijiang (north), Nanjiang (south) and Dongjiang (east). Around them are the Haihe area along the river, Beitang at the Beitangkou estuary, Dagukou in the Haihe estuary, and three areas under construction: Hanggu, Gaoshaling and Nangang.
In 2011 the port had 217 berths including service berths. Their sizes show how far the channels have been deepened since 1952: 90 berths could take ships over 10,000 DWT, 30 over 100,000 DWT and two over 300,000 DWT.
Behind the quays, cargo is sorted by type. The Container Logistics Center in northern Beijiang sits on 7.03 square kilometres of reclaimed land, with 350 hectares of container yard and 26 hectares of warehouses, about 60 per cent of the port's container capacity. The Bulk Logistics Center, opened in 2000 on 26.8 square kilometres of former salt flats south of Donggu, stores coal and ore, and is gradually moving south to Nangang to free land for the city. About 60 kilometres of internal railway run into the Beijiang wharves, the Nanjiang Rail Bridge was doubled in 2010 to carry 70 million tonnes a year, and a conveyor belt beside it feeds coal and ore to the bulk yards. Because the three core areas are poorly linked by road, the port opened a lighter route between Nanjiang and Beijiang in April 2010, using a single heavy barge of 7,800 DWT that carries 200 TEU, and added a second route to Dongjiang that September.
Ships are also built and mended here. The Taku Dockyard in Tanggu, founded in 1880 and still working as the Tianjin City Shipyard, is the oldest modern dockyard in northern China. The main repair yard today is the CSIC Tianjin Xingang Shipyard, founded in 1939 at the far end of the main harbour basin beside the Haihe shiplock, and in 1997 Singapore's Sembawang Shipyard opened China's first foreign joint-venture shipyard in Nanjiang with Bohai Oil.
Passengers use Dongjiang. The Tianjin Cruise Homeport opened in the summer of 2010 at the southern tip of the Dongjiang peninsula, with two berths for ships of up to 220,000 gross tonnes and room for 500,000 passengers a year. Ferries leave the Xingang Passenger Terminal for Kobe, Incheon and Dalian.
What the Port Means for Beijing and the North China Plain
This machinery exists because of what lies behind it. Tianjin has supplied what is now Beijing since 1153, when the river port at the junction of the Grand Canal became its main supply hub. Today the port's hinterland, set by its rail and road links, includes Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, Tibet and Xinjiang, over 5 million square kilometres, or 52 per cent of China's area and 17 per cent of its population. By October 2011 it had set up 21 inland "dry ports", from Pinggu in Beijing to Xi'an, Zhengzhou and Erenhot on the Mongolian border, and it ran scheduled container trains to 15 Chinese cities, including the border crossings of Erenhot, Alashankou and Manzhouli, and in the first half of 2011 these trains carried 129,000 TEU.
The growth has been steep. Annual cargo passed 100 million tonnes in December 2001, the first port in northern China to do so, and reached 400 million tonnes in 2010. Containers rose even faster, as the chart shows. On 4 February 2010 all operations were consolidated under the state-owned Tianjin Port Group.
The same density of cargo carries risk. On 12 August 2015 a series of explosions at a hazardous-chemicals warehouse owned by Ruihai Logistics in Binhai killed 173 people and injured nearly 800, with eight more reported missing. The China Earthquake Networks Center compared the blast to a magnitude 2.9 earthquake. Ballast-water dumping into Bohai Bay remains one of the port's main enforcement problems, and all ships carrying oil or chemicals, and every ship over 10,000 gross tonnes, must hold a spill-response agreement with an authorised contractor.
For the capital, Tianjin is simply where the sea begins: the seaport that the capital city of Beijing has leaned on since the 12th century, the successor to the northern end of the Grand Canal, and a rival across the Bohai to the Port of Dalian.