At about 12.55 million TEU in 2023, the Port of Xiamen was the 13th-busiest container port in the world on Lloyd’s List’s ranking, handling that volume from terminals on Xiamen Island, the Haicang and Tong’an mainland shores and the Jiulong River estuary in southern Fujian, China, facing the Taiwan Strait. A harbour has worked here since the Song dynasty; the modern port grew after the Treaty of Nanjing opened Amoy to foreign trade in 1842, and again after Xiamen became one of China’s first four special economic zones in 1980. It matters as the largest port on China’s southeast coast, and as the mainland port that faces Taiwan-administered Kinmen, less than 6 km away across Xiamen Bay. That growth has had a human price as well as a payoff, and the story is best told through the people who built, worked and lived around it.
Amoy’s Merchants, Emigrants and the Treaty Port of 1842
The harbour’s first builders were soldiers. In 1387, after raids by pirates, the Ming general Zhou Dexing raised a fortress on the island that gave Xiamen, “the lower gate”, its name. Portuguese traders arrived in 1541. After the Ming fell, the loyalist Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, made the island his base from 1650 to 1660 and renamed it “Remembering the Ming” before sailing to drive the Dutch out of Taiwan in 1661. The English East India Company opened a factory in 1678, only to move to Canton and Fuzhou in 1681, driven out by taxes and restrictions, though trade resumed in 1685.
British forces took the city on 27 August 1841 during the First Opium War, and the Treaty of Nanjing the next year made Amoy one of the first five ports open to British trade. Foreigners settled on Gulangyu, the 1.88 km² island facing the waterfront, which from 1902 was run as an international settlement in which 13 countries held extraterritorial rights. Amoy became a centre of the tea trade, shipping hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year to Europe and the Americas, and exporting porcelain and paper while importing sugar, rice, cotton and opium.
The people who left through the port mattered as much as the cargo. For centuries southern Fujianese emigrated from Xiamen to Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Myanmar, carrying the Hokkien language with them. About 350,000 overseas Chinese trace their ancestry to Xiamen, and an estimated 220,000 of the city’s residents are returned overseas Chinese and their relatives. Their money helped fund universities and cultural institutions in the city. The port itself fared worse: its tea exports collapsed in the early twentieth century under competition from British plantations in India, and Japan occupied Xiamen Island from May 1938 to September 1945.
Gulangyu shows how the balance has shifted from trade to visitors. The former settlement, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, bans cars and bicycles, draws more than 10 million visitors a year and had 12,509 residents in 2023. Its Victorian-era consulates, churches and hospitals look across the narrow Lujiang channel to the working waterfront of Xiamen Island, and it is reached from downtown only by ferry.
The Gaoji Causeway, Yundang Bay and the Cost of the Strait Crises
Geography made the port. Outside the harbour, Big Kinmen, Little Kinmen, Dadan and Erdan lie in a line across the approaches, while Xiamen Island and Gulangyu screen the inner waters, so ships shelter from storms that sweep the strait. In the nineteenth century the inner harbour on Yundang Bay was counted among the world’s great natural anchorages, and by the 1870s the city it served had an estimated 250,000 people. The Communist capture of Xiamen and Gulangyu in October 1949, and the failure to take Kinmen, turned that harbour into a front line. In the Taiwan Strait crises of 1955 and 1958, guns on the Xiamen shore shelled Kinmen and Nationalist batteries fired back at the city.
Workers built the Gaoji Causeway between 1955 and 1957, tying Xiamen Island to the mainland; propaganda of the day called the island a peninsula from then on. It was a lifeline for the port but a cost for the bay: later land reclamation closed the mouth of Yundang Bay, turning the old harbour into Yundang Lake, with the city government’s offices built on reclaimed land beside it. Because of the military standoff, the eastern half of Xiamen Island and much of the coast facing Kinmen stayed undeveloped through the 1960s and 1970s. For a generation the people of Xiamen lived beside one of the best natural harbours in China while the coast around it stood still.
Huli, 1981: The Workers of the Special Economic Zone
That changed with Deng Xiaoping’s opening policy. Xiamen was named one of the first four special economic zones in 1980, and construction of the Huli Export Processing Zone began on 15 October 1981 on just 2.5 km² of the island’s north. In 1984 the zone was widened to 131 km², the whole island, and in June 2010 to all of Xiamen, 1,573 km², taking in the mainland districts of Jimei, Haicang, Tong’an and Xiang’an. Overseas Chinese families were among the first investors, and by the end of 2018 the city had drawn 14,818 foreign-invested projects, including 112 by 62 Fortune 500 companies.
The port and the factories grew together. By 2018 Xiamen’s foreign trade was worth 600.5 billion yuan, 125 percent of its economic output, and GDP per person reached 118,015 yuan (about US$17,100). The city’s population rose to 5,163,970 at the 2020 census, and the built-up area now spills into four districts of neighbouring Zhangzhou, making a conurbation of about 7.3 million people. The city now bets on five industries: electronic information, equipment manufacturing, tourism and culture, modern logistics and financial services. Every September it hosts the China International Fair for Investment and Trade, and each year the Straits Forum, which drew more than 10,000 people in 2019, brings business and civic groups from both sides of the strait to the port city.
Haicang’s 2007 PX Protest and the Plant That Moved to Gulei
Haicang, on the mainland across the western channel and linked to the island since 1999 by the Haicang Bridge with its 648 m main span, grew into a district of wharves and heavy industry. In 2004 the State Council approved what was to be the world’s largest paraxylene (PX) plant there, expected to produce 800,000 tonnes a year and to generate 80 billion yuan annually, about a quarter of the city’s GDP. Construction started on 27 May 2007.
Residents did not accept it quietly. In March 2007 Zhao Yufen, a Xiamen University chemist who in 1991 had become the youngest woman then elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, led a petition, gathering 105 signatures from members of the national political advisory body, arguing that a plant with a risk of toxic emissions and explosions should not sit close to a city. On 1 June 2007 between 8,000 and 10,000 people walked through Xiamen in protest, organised largely by text message. In December the city opened an online vote in which 55,376 people opposed the plant and 3,078 supported it; the government set the result aside over a technical flaw, but at the end of that month announced the plant would move to the Gulei Peninsula in Zhangzhou.
The costs moved with it. The plant at Gulei, built from 2009 and run by the Taiwanese-owned Dragon Aromatics, began production in 2013; in April 2015 an oil leak caused an explosion and a fire in storage tanks that burned for days, reigniting after it was first declared out, and forced the evacuation of about 29,000 residents, according to Xinhua. After a three-year repair it was reorganised as Fuhaichuang, 90 percent owned by the Chinese state. The Xiamen protest is often described as a milestone in public participation in China, and it inspired later campaigns against PX plants in Dalian, Ningbo and Kunming. In Dalian, the protest of August 2011 drew about 12,000 people.
Zhangzhou, Kinmen and the Port’s 12.55 Million TEU
On 31 August 2010 Xiamen absorbed the neighbouring port of Zhangzhou across the Jiulong estuary, a rare merger across municipal lines that made it the largest port on China’s southeast coast. It is run by the Xiamen Port Authority, a department of the city government, and today comprises twelve port areas including Heping, Dongdu, Haitian, Shihushan, Gaoqi and Liuwudian. It has 74 berths along about 30 km of harbour coastline, nine container terminals and water up to 17 m deep. It is also a link in China’s 21st Century Maritime Silk Road and home to a coast guard base. The world’s 20 largest shipping lines all call, and 68 routes link it to more than 50 countries, with an average of about 469 ship calls a month.
The people with the most unusual stake in the port live on Kinmen. Passenger ferries run from Xiamen to the Shuitou terminal on Kinmen, and ships entering and leaving the port reach the Taiwan Strait through a channel between Taiwan-administered Dadan Island and mainland-controlled Qingyu Island. Since December 2015 Taiwan’s transport ministry has also opened the channel between Dadan and Menghu Islet, both Taiwan-administered, as a shortcut for ships using the Liuwudian and Xiang’an areas. Ferries, commercial links and mail between Xiamen and Kinmen were restored under the “Three Mini-Links” agreed in 2001, and in 2010 travellers made 1.31 million trips between them. Xiamen was the first mainland port to begin direct cargo shipping to Kaohsiung in Taiwan. The wider shipping lane is covered in our guide to the Taiwan Strait, and Xiamen’s long career as Amoy fits into the story of the world’s historic trade ports.