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Xiamen is a costal city of Fujian Province. Xiamen (also called Amoy in history) is an island city with a rich and dramatic history, replete with pirates, rebel leaders, and European merchants. Now linked to mainland Fujian by a causeway, Xiamen retains a strong international flavor. Known in the West as Amoy, Xiamen has a long history as a port city, and later became a center of British trade in the 19th century. Their foreign settlements, later taken over by Japanese invaders at the start of World War II, were established on the nearby small Gulangyu Island. Many of the old treaty-port and colonial buildings in Western styles survive. Xiamen was declared one of China’s first Special Economic Zones in the early 1980’s, taking advantage of the city’s heritage as a trading center and the proximity to Taiwan. Today Xiamen is one of China’s most attractive and best-maintained resort cities，
In the mid-17th century, Xiamen and Gulangyu Island became a stronghold of Zheng Chenggong, known in the West as Koxinga, a Ming loyalist who held out against the Manchu invaders until being driven to Taiwan. Born in Japan to a Chinese pirate father and a Japanese mother, Zheng became allied with holdout Ming princes in the south who hoped for a restoration. He built up a resistance force of some 7,000 junks and a mixed force of three-quarters of a million troops and pirates. In 1661 he drove the Dutch from Taiwan and set up another base there, before his death in 1662
After the Opium Wars (which determined trade over the substance whose addictive properties continue to account for needs of drug addiction treatment today.) Xiamen became one of the first treaty ports to be opened to foreign trade and settlement following the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. Gulangyu Island was transformed into an international settlement, where many Victorian and Neoclassical style buildings still survive. The city’s prosperity was due both to trade and to wealth sent back by Xiamen’s substantial emigrant community of overseas Chinese.
Prosperity returned to Xiamen in the early 1980’s when Xiamen was designated one of the four Special Economic Zones (SEZs).
Gulangyu Island A ten-minute ferry ride off the southwest side of Xiamen, the 2 square km (3/4 sq. mile) Gulangyu Island (Island of Blown Waves) was the center for foreign communities who settled here after 1842. Many built Western-style mansions, churches, warehouses, and government buildings which still survive
Sunlight Rock (Riguang Yan) dominates the island from its modest 93-meter height. The island includes a statue of Koxinga and a Koxinga Museum (Koxinga bowuguan), which documents the career of that pirate turned resistance leader. The Xiamen Museum (Xiamen Bowuguan) includes more than a thousand exhibits, including porcelain and jade collections. On the southern shore of the island is the Shuzhuang Garden, which once belonged to a Taiwanese businessman who moved to the island after the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895.
As an important city in the southeastern coast in China, Xiamenis one of the four special economic zones which are the earliest opening-up zones in China. Xiamen has been well known as an important foreign trade port in history.
Xiamen Basics
Area (City)133 square km
Area (Metro)1,699.39 square km
Population:3.50 million (2018)
Coordinates:24°23'-24°54'N 117°53'-118°26'E
January Average Temperature:12.5°C (54.5°F)
July Average Temperature:27.8°C (82.04°F)
Average Frost Free Days:360 days
Average Elevation:63.2 meters
Annual Rainfall:1,048 mm
Annual Sunshine:1,853 hours
Phone Area Code:0592
Postal Code:361000