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Xiamen
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.
Xiamen was
founded in 1394 at the beginning of the Ming dynasty as a center of
defense against coastal pirates. Its prosperity was due to its deepwater
sheltered harbor, that supplanted nearby Quanzhou, the port that had
been the center of the maritime trade with the Indies.
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
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.
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