Xiamen--An Island City with A Rich and Dramatic History

Xiamen	Xiamen

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.
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