About Xiamen City |
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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.
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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Prosperity returned to
Xiamen in the early 1980’s when Xiamen was designated
one of the four Special Economic Zones (SEZs). |
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