Quanzhou

Understand

About a millenium ago, the city was the main eastern terminus of the Maritime Silk Road and home to a large (over 100,000 by some estimates) international community, mostly Arabs but also including Persians, Indians and others. At one time, the city had seven mosques; the only one surviving today is the Great Mosque, built in 1009 CE.

Quanzhou was one of the main bases for the great Chinese treasure ships that routinely traded in Southeast Asia and India and sometimes reached at least as far as Persia and Aden. When Vasco da Gama — sailing the Cape Route to become the first European to reach India by sea — reached East Africa in 1498, he found Chinese trade goods such as blue & white pottery already in the market. The Chinese ships were far larger, longer range, and more advanced technically than European vessels of the period. See Voyages of Zheng He for some of the details.

thumb|The area along Sunwu Creek, south of downtown, has experienced an urban renewal. The bixi turtle carries an inscription commemorating flood control work on the creek There is a Maritime Museum in Quanzhou with many relics of this period.

Marco Polo sailed home from Quanzhou about 1292. He described it as the world's busiest port, with Alexandria a distant second. At about that time, Kublai Khan's fleet for the invasion of Japan sailed from Quanzhou. It was wiped out by a storm, the kami kaze or "spirit wind". This is the origin of the name for kamikaze (suicide) pilots during the Sec…

Get around

Taxis start at ¥8 and you can go almost anywhere in town for under ¥20.

Be warned about local traffic! Traffic anywhere in China often horrifies visitors (see Driving in China), but Quanzhou is worse than most places. On some travel blogs, even Chinese complain about Quanzhou traffic.

Eat

There are several vegetarian restaurants near Chengtien Temple on Nanjun Road

Sleep

Quanzhou is not a tourist-oriented city and there are relatively few hotels.

By 2015, a fair number of Quanzhou hosts have registered with airbnb.com.

Connect

The area code for Quanzhou is 595.

Go next

Bus to Fuzhou leaves from the bus station at the southern end of the main tourist street (not the main bus station) and takes about 3 hours (¥60-70). There are also buses to Fuzhou, Xiamen and overnight to Shenzhen from the small station next to the Overseas Chinese Hotel. This will be a convenient location for many travellers, but larger stations have a better choice of routes and departure times. Several times a week, there is an early-morning bus to Mount Wuyi and Jingdezhen. This bus is small dirty sleepers, arrives at many of its destinations very late at night, and drops passengers off by the side of the highway rather than the bus station. Consider taking the train instead. Chongwu is an old walled town near Quanzhou. There are good beaches near it.