Xiamen: The Camphor City Guide

By Robert Barge

Vibrant, modern, and drenched in history from centuries as a gateway to China, this garden city of two million is a hidden gem. When the author, Robert Barge, arrived in Xiamen to take up an engineering position, he was expecting a typical gray Chinese city; instead, what he found left such an impression that he was inspired to write this book,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Camphor Press Ltd
• Release date: Feb 27, 2017
• ISBN: 9781910736265

Book preview

PREFACE

All of the destinations in the text of this book are written in simplified Chinese characters so the reader can simply show them to a taxi driver when setting off. They’re all places that Xiamen’s drivers know well. For those readers wishing to try their hand at pronouncing the names in Mandarin, Pinyin has also been included.

Where bus information is given, the stop is named (zhàn is the Mandarin word for station) and the bus number(s) provided.

Xiamen does not have a uniform style for its street signs. But most commonly you will see signs with both Chinese characters and Pinyin, but no English. To help you match what you’ll see on the streets themselves and on most maps, this book adopts the same style. Fortunately, just one Mandarin word will cover most of your needs: lu, which is pronounced loo and means road. Thus, Zhongshan Lu means, simply, Zhongshan Road.

Some long roads are divided into sections: north (bei) and south (nan), or east (dong) and west (xi). For example, 龙虎北路 Longhu Bei Lu:

Longhu is the name

Bei means north

Lu means road

Map Key

There are several maps throughout this guide, with color-coded, numbered pins representing places of interest.

Map

Places that appear on these maps will have a box by the address in the text, giving the map letter (A through I) and pin number of that location, like this:

Map C3

XIAMEN

1.

INTRODUCTION

Xiamen in Fujian is a vibrant, leafy, airy metropolis, culturally and commercially connected with the rest of Asia. Thanks to its cosmopolitan history, it’s also a colossal domestic tourist attraction in its own right. To date, however, it has been hidden from the rest of us among the cities of China’s manufacturing south and buried away in the voluminous tomes of China guidebooks. But this garden island is emerging from relative obscurity, aspiring to UNESCO World Heritage status, and reasserting itself as the ancestral home of millions of overseas Chinese. Meanwhile, its university population embodies the experimental and adventurous nature of modern China’s youth, and the city’s biggest temple, Nanputuo, is at the vanguard of southern China’s Buddhist religious revival.

An important story of the last twenty-five years — one remarkable enough to be christened a miracle and then persistent enough to become the new normal — has been the economic rise of the People’s Republic of China. The world’s most populous nation barely made a dent in the consciousness of those of us in the West until recent decades; and when China finally did intrude into our lives, it came in the form of manufactured goods filling our houses, bearing those three ubiquitous words Made in China. The image of China in our minds that slowly replaced the drab monochrome of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and a militarized Tian’anmen Square, was that of a giant, smog-filtered workshop — bland and colorless. Especially susceptible to this characterization was China’s coastal south — a region usually overlooked for historical sites in favor of Shanghai, Beijing, and Xi’an, and typically only visited by Western businessmen touring factories in a region that has become known as the workshop of the world. To this day it’s hard to find a person outside China who imagines metropolises such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Quanzhou, and Xiamen to be anything other than polluted manufacturing cities.

Until recently, I shared that grey image of southern China. But a childhood spent in Singapore, Southeast Asia’s ethnic-Chinese enclave, steeped as it is in the Fujianese traditions of the city’s Hokkien community, hinted to me that there was color and energy to be found in Fujian. The force that has energized Singapore and her neighbours that ring the South China Sea is global trade. Xiamen, known in older European history books as Amoy, is at the northern sweep of this ring and has been intimately connected to the world since long before anyone heard the word globalization.

Southern China, its port cities like Xiamen most of all, is overwhelmingly the window through which the West has learned about China. The Venetian Marco Polo himself set sail from nearby Quanzhou, which was the terminus for Arab traders on the maritime Silk Route in the eighth century. In the 1600s the island played host to the Japanese-born hero of the Ming resistance, Zheng Chenggong, and his forces. After the Qing victory, the southern coast was where the European powers sent trading ships and gunboats in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And the Opium Wars resulted in the Europeans setting up consulates on Xiamen’s Gulangyu Islet.

The decades of foreign trade and fractious engagement gave birth to many of the Chinese and oriental stereotypes that persist in Western culture today. It was through these ports that the British developed their addiction to the Chinese tea that would end up in Boston Harbor in 1773, igniting a famous event tied to the American Revolution. European traders brought back tales of the Far East, and the sitting rooms of wealthy Europeans filled with curious Chinese luxuries. And as the nineteenth century wore on, aboard these boats came the Chinese themselves, making new homes in Melbourne, San Francisco, and London’s Leicester Square, in areas that we would come to call, simply, Chinatown.

A great number of foreign-born Chinese trace their roots to Xiamen and the southern coastal cities and towns of China, and those roots are treasured down through generations, in a culture that keeps ancestor worship at its core. In the first half of the 1900s, the Singapore emigrant and philanthropist Tan Kah Kee invested his Malayan wealth in the establishment of Xiamen University. By the 1980s Xiamen was attracting foreign investment as one of the first of China’s Special Economic Zones — the communist nation’s hugely successful experiment with capitalism, trade, and engagement with the world. But as history has coursed through the region, Xiamen has always found itself on the periphery of China’s written history — ruled from the distant north, by dynasties from as far away as Beijing, Mongolia, and Manchuria, and separated from the centers of political power by Fujian’s rugged terrain. So modern China’s history has been written and revised in the north, with cities like Beijing, Xi’an, and Shanghai at the core of the Middle Kingdom, with little attention directed to the mercantile southern coast mostly at peace. All the while, Xiamen and her neighbors have looked, not inward over mainland China’s mountains, but out to sea — to Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

I discovered the city, not through any dormant inspiration from Singapore, but after taking up an expatriate role as an engineer based in the city. I arrived for the first day of work with the image of a factory city in my mind, an image quickly dispelled by the sight of tree-lined highways, towering forested hills, and placid lakes. The expatriate experience of steadily peeling away the layers of a new home revealed something surprising and new every week. And for me the city is still revealing itself. So this guide is by no means complete, but it offers the reader a link to the parts of this garden island and surrounds that are starting points for exploring, and leaves room for discovery in what is a constantly growing and changing region.

The regional drawcard is undoubtedly the islet of Gulangyu, with its colonial European feel and vehicle-free steep, twisting lanes beneath southern Fujian’s subtropical foliage.