Xiamen’s English name Amoy hides a castle on an island
Fujian’s sub-provincial port faces the Taiwan Strait from an island that became a peninsula after a 1955 seawall. Song writers called it Jiahe Islet; a Ming defence castle named Xiamen stuck, while Western traders long said Amoy—and Kinmen lies only six kilometres offshore.
Xiamen, historically Amoy, is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian beside the Taiwan Strait, divided into six districts including Huli and Siming. Its island harbour ranks among Asia-Pacific trunk ports—about seventh in China and fifteenth worldwide for containers. Nature Index research rankings place the city among the global top forty, anchored by prestigious Xiamen University. For most of history the area was Tong’an County before twentieth-century reorganisations.
Han records already mention Tong’an; Song texts (960–1279) call the island Jiahe Islet. The present name comes from the Xiamen Defense Castle. After Ming’s fall, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) used the island as an anti-Qing base, planting a military presence in 1650 under Shunzhi. Qing prosperity under Kangxi restored the characters 廈門; after the 1911 revolution the name Siming returned briefly, then Xiamen was restored in 1933 when Fujian planned its first modern city—Siming surviving as a district label.
English “Amoy” reflects Zhangzhou dialect pronunciation of the same characters. Nineteenth-century Yundang Bay was praised as a great natural harbour before reclamation filled its mouth into downtown waterways. Xiamen Island is Fujian’s fourth-largest and became a peninsula once the 1955 seawall linked it to the mainland. Liehyu in Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands sits only about six kilometres away—geography that still shapes the strait city’s strategic and commercial life. Research universities and container cranes now share a shoreline that once sheltered Ming loyalists and Qing customs houses.
Source: Xiamen
