The Port of Dalian is an important centrally-located port on the Liaotung Peninsula on China’s western Pacific shores.
Port History
The area was occupied by the British in 1858 and returned to China in the 1880s. China’s Qing government built fortifications and mining camps on the northern coast of the Dalian Gulf in 1880. The Japanese occupied the area during the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895.
In 1898, Russia leased the peninsula and laid out a modern city called Dalny, which became Russia’s main ice-free port in Asia and headquarters for their Pacific Navy. Russia spent more than 10 million rubles building the city, dredging the harbor, and constructing piers and wharves.
Dalny was the major battlefield in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. Due to bad military decisions, the Russians were forced to cede the area to Japan, which then enlarged and modernized the area and divided it into two cities: Dairen (Dalian) and Ryojun (Lushun). Under the Japanese, the area became an important industrial center. By 1941, the Japanese were building ships of 8 thousand tons in the Port of Dalian, and they established an important chemical industry there. The Japanese also installed a steelworks, but it was not productive until the Chinese expanded it in the mid-1950s.
After Japan surrendered in 1945, Dalian was governed by the Soviets. They continued to govern until 1950. During the five-year period, Soviet and Chinese Communists worked together to develop the city and the port. In 1950, the Soviets gave the Port of Dalian to China, who transformed it into an important shipbuilding center. In the 1990s, China’s current Minister of Commerce, Bo Xilai, was mayor of Dalian and provincial party official. As mayor, he created many beautiful parks and preserved much of the city’s Japanese and Russian architecture.
In 1984, China designated the Port of Dalian (called Lu-ta by the Chinese) an open city and invited foreign investment. Today’s city supports a variety of manufacturing including food processing, oil refining, papermaking, cotton textiles, and fertilizer. The Port of Dalian is also well known for heavy industry. It’s an important deep water oil and fishing port that supports engineering and marine transport colleges.
Port Commerce
The Port of Dalian is important to China’s trade economy. It offers generous space, deep water, and year-round ice-free navigation. It’s a convenient port for the movement of cargo between South Asia, the Far East, Europe, and North America. It has almost 100 miles of specialized rail lines, 74 acres of warehouses, and 1.8 million square kilometers of stacking yards. The Port of Dalian boasts China’s biggest crude oil and ore terminals.
The Port of Dalian handles over 100 million tons of cargo each year. It is China’s second largest container port and its fastest-growing sea-rail port. The Port of Dalian is also the country’s busiest passenger seaport, with over five million passengers passing through the port each year. The Port of Dalian’s Container Terminal Co. Ltd. handles foreign trade containers, with capacity for 2.1 million TEUs a year. The terminal has received many awards for effective operations. The Port of Dalian’s Dagang China Shipping Container Terminal handles domestic trade containers.
The Port of Dalian is the Country’s major seaport exporting agricultural products from northeast China and Inner Mongolia. The Dayao Bay Terminal contains two berths for bulk grain export and import, with an annual capacity for throughput of 5 million tons.
Further, the Port of Dalian is the major import port for ores to northeast China. The ore terminal is the largest, most modern ore terminal in China and has capacity for over 2 million tons of ore, which will be expanded to 6 million tons. The ore terminal has a capacity for throughput of 20 million tons.
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