Xiamen's past runs from Tang-era temples and Koxinga's anti-Qing naval camp to 1842, when Amoy became a treaty port and foreign consulates filled the harbour. Add Hakka Tulou, overseas-Chinese mansions and Cold War frontline batteries facing Taiwan.
Founded in the Tang and rebuilt in 1684 after Qing forces retook Xiamen, this Buddhist complex climbs Wulao Peak in four halls. The Great Compassion Hall holds four Guanyin statues back-to-back; rock faces behind carry Qing-era 佛 carvings.
Founded 1921 by rubber magnate Tan Kah Kee, China's first university endowed by an overseas Chinese. The Jiannan auditorium and Qunxian buildings show his 'Western body, Chinese cap' style: granite arcades under upturned Minnan tile roofs.
Eight galleries on Zheng Chenggong, the Ming loyalist who made Xiamen his base from 1650 and expelled the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662. Displays include Ming naval charts, his troops' weapons and a scale model of the Fort Zeelandia siege.
The terrace where Zheng Chenggong drilled 17th-century troops before sailing for Taiwan, now marked by a 15.7 m granite statue completed in 1985 that faces the strait. Ming-period drill-ground foundations survive in the rock below.
Built 1891–1896 under Qing coastal-defence reform, it mounts the world's largest surviving Krupp coastal gun — a 280 mm barrel of 1893, 13.9 m long, that shelled a Japanese warship in 1937. Ramparts, tunnels and barracks remain intact.
Amoy opened as one of five treaty ports in 1842; thirteen nations kept consulates on Gulangyu. The 1870s British consulate on Lujiao Road, the Japanese consulate with its basement cells and the Spanish legation stand within 300 m.
Amoy's landmark of 1907, designed by American missionary John Otte for merchant Lin Heding, its red dome copying Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. Unfinished for decades, it later served as a Japanese hospital and now holds 90-plus pipe organs.
Founded 1956 by Tan Kah Kee, the only museum in China devoted to emigration. Galleries trace coolie contracts, remittance letters (侨批), Nanyang trading houses and the returnees who financed Xiamen's schools, banks and villas.
The 1920s commercial spine cut through the old town by the municipal government, lined with qilou arcade shophouses built with Nanyang money. Its seaward end looks over the harbour that ranked among China's busiest treaty-port anchorages.
Tan Kah Kee began building this education complex in 1913 with Singapore rubber profits: Daonan Hall, Nanxun Building and Longzhou Pool, all in his signature granite-and-swallowtail-roof idiom. His plain 1918 house is preserved with original furniture.
Tan Kah Kee's 1950s tomb sits in a curved gallery of 58 stone reliefs he commissioned, carving Chinese history from Yu the Great to the 1949 revolution. Its 28 m Jiti monument bears Mao's calligraphy, dedicated 1953.
A Song-founded fishing settlement absorbed by the city; behind the food stalls stand the Zeng ancestral hall, Fude Temple and a handful of 1920s overseas-Chinese houses with tiled verandas and clan couplets carved over the doorways.
Xiamen's oldest working harbour, in use since the Ming and once the departure point for junks to Taiwan and Nanyang. Wooden fishing boats still moor beneath 1950s dockyard sheds now converted to workshops along Damo Road.