Geographical Connections
Specific locations mentioned in this article include: Quanzhou Prefecture, Licheng District, West Street, East Street, South Street (Zhongshan Road), Jubao Street, Luocheng, Yicheng, Zicheng, Chongyang Gate, and Quanshan Gate.
Have you ever seen a city shaped like a fish?
I’m not talking about some architect’s fever dream. I’m talking about Quanzhou—an ancient city that started “growing” in the Tang Dynasty and never stopped. Its shape wasn’t drawn by anyone. It was squeezed out, inch by inch, by sea winds, trade routes, wars, and the footsteps of generations.
Here’s the paradox: this city was once the greatest port in the world. And its walls traced the outline of a carp. That’s where my curiosity began.
I. From “Ya-cheng” to “Carp City”
I opened the Records of Quanzhou Administrative Divisions and found the starting point on the first page: the 1st year of Wude in the Tang (618 AD).
Back then, Quanzhou was tiny. The so-called “city” was just a “Ya-cheng”—a military and administrative compound. Nothing more than a few walls around some offices.
The real turning point came in 1087, when the Maritime Customs Office was established. Trade flooded in like a sluice gate had opened. I checked the Licheng District Records—by the Song Dynasty, Quanzhou had gradually taken on the shape of a carp.
Why a fish? Not an arbitrary choice. The terrain slopes from northwest to southeast, and that silhouette was ideal for drainage. But folk tradition saw something more—a fish meant prosperity, a good harvest. Feng shui and practicality, fused into urban form.
In the 3rd year of Shaoding (1330 AD), Quanzhou did something massive: it expanded the Luocheng (outer city). According to the Quanzhou Prefecture Chronicles, the wall’s circumference reached 30 Li after that expansion. Houzhu Harbor and the southern trade zone were linked into one continuous fabric. Zaiton’s spatial identity as the “Greatest Port in the East” was set in stone.
II. The Iron Bastion of 1387
If I had to pick a single peak moment for Quanzhou’s city wall, I’d choose 1387.
That year, Zhou Dexing, the Marquis of Jiangxia, arrived. His mission: overhaul coastal defenses. And he didn’t hold back. Volume 3 of the Wanli Chronicle records a set of numbers that made me stop and stare: the wall stood 2 zhang and 1 foot high, with a circumference of 3,600 zhang—roughly 12 kilometers.
Let me put that in perspective. Walk from West Street to East Street and back, and you’ve just circled the entire Ming-era city. Only this wall wasn’t enclosing just a city. It was protecting the lifeline of a world-class port.
Zhou designed 7 gates: Renfeng (East), Yicheng (West), Deji (South), Chaotian (North), plus Anhe (Northeast), Suqing (Northwest), and Tongjin (Southeast). Each topped with a tower that announced, from a distance: you are approaching something important.
But what struck me most wasn’t the gate names—it was the data in the Quanzhou Architectural Records: 22 guard posts (Wopu), plus watchtowers and parapets. That defensive network proved decisive in 1558, when Wokou pirates laid siege to the city and couldn’t break through. Numbers don’t speak. But they tell stories.
III. West Street and East Street: Two Parallel Timelines
Here’s something remarkable about Quanzhou’s street layout: it has barely changed.
West Street is the oldest thoroughfare in the city, dating back to the Tang Dynasty. The Wanli Chronicle described it with a phrase so vivid it sticks with you: “a place where a hundred goods gather.” Four words, and you can already hear the hawkers and see the crowds.
I noticed a detail that kept pulling me back: the alleyways off West Street—“Xiangfeng,” “Jingting”—have kept their names for over 1,000 years. I checked this repeatedly in the Quanzhou Place Names Gazetteer. Every character traces back to the Song-Yuan urban fabric.
Jubao Street fascinated me even more. Located outside Deji Gate, it became the “last mile” of global trade after the Shunji Bridge was built in 1196. The Quanzhou Customs Chronicle records that this was the hub for currency exchange and precious goods. Every stone you step on there could have once backed a shipload of international cargo. Quanzhou’s trade with 58 nations was concentrated on this single street.
IV. When Walls Became Roads
In 1924, the people of Quanzhou made a bold decision: tear down the wall.
This wasn’t destruction—it was reinvention. Overseas Chinese funded the effort, transforming the wall’s foundations into a ring road. The ancient wall vanished, but its skeleton didn’t disappear. It just changed shape.
Then came Zhongshan Road, built between 1924 and 1926, stretching 2.5 kilometers. I looked up the Architectural Records: it used the “Veranda” style—Hokkien red brick fused with Southeast Asian decorative motifs. The aesthetics of diaspora capital and the cutting-edge commercial logic of the 1920s were kneaded into two and a half kilometers of road.
Quanzhou’s modern transformation wasn’t demolition. It was the old city putting on a new coat. Today, over 100 historical buildings still line Zhongshan Road. Every door you open is a page from Republican-era history.
V. What Digital Eyes Can See
Digital tools gave me a new lens.
I overlaid the “City Map” from the 1763 Qianlong Chronicle onto modern satellite imagery. What I found left me speechless: the core area of the city maintained over 90% consistency between 1763 and 2024.
261 years. Wars, demolitions, development, construction—through all of that, Quanzhou’s urban skeleton barely shifted. Especially East and West Streets—their position, direction, and scale are nearly identical to what they were centuries ago.
That level of spatial continuity is extraordinarily rare in world urban history.
But not everything survived. Cross-referencing the Place Names Gazetteer with the Wanli Chronicle, I found that over 50 alley names have vanished from the map. Modern redevelopment erased them. But digital mapping can bring them back—locating the ancient warehouses for aromatics, tracing the hidden corners of Zaiton’s logistics network. Once digitized, these aren’t just nostalgia. They’re evidence.
VI. A Digital Archive for the Future
From Tang to Ming, from Ming to the Republic, from the Republic to today.
Quanzhou’s urban space wasn’t built—it grew. Each layer carries the imprint of the age that laid it down. The coordinates of those 7 gates in the Wanli Chronicle, the 3,600 zhang of foundations in the Architectural Records—they shouldn’t just sit in yellowing pages.
I pulled them back into the light with digital tools. Not for nostalgia. So that future generations can see what the “Carp City” once looked like.
If you’re searching for your ancestral home on chinaroots.org, or studying how a city transforms over centuries, the silent numbers in these chronicles are the only key to unlocking a thousand years of Zaiton’s prosperity.
Some gates, once gone, can never be rebuilt. But at least we can still remember where they stood, and which way they faced.