Read this first: the Gulangyu ferry
Gulangyu is a small car-free island a few hundred metres off Xiamen, covered in the villas of returned overseas Chinese and foreign consuls, and inscribed by UNESCO. It is the reason most people come. Since February 2026 you cannot simply turn up and get on a boat.
The rules now, in summary:
- Tickets are real-name: your passport is tied to the ticket, and the name on it is checked at the pier.
- Daily sailings are capped, and on holidays and summer weekends the cap binds.
- Tickets go on sale 15 days ahead, at nine in the morning, for the fifteenth day out. If you want a Monday, you buy it a fortnight earlier.
- The official channel is a WeChat and Alipay mini-programme. Tickets are not sold loose at the pier any more, and the tourist pier is not the one residents use.
- Any speedboat tout, agency or "special line to Gulangyu" offering to get you across outside this system is operating illegally, and Xiamen's own government has said so for years.
Three practical consequences. First, your Xiamen dates are now fixed by a ferry booking rather than the other way round: decide the island day before you book flights. Second, build a wet-weather alternative, because the ticket is for a day and typhoons do cancel sailings. Third, do not believe a tour seller who tells you they can get you on a boat tomorrow. Check the attraction page for the current booking channel and the return-ticket validity, which has its own rules and has changed.
Who Xiamen is for
Xiamen is a subtropical island city on the Fujian coast, built on tea, migration and smuggling, and it is one of the pleasantest places to live in China - which is a different claim from one of the most interesting places to visit. The old quarter has arcaded shophouses, the university campus is on a beach, and the food is a distinct cuisine of its own, closer to Taiwan than to Guangdong.
It is for you if you want warmth, walking, seafood, and a slow three or four days. It is a good decompression stop after an intense northern itinerary. It is excellent for food travellers, and the Hokkien food here is the parent cuisine of much of what is eaten in Taiwan, Singapore and Penang, which makes it interesting if you know those places.
Skip it if you have a week in China - there is nothing here of the order of the Forbidden City or Longmen, and you would be spending a quarter of your trip on a pleasant seaside town. Skip June to September if you can: it is hot, very humid, and in typhoon season, which can close the ferry and the airport. And skip it if crowds spoil things for you and you cannot travel outside Chinese public holidays, because Gulangyu at its cap is still a great many people on a very small island.
Peanut allergy: a specific warning. Xiamen's signature dish, satay noodles, is built on a sauce of ground peanut and fermented dried shrimp together. It is not a case of peanut as a garnish you can ask them to leave off - it is the base of the broth, prepared in bulk, and the same pot, ladle and counter serve everything in the shop. Peanut soup, another local staple, is exactly what it says. Anyone with a serious peanut allergy should avoid satay noodle shops entirely rather than try to negotiate, and should treat shellfish cross-contact as near-certain in the same premises.
Getting there and around
Fly. Xiamen Gaoqi is on the island itself and close to the centre, though a new airport at Xiang'an is expected to take over flights, with Metro Line 3 connecting it - check which airport your ticket names, because during a changeover this is exactly the sort of thing that goes wrong. By rail, Xiamen North is the high-speed station and is well outside the centre, linked by Metro Line 1 and by the BRT.
Around town there are three things worth knowing. The BRT is an elevated bus-only network with English signage and is the fastest way along the island. The metro has three lines and covers the main axes. Taxis are cheap, but if a driver proposes the ring road, decline - it is the scenic route and the expensive one.
A four-day shape
- Day one: Xiamen island. Zhongshan Road's arcaded shophouses and the lanes behind it, Nanputuo Temple at the foot of the hill, and Xiamen University's campus next to it. Late afternoon on Shapowei, the old fishing harbour, which is where the city's own young people go.
- Day two: Gulangyu. Your booked day. Go early, walk the back lanes rather than the waterfront, and give it until mid-afternoon. The island's point is the architecture - Victorian consulates, Amoy Deco villas, Southeast Asian returnee mansions - and the quiet, both of which disappear on the main streets.
- Day three: food and the ring road. A satay noodle breakfast, the markets at Bashi or Batou for seafood, and the east-coast beaches in the afternoon. Hire a bike for the seafront cycleway if the weather is reasonable.
- Day four: Tulou or Jimei. The Hakka earthen roundhouses of Nanjing and Yongding county are a long day trip inland and worth it if you have not seen them; closer in, Jimei has the Tan Kah Kee school complex, which is the strangest and best architecture in the region - Chinese roofs on European colonnades, built by a rubber magnate.
Three nights is the minimum, because one of them is spent on the island. Four is better.
The food, and where the local habit differs
- Satay noodles, *shacha mian*. Egg noodles in a broth of ground peanut, fermented dried shrimp, garlic and spices. The habit: you pick your own toppings from a tray at the counter - pork intestine, liver, squid, fish cake, tofu puffs - and the cost is in the toppings, not the noodles. Tourists order a standard bowl. Locals order a bowl with three or four specific things in it and are particular about which.
- Oyster omelette, *hai li jian*, made with small oysters, egg, sweet potato starch and garlic shoots. The Xiamen version is looser and starchier than the Taiwanese one and is not served with ketchup.
- Peanut soup, a hot sweet soup of collapsed peanuts, eaten at breakfast and often with a *youtiao* dunked in it.
- Sea worm jelly, *tusun dong* - marine worms set in their own aspic, cut into blocks and served cold with soy and chilli. The local delicacy that visitors refuse.
- Thick vermicelli soup, braised duck with ginger, and crab congee.
The broader habit worth copying: eating here is spread across the day in small amounts rather than concentrated into two meals. Breakfast is a proper cooked meal out of the house, and the late-afternoon snack is a fixture.
What is genuinely overrated
The Gulangyu waterfront. Having spent a fortnight's planning on your ticket, do not then spend the day on the one street where the souvenir shops, costume photographers and tour flags are. The back lanes are a hundred metres away and nearly empty.
Sunlight Rock. The highest point on Gulangyu, with a queue up a staircase to a small rock platform and a view you have already had from four other places on the island.
Zengcuo'an. Marketed as a fishing village turned arts quarter. It is a dense grid of identical snack stalls and guesthouses.
The lover's-bridge and seaside-boardwalk photo circuit that the island's tour operators push. It exists for photographs and nothing else.