A little history Xiamen was founded in the mid-fourteenth century and grew in stature under the Ming dynasty, becoming a thriving port by the seventeenth cen tury, influenced by a steady and rather secretive succession of Portuguese Spanish and Dutch fortune-hunters. When invading Manchu armies poured down from the north in the seventeenth century, driving out the Ming, Kiamen became a centre of resistance for the old regime. The pirate and self; styled Prince Koxinga (also known as Zheng Chenggong) led the resistance before being driven out to set up his last stronghold in Taiwan - incidental- ly deposing the Dutch traders who were based there where he eventually died, before Taiwan too was taken by the Manchus. Koxinga’s exploits have been heavily romanticized and reinterpreted over the years, and today his recapturing of Taiwan from unfriendly forces is used both to justify China’s claims on its neighbour, and also to provide an example of how to pursue those claims. A couple of hundred years later the British arrived, increasing trade and establishing their nerve centre on Gulangyu; the manoeuvre was formalized with the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. By the start of the twentieth century; Xiamen, with its offshore foreigners, had become a relatively prosperous com- munity, supported partly by a steady turnover in trade and by the trickle of wealth back from the city’s emigrants, who over the centuries had continued to swell in numbers. This happy state of aft:airs continued until the Japanese invasion at the beginning of World War II. The end of the war did not bring with it a return to the good old days,how- ever. The arrival of the Communists in 1949, and the final escape to Taiwan by Chiang Kaishek with the remains of his Nationalist armies, saw total chaos around Xiamen, with thousands of people streaming to escape the Communist advance in boats across the straits. In the following years the threat of war was constant, as mainland armies manoeuvred in preparation for the final assault on Taiwan, and more immediately, on the smaller islands of Jinmen and Mazu (known in the West as Quemoy and Matsu) which lie only just off the main- land, within sight of Xiamen. Today the wheel of history has come full circle. Although Jinmen and Mazu are still in the hands of the Nationalists, the threat of conflict with Taiwan has been subsumed by the pronfise of colossal economic advantage. In the early 1980s Xianren was declared one of China’s first Special Economic Zones and, like Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong, the city has entered a peri- od of unprecedented boom. Things seem only to be getting better: Spring Festival 2001 saw the first direct passenger ferry between Taiwan and the nrainland for fifty years - though this was a one-off event - and in early 2002 irregular freight services started up.

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