Quanzhou Maritime Museum

The Quanzhou Maritime Museum is the only museum in China specialising in overseas trading relations, and its collection is the physical evidence of the city's extraordinary medieval history. Stone inscriptions in Arabic, Persian, Tamil, Syriac, and Hebrew document the communities of foreign merchants who lived here permanently; the grave markers of Arab, Persian, and Jewish traders are among the most remarkable objects in the museum. A detailed model of the medieval harbour shows the scale of the infrastructure that served thousands of ships.

The museum is housed in a purpose-built complex in the eastern part of the city. Allow two to three hours; the inscriptions repay careful attention even if you cannot read the languages, and the ship hall is genuinely impressive in person. The museum is free with advance registration and is a UNESCO-inscribed site. It is about 20 minutes from the old town by taxi.

things to do museum
A story
The star exhibit is the Quanzhou ship, a 13th-century ocean-going junk recovered from Quanzhou Bay in 1974. The vessel is 24 metres long and was found with its cargo still partially intact: pepper, betel nuts, ambergris, mercury, and coins from multiple countries — a snapshot of one journey on the Maritime Silk Road. The ship's V-shaped hull, reinforced with multiple layers of planking on the sides and compartmentalised into watertight sections, represents a level of naval engineering that enabled Chinese merchants to sail to the Persian Gulf and East Africa. The design of the compartments influenced ship construction for centuries.