20250908 Monday, September 8, 2025 Gulangyu Island, Rejoining Viking Yi-Dun

20250908 Monday, September 8, 2025 Gulangyu Island, Rejoining Viking Yi-Dun

There was a total lunar eclipse last night at 1am, but we were too tired to get up and go look for it because our hotel room window was on the wrong side of the building. 

We had another marvelous breakfast in the Andaz hotel’s buffet and then headed off to the international cruise terminal to board a ferry to Gulangyu Island. As we approached the ferry terminal, we could see the Viking Yi-Dun tied up at the far end of the pier. 

Xiamen and Gulangyu Island have a very important place in history.  This owes in large part to China’s losing the Opium wars.  In early times, China had insisted on trading with the outside world only with silver for payment.  This was when the British Empire was highly dependent on China’s main exports of tea and silk.  This lead to a trade deficit because the British Empire didn’t produce anything China wanted or needed.  This lead to China coming into possession of the vast majority of the world’s silver reserves.

  
That was true until the British introduced opium to China.  Once the Chinese became addicted, silver was flowing back from China to the British Empire.  When China fought to stop this terrible affliction, they did not have the naval or military resources or power to resist the British, not to mention that all of China’s people were becoming addled by opium addiction and unable or unwilling to fight.  

These wars lead to terribly one sided trade agreements, but one of the main concessions was forcing open several Chinese ports to trade with the outside. Xiamen was one of those ports, and Gulangyu Island was the first part of Xiamen settled by the imperialists.  It is because of this that Gulangyu Island is sometimes referred to as the birthplace of Chinese modernization because it was the influence of these western traders that brought new skills, concepts of governance and art to China.

Once we got into the ferry terminal, we started to see additional Viking lollipops and tour groups start to enter the ferry terminal. These were passengers coming off our ship for this excursion.  There were several optional excursions which included the Fujian Tulous, Quanzhou, and Gulangyu Island for passengers arriving in Xiamen. But they could only choose to do one excursion. We managed all of them with the overland excursion.

It was a short ferry ride over to Gulangyu Island.  From there, we walked a short distance and boarded an electric cart, which could take 15 passengers.  The island does not allow any private vehicles, but in China, everything is negotiable.  Our group got divided up onto two carts.  These were the same kind of carts used to ferry us in Egypt at the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.  These whisked us around the perimeter of the island along a stone paved pathway shared by pedestrians.  

Viking YiDun at Xiamen

Xiamen from Ferry to Gulangyu

Gulangyu ferry terminal

American Embassy, Gulangyu Island

Island electric trolley

Gulangyu SUV

Gulangyu beaches

Gulangyu small boat harbor

Gulangyu beaches- NO SWIMMING

The island has several very attractive light brown sugar sand beaches, but they are all posted Swimming Forbidden!  There were other signs warning of mudflats hazard as well, so there may be quicksand.  There are lots of Banyan trees on the island.  

We saw from Xiamen last night, from the restaurant looking out at the southern part of the island, a huge stone statue.  This is of a legendary protector of the island, Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong), who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan in the 1660’s and resisted conquest by the Manchu. For most of recorded history since the statue was erected, there had never been a typhoon that directly hit the island.

Gulangyu’s Protector Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong)

Then in 2016, a pair of blade shaped skyscrapers were built south of the island.  They were aligned in such a manner that you might think the blades were pointing at the island.  For many of the locals, this was bad Feng Shui.  Government officials laughed off the concerns until the very next year, after completion of the twin towers, a massive typhoon made a direct hit on the island causing lots of destruction and deaths.  Within a few years, they erected a third tower with the Buddhist logic that this would make the 3 towers symbolic of an incense offering.  So far, it seems to be working.

We hopped off the carts at the Shuzhuang gardens built by Lin Erija, a Taiwanese tycoon. This is a tranquil and beautiful garden of stones, pathways, bridges and ponds.  Two ponds are fresh water stocked with sizable Koi, while a larger third pond is a tidal pond that fills and flushes with the tide.  There is a huge natural boulder that forms a focal point to the garden.

Shuzhuang Garden

One of the buildings on the estate is a piano museum.  The arrival of western influences on Gulangyu and China included the arrival of Christians with their music.

Gulangyu Piano Museum.

Many famous Chinese pianists and other musicians came from Gulangyu.  This building houses a huge collection of pianos.  Many are unique one of a kind masterpieces, and some have unusual design elements.  We mostly appreciated that it was nice and air conditioned inside.  

After touring the gardens and piano museum, we walked to the central market area, walking past the first athletic field in China, presumably constructed originally as a cricket field.  

First western style athletic field in China

We had another feast of a lunch at Shang Yu Tsui San, which had nice air conditioned private dining rooms for our party and modern clean western toilets. 

This was a 14 course meal featuring steamed turbot, a flat fish like a flounder, squid, delicious deep fried oysters, razor clams with asparagus, and cuttlefish stir fried with termite mushrooms.

Xiamen from Gulangyu Island

  
After lunch we had free time to wander through the town to check out all the shops and stalls.  We don’t normally buy souvenirs but we expect to meet a Chinese cousin in Shanghai that we have never met before, so we picked up a gift.  The town had the feel of a small English village with its narrow winding alleyways rather than the Hutongs of Beijing.  

We boarded the ferry and were happy to be bound for the ship at last.  It was another hot sunny day with temperatures in the 90’s and humidity of over 93%, so we were all looking forward to showers and a nap.

After getting back aboard the ship, we finally got to really unpack our luggage and make ourselves at home. 

There was a ship’s shuttle bus to Xiamen’s pedestrian shopping street Zhongshan Street. This is near the restaurant we had dinner in yesterday, but remote from the hotel. So we took the shuttle to see a bit more of the city. 

Zhongshan Rd Pedestrian Mall

Zhongshan Rd pedestrian mall

Zhongshan Road is fronted by big hotels and is a high end shopping district for the most part with restaurants, bars and boutique shops, but there are a few shops selling tourist kitsch. Janet found more hair clips that were a bit fancier than the ones she bought earlier, but also a bit more expensive at ¥12. But we added to her collection. 

We had to scurry quickly to catch the next shuttle back to the ship and just made so we wouldn’t have to be on the very last shuttle back. 

We had dinner in the Restaurant, which seemed deserted when went to eat at 6:15 pm.  

Crab and shrimp stuffed Squid

Swordfish

Corn and Butternut Squash soup

We watched the sail away, which was quite spectacular due to Xiamen’s population of giant skyscrapers fitted with LED grids that turned them into gigantic video displays. This was augmented by an occasional flash of cloud to cloud high altitude lightning, and intermittent downbursts of rain.

The ship began to rock and lurch noticeably after we got out onto the seas. Apparently, Hong Kong was hit with a typhoon just a day after the ship had left it.  We are probably dealing with the remnants of that storm system.  We were fortunate not to have gotten bad weather during our overland tour.

Shortly after 10pm, an announcement came in over the loudspeakers in our stateroom.  It was all in Chinese, and sounded urgent.  It left me thinking “do I need to be concerned about that?”  A couple of minutes later, a second announcement was made in English requesting a medical response team on deck 7 aft.  Fortunately, there were no 7 tones followed by one long tone on the ship’s alarms.  

Tomorrow we arrive in Pingtan, off the southern tip of Fuzhou, across the strait from Taiwan.  It straddles the boundary between the East and South China Seas and is known as the Maldives of China.  We’ll learn more tomorrow.