Xiamen: the car-free island of Gulangyu

Gulangyu, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2017, preserves over a thousand buildings in diverse architectural styles built by foreign consulates and merchants between the 1800s and 1900s, accessible only on foot along narrow, quiet alleyways.

The Nanputuo Temple, an active Buddhist monastery for over a thousand years at the base of the hill of the same name, pairs prayer halls with a vegetarian restaurant run directly by resident monks.

The campus of Xiamen University, often cited as one of China's most scenic, faces directly onto the sea and opens to outside visitors during set hours.

The Hulishan Fort, a late-19th-century coastal fortification, houses a German Krupp cannon among the largest ever produced, still today pointed across the Taiwan Strait.

Gulangyu, car-free since 1949, offers today a silence that the rest of Xiamen — an active commercial port for centuries — has never truly known.

The Krupp cannon at Hulishan, pointing toward the strait, remains a reminder that this quiet was never taken for granted in this corner of the Chinese coast.