The Port of Shanghai is the largest port in the world, having eclipsed the Port of Singapore in 2010, and today handles over 34 million TEU of containers at six massive container terminals located in the wide mouths of the Yangtze delta. Shanghai lies 24 kilometres up the Huangpu river from its confluence with the mighty Yangtze, and there are many bulk, general cargo and non container terminals handling coal, iron ore and other bulk cargoes on the banks of the Huangpu from Wusongkou at the confluence of the Huangpu and Yangtze to the city centre of Shanghai. The mighty Yangtze is the largest river in China and rises in Tibet and flows 3,464 miles to the mouths of the Yangtze. It waters densely populated and very intensively cultivated areas including in the upper reaches the Red Basin of Szechwan and in its central part a huge lowland of lakes and major industrial centres. The extensive muddy delta below Nanking, the former Nationalist capital of China, has been used with great effect to build, during the last twenty years, the largest container terminals in the world.

History Of Shanghai

The Chinese have a great cultural history of three thousand years that gave rise to the philosopher Confucius (551-479 BC), who advocated humane government, a moral code to maintain order, and promotion by merit. The Chinese are great travellers and seafarers, with the ‘Silk Route’ to Venice and Rome opened up during AD 74 to 94 by Marco Polo and other merchants carrying Chinese goods. It has only recently been proven that the Chinese were great seafarers long before European explorers reached India and China. During a two year period from March 1421 to October 1423, the Chinese Admiral Zheng sailed from Shanghai with four Chinese fleets and circumnavigated the world, setting up overseas Chinese civilisations. DNA evidence and the maps they left behind have proven this, and it is believed that these maps, which still exist today, helped the first European explorers, the Portuguese, to reach China one hundred years later.

The Ming dynasty from 1368 to 1644 saw a great flowering of Chinese culture as well as the rebuilding of the Great Wall of China, which was first linked together 2,200 years ago to keep out the Mongol hordes. The Ch’ing dynasty, from which China gets its name, lasted from 1644 until 1912. Shanghai had become a treaty port in 1842 along with several other Chinese coastal ports. Shanghai port had opened for business on 17th November 1843 under the Treaty of Nanking, and became of great importance by 1850. Its international prestige was confirmed ten years later when the Yangtze was opened up to foreign trade. The old walled city of Shanghai granted concessions of land to the British, French and American entrepreneurs. The British Concession was the biggest at 134 acres, with the much smaller French Concession just upstream of the British Concession, and the American Concession not far away on the other side of the Woosung river. This International Settlement had no other parallel in the Chinese treaty ports, but worked very well under its dominantly British control.

By 1890, Shanghai had become a major international port centred on The Bund, a famous half mile of quays on the west bank of the Huangpu river that housed the great French, British and American banks and shipping businesses. Shanghai was known as the ‘Paris of the East’ because of its French Concession, but the literal meaning of Shanghai is ‘by the sea’. The Bund had a long curving line of elegant and spacious buildings varying in style from ‘Classic Colonial’ to high ‘Victorian Gothic’, with its peak being the Customs House with its 90 metre high clock tower. Although unpaved at this time, the river frontage was busy with horse drawn carriages, rickshaws and traditional Chinese wheelbarrows. Shanghai was now the largest city in the Far East, and the largest port in the Far East easily eclipsing the ports of Ningbo, Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Co. Ltd.

This important shipping company was set up on 16th December 1872 by Li Hung- Chang, Governor General of the province of Chihli, as a Government supervised and merchant managed company. It was formed partly to transport rice from the lower Yangtze region to North China, and partly to compete with the lucrative shipping trades of Western firms in Chinese waters. Four fifths of the start up capital was provided by Chinese shareholders, making it the first Chinese company not based on foreign ownership. It was primarily active in river and coastal shipping and grew rapidly to thirty owned ships engaged on eight routes in 1877, compared to six ships of Jardine, Matheson on three routes and eight ships of Butterfield & Swire on three routes in Chinese waters.

The Kaiping coal mines of Northern China provided the impetus for a coastal cargo trade to Shanghai and other Chinese ports of China Merchants’. A fleet of two dozen ships was owned at the start of the great trade depression of 1930, mostly twin screw river and coastal steamers with the largest being the sisters Kiang An and Kiang Shun of 4,327 grt built in 1921 by the Shanghai Dock & Engineering Co. Ltd., founded by S.C. Farnham and L. Boyd. This yard had eight shipbuilding slipways on the Huangpu river and five dry docks, and its main rival was the Shanghai New Engineering & Shipbuilding Works Ltd., also with eight shipbuilding berths building ships up to 450 feet in length.

The Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the destruction of Shanghai port during the Second World War led to the Communist takeover of China in 1949. The China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. then split into two parts due to the Chinese civil war of 1949, with half of its fleet moving to the offshore island of Taiwan, formerly Formosa. The Taiwan based cargoliner Hai Fei was engaged in 1956 on a Pacific service from Taiwan to the Philippines, U. S. West Coast ports returning to Japan and Taiwan. A tanker fleet was also owned at this time including Hai Kwang of 28,642 dwt built in 1956 by the Kawasaki Dockyard Co. Ltd. at Kobe. Finally, after over 120 years of operation, the Taiwan part of the company merged with Yang Ming Marine Transport Corporation on 1st July 1995.

The China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Co. Ltd. was a forerunner of China’s national and industrial institutions, and was one of mainland China’s earliest and most enduring businesses. As well as shipping, the China Merchants’ Group were, and still are, engaged in property development and management, and financial investment and management, and banking and insurance.

The ‘Yangtze Incident’

Shanghai Port Expansion

Overseas trade into Shanghai was cut dramatically after the Communist takeover of China in 1949, with a crippling effect on the infrastructure and development of the city. The big British banks and shipping companies uprooted themselves and their owning families and moved to Hong Kong. Shanghai and the Huangpu river were then reliant on the Yangtze river trade from Central China and the river gorges of the western Yangtze, and only a slowly increasing amount of coastal trade. The Shanghai Ocean Shipping Co. Ltd. is one of seven regional companies that currently make up the China Ocean Shipping Co. Ltd. (COSCO), which was set up on 27th April 1961. The first COSCO container service began from Shanghai to Sydney (NSW) with export goods on 26th September 1978. Ten years later in 1988, the Chinese central government allowed Shanghai to initiate economic reform.

The Port of Shanghai soon began to be developed by the Shanghai Port Authority at a rapidly increasing pace. The Huangpu river, downriver from Shanghai, was developed with bulk terminals, container terminals were built at its confluence with the Yangtze, and later the Yangshan deep water port was built on the Yangshan islands, a group of islands in Huangzhou Bay, linked to the mainland by the long Donghai Bridge to allow containers to be transported by road from its big container terminals at Yangshan. This development allowed the port to overcome overcrowding in the Huangpu river, and to rival another deep water port, that of Ningbo-Zhoushan just to the south. Shanghai Airport was opened to the south of the city, and helped to bring further economic activity and overseas tourists to see this vibrant city.

Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) was incorporated in January 2003 to reorganise the former Shanghai Port Authority and was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange three years later. The Port of Shanghai has been rapidly expanded in twenty years to 125 berths with a total quay length of twenty kilometres. SIPG owns the bulk, break bulk, ro-ro terminal and Shanghai Port Cruise Terminal, and operates joint ventures for five of the container terminals. There are three working zones:-

– Yangshan Islands Deep Water Port

– Huangpu River Port from Wusongkou to the City Centre

– Yangtze River Port at Waigaoqiao

The Port of Shanghai is a critically important transport hub for the Yangtze river region and the most important gateway for foreign trade. It serves the very important economic heartlands of Anhui, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Henan provinces with their dense populations, strong industrial bases and highly developed agricultural sectors. The huge Port of Shanghai trade increased over thirty years from 100 million tonnes in 1984 to 750 million tonnes in 2014.

Shanghai Port Cruise Terminals

The city centre cruise terminal, Shanghai International Cruise Terminal, is situated at the centre of the Huangpu river district, adjacent to the famous Bund and opposite the Pudong Lujiazui financial district. The terminal was opened in 2008 and has an area of 165,000 square metres with ten metres of water draft and 1,200 metres of quay. Annual capacity is one million passengers and the terminal can accommodate three large cruise liners of around 70,000 gt at the same time. The terminal buildings were designed to complement the new high rise architecture on both sides of the Huangpu river at this point. Many cruise lines have called at this new terminal including those of Royal Caribbean International, Star Cruises, Holland America Line, Crystal Cruises, Costa Cruises, Carnival Cruises, Cunard Line, Princess Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises.

There are two other cruise terminals, one at Wusongkou Port at the confluence of the Huangpu river with the Yangtze, and the other at Waigaoqiao Port seven kilometres east of Wusongkou Port and further down the Yangtze delta towards the sea. Wusongkou Cruise Terminal is also known as Baoshan Cruise Terminal and has two berths, one for cruise ships up to 100,000 gt and the other for cruise ships up to 200,000 gt. Waigaoqiao Cruise Terminal has three berths for large cruise ships, with many cruise ship arrivals berthing either here or at Wunsungkou before sailing up the Huangpu river to the Shanghai International Cruise Terminal.

Iron Ore Imports and Steel Exports

The Shanghai Baosteel Group Corporation is the biggest steel producer in China and the third biggest in the world with an annual production of 30 million tonnes of steel. The Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG) iron ore terminal at Luojing on the Huangpu receives vast amounts of iron ore from Australia and Brazil, with some 109,000 Baosteel employees turning the iron ore into iron and steel products such as plates, slabs, pipes and rolled steel shapes and tubes at its blast furnaces and mills. The Shanghai Baosteel Group was founded in 1978 as Baosteel Iron and Steel, and has grown exponentially to a present turnover in excess of $40 million. The main products are high grade carbon steel, stainless steel, and alloyed steel formed into plates and tubing widely used for household appliances, aerospace engineering projects, oil exploration, nuclear power plants, shipbuilding, electronics, building construction and other business needs. The Baosteel Group is also a force on the international front with exports to over forty countries including the United States, Japan, Korea and Germany.

Prior to 1978, the Chinese steel industry was undeveloped, with most of the small amount of steel produced by Anshan Iron and Steel in North East China and founded in 1916. Investment in Chinese steel was begun in the late 1950s by the Government with Wuhan Iron and Steel beginning production in 1958. In 1970, the Chinese Government had taken central control of its steel industry and the few provincial steel plants around the country. A site in the Baoshan district of Shanghai on the coast of the China Sea was selected in December 1977 for the first Baoshan blast furnaces. A production target of 80 million tonnes to be reached in ten years was set for the company by the Government.

The design of the Shanghai plant was modelled on a modern steel facility of the Nippon Steel Corporation in Japan. A team of the best engineers and managers in China was allocated to the project with the first steel produced in 1985 and three more big blast furnaces in production in 1991 and 1994. Steel was supplied to the Chinese automotive industry, house and factory construction, shipbuilding and other industries with no fewer than 37 wholly owned subsidiaries and 18 holding company subsidiaries by 1998. In that year, the Shanghai Baoshan Group merged with the Shanghai Metallurgical Holding Group and the Meishan Iron and Steel Co. Ltd. to form the Shanghai Baosteel Group. Partnerships were forged in 2001 with Wuhan Iron and Steel and Shougang Iron and Steel to make the Shanghai Baosteel Group the third largest producer in the world.

Shanghai Baosteel Group then made international alliances around the world with Thyssen Krupp of Germany, Fiat of Italy, and Haier of the United States, as well as the Yichang Sheet Steel Corporation and the Lubao Steel Pipe Corporation. The Shanghai World Expo of 2010 saw Baosteel take a huge pavilion stage of 1.29 million square feet as befits a global steel giant. The Shanghai Pudong blast furnaces of Baosteel provided steel for much of the construction work of the Shanghai World Expo of 2010, as well as the huge rescue and rebuilding effort after a massive earthquake in Wenchuan in Sichuan Province in May 2008. Steel barracks for six devastated villages were provided as well as new steel buildings, strengthened for future earthquakes, for these western areas of China.

The Shanghai Luojing Ore Terminals Co. Ltd owned by SIPG is a major unloading facility for iron ore on the lower Huangpu river that came into use in 1997. It is located 38 kilometres from Shanghai city centre by the land route and 17 kilometres from Wusongkou. It covers an area of half a million square metres and is equipped with eleven large grab cranes, seven mobile cranes and nearly nine kilometres of conveyor belt systems. The unloading quay has a water draft of eleven metres and can accommodate Capesize bulkers of 180,000 dwt. The loading quay for steel products has a water depth of eight metres and can accommodate vessels on both sides of the quay. The daily working capacity rate for every Capesize vessel at the quays is 35,000 tonnes of iron ore. The twenty larger deep draft Valemax ore carriers of Brazil of 400,000 dwt e.g. Vale Brasil, and the eight deep draft Cosco ore carriers of 300,000 dwt, e.g. Cosco Ansteel discharge at the deep water Dalian Port in Northern China.

A SIPG steel export terminal is located 2.5 miles from the mouth of the Yangtze on the Huangpu river. It covers a land area of 49 acres with 1,800 feet of quays and three berths. This terminal handles 1.8 million tonnes of cargo per year mostly steel exports and heavy lift cargo. It is the best terminal in the Port of Shanghai for handling unwieldy and over sized cargo, and has been used for many State sponsored construction projects e.g. Shanghai Jinshan Petrochemical Works, the Quinshan Nuclear Power Station, Pudong International Airport, Shanghai Rail Transit and Tunnels, and many other important national projects.

There are several other SIPG bulk import and multi purpose terminals on the Huangpu river including one at Jungong Road seven kilometres from Wusongkou. It covers an area of 62 acres and has four berths with a total quay length of 745 metres and 33 acres of warehouses and bulk storage yards. It handles iron, steel, grain, pulp, heavy equipment and other bulk cargoes. It has eight gantry cranes for bulk cargo discharge to an internal railway system of 6,300 metres. SIPG also owns other bulk terminals on the Huangpu river at Wusongkou Port handling 2.9 million tonnes of cargo per year on a 66.7 acre site, at Minsheng for the import of grain and oilfeeds and the export of rice on 42 acres, at Xinhua for imported bulk cargo on 104 acres, and at Nanpu for the import of timber. The extensive barge traffic on the Huangpu river originates mostly from the Longwu barge terminal on a 183 acre site.

Container Ship Terminals

There are six massive container ship terminals within the limits of the Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG). One is at the Yangshan Deep Water Port, and four are at Waigaoqiao Port i.e. the Shanghai Pudong International Container Terminal, the Shanghai East, Shanghai Mingdong, and the Shanghai Zhendong Container Terminals, and another at Wusongkou Port. A yearly eight per cent increase is achieved by the combined five terminals each year, with a total of 33.773 million TEU handled during 2013.

Yangshan Deep Water Port came into operation in October 2013 in the Yangshan islands. In order to help navigation in bad weather, and to shorten vessel waiting times and the efficiency of berthing, a two way navigation channel system is operated similar to that of the English Channel. The port accommodates vessels on a three thousand metre long quay with 34 container gantry cranes, 120 straddle carriers and many other forklifts and other handling equipment.

Phase one of the Shanghai Pudong International Container Terminal was established on 1st March 2003 at Waigaoqiao as a joint venture between SIPG, COSCO and Hutchison Ports Pudong. The container terminal is located on the south bank of the of the Yangtze river at the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone. It has a total quay length of 900 metres with three container ship berths able to accommodate the largest container ships in the world. It has a land area of half a million square metres and a container yard able to stack 30,000 TEU at the same time. Reefer and hazardous cargo containers are handled separately. There are ten gantry cranes, 36 straddle carriers, 73 flat container vehicles and eleven forklifts in operation. A CTMS real time computer system marshals and controls the entire operation of the terminal and the yard.

Shanghai East Container Terminal was established on 12th September 2002 as a joint venture by SIPG and Maersk Line and APMT Terminals. It has a total quay length of 1,250 metres, four berths for large container ships, and two for inland feeder services. It covers a land area of 1.55 million square feet and is equipped with thirteen gantry cranes, 48 straddle carriers and much other handling equipment. Some 1.05 million TEU of containers was handled in the first year of operation, and the present throughput is 3.63 million TEU with a maximum level of 4.0 million TEU. The China Ports Association has rated this container terminal among the top ten container terminals in China.

SIPG Zhendong Container Terminal is located on the west bank of the Yangtze river at the north side of the Pudong new area, six kilometres from Wusongkou in the west, and around 85 kilometres from the mouth of the Yangtze river in the east. The terminal has a quay length of 1,566 metres with five large container ship berths equipped with thirteen gantry cranes. It was opened in July 2000 with a land area of 1.7 million square metres and is equipped with a world class internal computer network system (TOPS 5.0) developed by SIPG to provide container ships and customers with the most efficient, convenient and safe movement of containers.

SIPG Mingdong Container Terminal was established to meet the rapidly rising needs of the development of the Port of Shanghai. It was established as a 50/50 joint venture between SIPG and Hutchisn Port Holdings and handles both containerised and bulk cargoes for international and domestic routes. The transhipment, warehousing, distribution, container repair and washing, cargo consolidation, storage and technical service functions are all available. This terminal has helped SIPG to play a vital part in building the city of Shanghai into an international shipping port with a flourishing economy.

The Shanghai Container Terminals Co. Ltd. (SCT) is located in Wusongkou Port and is a joint venture between the Shanghai Container Co. Ltd. and Hutchison Port Holdings Ltd. The SCT Terminal has ten berths on 2,300 metres of quay and 326 acres of container storage yards. SCT offers its clients a wide range of services including a multimodal freight transfer station, repair and washing of containers, a shipping and freight agency, as well as electronic data interchange on cargo documentation. The SIPG also has container handling facilities in the Wusongkou Port area on a 2,600 metre long quay with an alongside depth of 57.4 feet for berthing large container ships up to 150,000 TEU capacity. The terminal has a maximum designed capacity of 5 million TEU per year.

Haitong International RO-RO Terminal

This Shanghai terminal is a joint venture of SIPG, NYK of Japan, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, Anji Automotive Logistics and SAIC Hong Kong Ltd. The import and export of major foreign and domestic manufactured cars and vehicles is complemented by Pre Delivery Inspection (PDI) services, ro-ro cargo operations and vehicle storage services. Component parts for vehicles of the major world manufacturers also arrive in containers to complete the full service of this important vehicle import and export terminal. The terminal is equipped with an advanced computerised management system for ro-ro cargoes. The berth is 719 feet long with an alongside depth of water of 46 feet and can accommodate the largest car and vehicle carriers in the world. A second ro-ro terminal of 25 acres in area is under construction and will include warehouse storage for vehicle components.

SIPG Coal Branch

China is the largest user of coal in the world, using more coal per year than the United States, the European Union and Japan put together, or to put it another way more than half of the total world coal consumption. Some 55% of imported and mined coal is used in the production of electricity with the remaining 45% used in the industrial sector. The Port of Shanghai is a major importer of coal via its Coal Branch, which also handles sand and gravel. The Coal Branch terminals cover an area of 573,500 square metres and have quays totalling over two thousand metres in length with seventeen berths throughout the lower Huangpu river area. Coal storage yards total a quarter of a million square metres and the combined throughput of these berths exceeds 30 million tonnes per year. Four terminal offices keep a check on the Capesize bulkers arriving at the seventeen berths from Hay Point in Australia, Richards Bay in South Africa, and Mangalore in India, and other world coal export ports.

SIPG Logistics

This logistics company was incorporated by the merger of more than twenty enterprises including SIPG and four major Shanghai freight forwarding companies. It is wholly owned by SIPG, and offers a complete logistics service chain including all aspects of logistics business such as :-

– International freight forwarding

– Deep sea shipping agency

– Inland feeder agency

– Storage and stockpiling

– Road and multimodal transport

– Container stuffing and stripping

– Repair and washing of container boxes

– Heavy lift and hazardous cargo

– Parcel items for break bulk services

A logistics arm of SIPG was essential to operate modern methods of cargo handling on all types of ships that were arriving or departing from the booming city of Shanghai.

Shanghai Jihai Shipping Co. Ltd.

SIPG established a shipping company on 21st September 2001 in partnership with the Shanghai China Ocean Shipping Agency and Shanghai Haihua Shipping Co. Ltd. It is a wholly owned Chinese shipping company and operates liner services for international container shipping as well as Yangtze river and coastal traffic. It acts as a cargo carrier and an agency for all types of cargo including heavy lift with a fleet of eighty mostly chartered ships. The fleet has a total container capacity of 11.6 million TEU, ranking it at sixth place on the list of big Chinese shipping companies. Cargo is carried for all of the major container lines including Maersk Line, CMA CGM, Hanjin, Zim Line, Evergreen, NYK, Hapag-Lloyd, Mitsui, ‘K’ Line, OOCL, MSC, PIL and many other lines.

Some of the owned ships include the sister feeder container ships Ji Hai Yang Shan and Ji Hai Zong Shan of 3,772 gt and 360 TEU capacity. They were purchased in 2004 six years after they were completed at Taizhou by the Huangyan Yongming Shipbuilding Co. Ltd., and are powered by twin Chinese type six cylinder four stroke diesels of 1,800 bhp manufactured by the Guangzhou Diesel Engine Factory. There are many other Chinese shipping companies operating from Shanghai, owning container ships, bulk carriers, general cargo ships, oil and gas support vessels, and fishing vessels. The Shanghai Maritime Authority operates the survey vessel Hai Xun 21 of 1,859 gt from Shanghai on river and coastal depth surveying.

Shanghai Petrochemical Co. Ltd. (SPC)

This company was formed in 1972 and is now China’s largest and most diverse petrochemical enterprise with over 60,000 employees. It has a big refinery at Jianshan in Shanghai and 54 other plants and depots across the country. In 1978, SINOPEC, the Chinese Government petroleum company, began supplying crude oil to SPC at a 40% discount on world market prices. By 1996, the company was refining 4.85 million tonnes of crude oil into gasoline, diesel, fuel oil, asphalt, ethylene, and other products to be made into synthetic fibres and synthetic plastics. The big refinery is located on the Huangpu river as well as an ethylene plant, two chemical plants, a polyacrylic fibre plant, and a plastics production plant. Nine co-operative agreements were signed and are in force with foreign oil companies e.g. BP Chemicals, Union Carbide and Japanese oil companies. Crude oil arrives at the refinery in chartered tankers, and refined products leave in chartered coastal tankers.

Postscript

The constant barge traffic up and down the Huangpu river at Shanghai City Centre take small parcels of cargo further up the river or bring down more cargo for this insatiable port, the largest port in the world. The city centre has a backdrop of the many high rise buildings of the Pudong Lujiazui skyline. The tallest building is the Shanghai Tower, a very tall skyscraper designed by the American firm of Gensler and headed by the Chinese architect Jun Xia. It was topped out on 3rd August 2013 at a height of 2,073 feet and is of an impressive design. The Shanghai Tower has nine cylindrical sections stacked atop each other to give 121 floors, and has a large central spherical globe section for atriums, restaurants and public viewing areas to view the horizon for many miles around. There are two other very high skyscrapers in its immediate vicinity, the Jin Mao Tower and the Shanghai World Financial Tower, each very impressive in their own right.

The Port of Shanghai serves a huge hinterland extending for hundreds of miles, andthe Huangpu and Yangtze rivers and other waterways and the extensive railways give easy distribution of cargo rather than truck based land distribution. The sheer number of terminals and quays is mind boggling and says much for the ingenuity of the Chinese and their management of this gigantic port.