Top 15 Things to Do in Xiamen: Sights, Food and Ferries

Xiamen is a small island city on the Fujian coast that punches well above its size. A UNESCO-listed settlement sits one ferry ride offshore, a Qing coastal battery still points a German cannon at the strait, and the street food is the best in the province. The catch is that most of the good things here now run on booking systems. The Gulangyu ferry, the university campus and even the temple all want your passport details in advance. Get the reservations right and Xiamen is one of the easiest cities in China to enjoy. Get them wrong and you burn a morning at the wrong pier. A private Xiamen tour takes that problem off your hands, but the list below works either way.

1. Discover Gulangyu Island

Gulangyu, a twenty-minute crossing from the tourist pier, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017 as a historic international settlement. Thirteen countries kept consulates here after 1843, and the result is not quite two square kilometers of colonial villas, mission schools and banyan-shaded lanes with no cars on any of them. Sunlight Rock is the high point, a granite outcrop with a view over the whole island and back across to the Xiamen skyline. Shuzhuang Garden was a private seaside estate before it became public, and the Piano Museum inside it holds the collection that gave the island its reputation.

Admission to Sunlight Rock is around CNY 60. Shuzhuang Garden is about CNY 30 and the Piano Museum is inside that ticket, so the two together come to roughly CNY 90 and are worth it if you plan a full day. Read the ferry section below before you book anything else, because the boat is where most visitors lose their morning.

2. Experience Xiamen University

Xiamen University’s Siming campus is one of the most attractive in China, wedged between the hills and the sea with a lake, an arcade of Minnan-roofed teaching halls and a tunnel through the ridge to the beach. It was founded in 1921 by Tan Kah Kee, the same Singapore-based industrialist behind Jimei.

You cannot simply walk in. Visitors must reserve a slot in advance through the university’s official WeChat account or the visitor mini-program, supply ID details, and pass facial recognition at the gate. Bookings open a few days out and the daily quota is roughly 2,000 on weekdays and 8,000 on weekends and holidays. Walk-ins are refused, no matter how far you have come.

3. Wander around Nanputuo Temple

Nanputuo sits directly against the university’s north wall, stacked up the hillside in tiers so each hall looks over the roof of the one below. It has been a working Buddhist temple since the Tang period and is still the seat of a Buddhist college, so the incense smoke and the chanting are not staged for anyone.

Entry is free but requires registration through WeChat, the same as the campus. Hours run from early morning to late afternoon. Dress covers shoulders and knees. The vegetarian restaurant beside the main gate is a destination in its own right and fills up between 11:30 and 13:30, so eat early or eat late.

4. Stroll along Zhongshan Road Pedestrian Street

Zhongshan Road is the old commercial spine, lined with the arcaded shophouses that Southeast Asian returnees built across Minnan and Penang alike. Walk it in the evening when the arcades are lit and it runs straight down to the waterfront. It is touristy at the top end and improves considerably the further you get from the main drag. Duck into the side lanes toward Kaiyuan Road and you are in the Eighth Market, which is where the city actually shops.

5. Relax at Xiamen Botanical Garden

The Botanical Garden, still known locally as Wanshi, wraps around a reservoir on the slopes behind the city and holds more than 8,500 plant species across a dozen or so themed collections. The rainforest section releases mist on a schedule during the day and the light through it is the reason half the visitors are there. Admission is about CNY 30, gates open around 06:30, and entry is free if you get there before 07:00. Give it two hours minimum. The hills are steeper than they look.

6. Discover Jimei School Village

Jimei is Tan Kah Kee’s monument to himself, and it is a strange and rewarding one: a whole education district built from 1913 onward in a hybrid style that puts sweeping Minnan tiled roofs on top of Western colonnades. Ao Garden holds his tomb, and Guilai Hall was his house. The village is free to walk; individual halls charge small entry fees.

Getting there is half the appeal. Metro Line 1 crosses the bay on an open causeway to reach it, so for about a minute the train appears to be running across the sea.

7. Cycle Huandao Road and the Bicycle Skyway

Huandao Road is the coastal ring road around the island’s southeast edge, with a dedicated cycle and pedestrian path running alongside the water past beaches and headlands. It is flat, it is well surfaced, and it is the single best way to see the shoreline.

Inland, Xiamen also built the Bicycle Skyway, a 7.6-kilometer elevated cycle path suspended about five meters above the road and slung beneath the BRT viaduct. It opened in 2017 and remains the longest elevated cycling route in the world. The two are separate routes and both are worth an afternoon.

8. Explore the Xiamen Museum

The Xiamen Museum on Tiyu Road holds more than 60,000 objects, weighted toward Fujian ceramics, jade, stone carving and the material record of the overseas Chinese diaspora that shaped this city. Admission is free, hours run 09:00 to 17:30 with last entry at 17:00, and it is closed on Mondays outside public holidays. That Monday closure catches a lot of travelers.

9. See Shapowei, the old harbor turned art district

Shapowei is where Xiamen’s port began: a natural typhoon shelter on the southwest of the island, and for a long time the last working fishing harbor inside the city. Fishing boats still moor along the seawall. Behind them, the old seafood processing plant reopened in 2014 as the Art West Zone, and the surrounding lanes now run to galleries, record shops, small-batch coffee and a live music venue in a former cold store. It is the one part of Xiamen where the working city and the designed city sit directly on top of each other.

10. Visit the Tianluokeng Tulou Cluster

The Tianluokeng cluster is the photograph everyone has seen of Fujian: a square earthen building on a terraced hillside with three round ones and an oval set around it, known locally as four dishes and a soup, the square block in the middle being the soup. These are Hakka fortified clan dwellings, some housing dozens of families behind rammed-earth walls a meter thick, and the Fujian Tulou were inscribed by UNESCO in 2008.

They are also a long way out. Tianluokeng is in Nanjing County, Zhangzhou, roughly 150 to 160 kilometers from Xiamen and two and a half to three hours by road each way. Note that this is Nanjing County in Fujian, not Nanjing the city in Jiangsu. Site tickets covering Tianluokeng along with Yuchang Lou and Taxia Village run around CNY 90 to CNY 100.

On the ground

The tulou are a full day out of Xiamen and public transport makes a mess of it: a long-distance bus to the county seat, then a local connection, then a shuttle between clusters, with the last return leg leaving earlier than you would like. A private tulou tour puts the driver and an English-speaking guide in a single booking, which is the difference between seeing three clusters and seeing one.

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11. Eat at Zengcuo’an after dark

Zengcuo’an was a fishing village until the city grew around it. It is now the densest eating district on the island, a maze of narrow lanes off Huandao Road that comes alive from about 18:00 and stays busy until 23:00. Grilled oysters with garlic and glass noodles, skewered seafood, shacha noodles and fried oyster omelettes come out of open kitchens on every corner. Most dishes land between CNY 10 and CNY 30, so a full meal plus several snacks stays under CNY 50. Getting lost in it is the point.

12. Visit the Gulangyu Piano Museum

The Piano Museum sits inside Shuzhuang Garden and opened in 2000 around the collection of Hu Youyi, a Gulangyu native who spent a life in Australia buying antique pianos and sent them home. It holds more than a hundred instruments, including gold-plated uprights, square pianos and hand-cranked and pedal-driven automatics from the nineteenth century. Staff play through the day rather than leaving the instruments silent behind rope, which is what makes it worth the entry.

13. Tour Huli Mountain Fort

Hulishan Fortress went up in the 1890s on the headland facing the strait, and its centerpiece is a Krupp coastal gun shipped from Essen, which Guinness recognizes as the largest and oldest nineteenth-century breech-loading coastal cannon still in existence. The gun emplacements, tunnels and magazines are open, and the view across to Kinmen from the ramparts explains exactly why the battery was built here. Tickets are around CNY 25. A Qing military drill is staged daily at roughly 10:00 and 16:00.

14. Spend a morning on the beaches

The southeastern shoreline along Huandao Road carries a run of sandy bays: Huangcuo, the beach below Zengcuo’an, and a string of quieter coves between them. Water is warm from late spring through autumn and the sand is clean, which is not something you can say of most Chinese city beaches.

Time it properly. Typhoon season runs July through September and peaks in August, and when a system is tracking in, the beaches close and the ferries stop. Late October and November are the reliable months.

15. Shop the Eighth Market

The Eighth Market, Bashi to locals, is a century-old wet market at Kaiyuan Road and Kaihe Road, a few minutes’ walk from Zhongshan Road. It has survived war and forty years of redevelopment and it is still the real thing: tanks of live crab and shrimp, drying squid, hand-pulled noodles and a wall of Minnan snacks. Buy seafood at a stall and the small restaurants around the edge will cook it for you for a fee. Go between 06:00 and 10:00 when the boats have just landed.

What to eat in Xiamen

Xiamen food is Minnan cooking crossed with four centuries of Nanyang trade, and the crossing shows on the plate.

Shacha noodles are the city’s bowl. The sauce is a fusion artifact: Southeast Asian peanut, coconut and dried shrimp simmered into Minnan garlic, chili and five-spice, then thinned into a broth over noodles and whatever seafood you point at. Every shop guards its own ratio.

The oyster omelette, which Xiamen and Taiwan both claim, is small oysters bound in starch-thickened egg and fried until the edges crisp and the middle stays soft. Peanut soup is the sweet counterweight, eaten with fried dough sticks at breakfast or as a late dessert.

Then there is sandworm jelly, tusundong, a set aspic made from marine sipunculid worms and served cold with soy, vinegar and garlic. It is a Xiamen specialty, it is entirely local, and it divides visitors completely. Try it once at the Eighth Market and settle the question.

Booking the Gulangyu ferry without losing a morning

This is the mistake almost every first-time visitor makes, so read it carefully.

Tourists cannot use the pier locals use. Lundu, the ferry terminal at the end of Zhongshan Road, is reserved for residents during the day. Visitor sailings leave from the Xiamen International Cruise Center at Dongdu, further up the coast, and you need to be there rather than at the convenient downtown pier. Lundu only opens to visitors on evening sailings.

The practical rules:

• Piers. Daytime departures run Dongdu to Sanqiutian, which lands nearest the main sights, or Dongdu to Neicuoao. Songgu in Haicang also serves Neicuoao. Night sailings run from Lundu.
• Fare and crossing. About CNY 35 round trip in standard class, CNY 80 for a deluxe cabin, CNY 30 from Songgu. The return leg is included and valid for 20 days. The Dongdu crossing takes about 20 minutes; the short night hop from Lundu is nearer five.
• Book ahead. Tickets open about 15 days out on the official site at xmferry.com and through the xmferry WeChat account. Book at least a day early, three days early for weekends and Chinese public holidays. Foreign passports do not always clear the online system cleanly, so leave yourself the time to collect at a counter.
• Bring your passport. The original document used to buy the ticket has to be presented at the gate. Photocopies are refused, and the name on the ticket must match the document.
• The island is capped. Gulangyu admits a limited number of visitors per day, with the figure attributed to the national tourism authority at 65,000. In peak season the boats genuinely sell out and thousands of people are turned away daily.

Getting to Xiamen and getting around

Xiamen Gaoqi International Airport sits about 10 kilometers from downtown, which is close enough that a taxi or DiDi takes 20 to 35 minutes outside rush hour and 40 to 60 in it. There is no metro station at the terminals; the metro connection runs via a shuttle to Gaoqi station on Line 1. BRT and city buses cover the same trip in 40 to 60 minutes for CNY 5 or less.

Expect this to change. Xiang’an International Airport is being built on Dadeng Island to the east and is scheduled to take over as the city’s airport around the end of 2026, at which point Gaoqi closes to civil traffic. Metro Line 4 is being constructed as the express link out to it. If you are reading this close to that handover, confirm which airport your ticket actually uses.

On the ground, three metro lines are running: Line 1 from Zhenhai Road to Yannei, Line 2 from Tianzhushan to Wuyuanwan, and Line 3 from Xiamen Railway Station to Caicuo. Lines 4 and 6 are still under construction. Between the metro, the BRT and cheap ride-hailing, you will not need to rent a car anywhere on the island.

One more thing worth knowing: Gaoqi airport and the Xiamen cruise port are both designated ports for China’s 240-hour visa-free transit, which lets nationals of a long list of countries stop for up to ten days on the way to a third country. The onward ticket has to be to somewhere other than where you flew in from. Rules and the country list change, so check the current position before you count on it.

Things to do in Xiamen, day by day

Order matters more than pace here, because two of these three days depend on a booking you made before you arrived.

Day one, the island. Start early at Nanputuo, walk through to the Xiamen University campus on your pre-booked slot, then down to Hulishan Fortress for the late-morning drill. Take the coast road east in the afternoon, along Huandao Road by bike if the weather holds. Finish at Zengcuo’an for dinner.

Day two, Gulangyu. Take the first practical ferry from Dongdu and spend the day on the island. Sunlight Rock first while the light is good and the crowds are still on the boats, then Shuzhuang Garden and the Piano Museum, then the back lanes, which is where the villas actually are. Come back in the late afternoon and finish on Zhongshan Road and Shapowei.

Day three, out of the city. Either the tulou, which is a full day with three hours of driving at each end, or a shorter run north to Jimei School Village followed by the Botanical Garden and the Eighth Market. Pick one; do not attempt both.

Common questions about visiting Xiamen

How many days do you need in Xiamen? Two full days for the island itself, three if you want the Fujian tulou. Anything under two and Gulangyu will eat the whole trip.

Do you need to book Gulangyu tickets in advance? Yes. Tickets open 15 days ahead online and the island runs a daily visitor cap, so peak-season sailings sell out. Turning up at the pier on a summer weekend is how people end up not going.

Is Xiamen worth visiting? It is one of the few Chinese cities where the historic fabric survived largely intact, and it is small enough to see on foot and by metro. If you have a spare 48 hours on the southeast coast, yes.

When is the best time to go? October and November. Warm, dry, past the typhoons. March and April are the second choice. August is hot, wet and the peak of typhoon season.

Tip: if you want the campus slot, the ferry booking and the tulou logistics handled in one conversation rather than five apps, a Xiamen English tour guide is the shortcut. Everything above is doable alone; it just costs you a morning of admin.