International Cargo Seaport: Port of Dalian

China is an industrial giant, so it has a lot of busy ports for export and import purposes. The country has a grand total of eight huge ports that are categorized in the top 25 busiest seaports in the entire world, one of which is the Port of Dalian.

About Port of Dalian

The Port of Dalian is located in the southern area of the Liaodong Peninsula on the Yellow Sea. It belongs to a northern province in China, Liaoning, which makes it one of the most northern ports in the country.

The port only has a small 15 square kilometers of land area, but the enormous 346 square kilometers of a water area is huge even for a giant seaport. The port also has very large warehousing and stacking yards with 300 square kilometers and 1,800 square kilometers, respectively.

The History

The Port of Dalian was founded and opened in 1899. However, the port that is owned by the Dalian Port Corporation Limited had never had any container ships entered until more than seven decades later in 1972.

That moment became the first and the beginning of container routes in China. Then, a year later in 1973, the port was able to handle a total of 21.5 million tons of containers. The port has become one of the busiest ports in the country since then.

Before 2017, the port was operated dividedly between three entities, the Dalian Container Terminal or DCT, the Dalian Port Container Terminal or DPCT, and the Dalian International Container Terminal or DICT. Each entity controlled seven, five, and two container berths, respectively.

Then, in August 2017, the three entities united and became one to operate the port under the name of the Dalian Container Terminal. Earlier that year, Dalian’s port and other ports in the province of Liaoning have agreed to be under one company to manage the ports.

Volume of Transaction in Port of Dalian

In 2020, the Port of Dalian had a huge drop in the cargo transaction volume. The year before, in 2019, the port had more than ten million twenty-foot equivalent units or TEUs for short, but then the number dropped to 6.5 million TEUs, just above the Port of Tanjung Priok in Indonesia.

The cargo transaction volume of the port has never been that low since 2011. It had an increased up to eight million TEUs in 2012, and then the number had been steadily between nine million and eleven million TEUs after that year.

Interesting Facts

Being in the cold northern part of the planet Earth, the Port of Dalian is the most northern port in China with no ice. The location is strategic, which allows the port to have more than 300 shipping and trading links from up to 160 countries and regions all over the world.

Moreover, the port is able to handle at least 100 million total volumes of discharged and loaded cargo per year at that port. A total of 68 container shipping routes are also available both domestically and internationally.