A Song Dynasty (960-1279) shipwreck at the city's Maritime Museum. [Photo by Wang Kaihao/China Daily]

Growing ambition

As a person central to the drafting of documents for the World Heritage status bid, Fu, also a Quanzhou native, knows the importance of impressing the World Heritage Committee.

"The 22 components cannot be seen as 22 scattered spots," she explains. "They are closely linked to one another, functionally, spatially and culturally, and jointly exhibit the key attributes of Quanzhou's regional economic and social system shaped by the surging wave of world maritime trade."

The historic sites, now accorded World Heritage status, include administrative buildings, the city's infrastructure, such as city gates and walls, religious sites that marked multicultural communities, production sites for ceramics and iron, as well as a transportation network formed by bridges, docks and pagodas.

As Fu explains, a consensus was reached between the authorities and the general public during the Song Dynasty to make full use of maritime trade, because tense relations between the dynasty and its neighbors to the north made cross-border trading routes on land unstable.

"The focus of development was thus shifted toward the ocean," she says.

After the Song Dynasty lost half of its territory and entered the Southern Song period (1127-1279), maritime trade became even more crucial to prolong its rule.

A historic opportunity came upon Quanzhou. From the 10th to 14th centuries, global maritime trade experienced a remarkable period of prosperity, a golden age.

Known as Zayton overseas, the city boomed and surpassed Guangzhou, in today's Guangdong province, to become the country's biggest harbor in the early 13th century. This upward trend continued into the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) as its Mongol rulers also upheld the national policy to support thriving maritime trade.

"As the fulcrum in the East, Quanzhou functioned as an engine for trade across the Asian seas," Fu says.

A 14th-century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta once wrote: "The harbor of Zayton is among the biggest in the world, or rather the biggest."