Why Gulangyu is the crossing everyone makes from Xiamen
Picture this: you step off the ferry at a small pier, walk into a lane, and suddenly the traffic, the horns, the familiar noise of a city all disappear — because Gulangyu has not one single car. What is left is the sound of footsteps, birds in the banyan trees, and now and then a few bars of piano floating out of an old house. This is a tiny island, barely 2 square kilometres, sitting right off Xiamen and separated only by a narrow strait you can cross by boat in under 20 minutes.
Gulangyu (鼓浪屿) was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017 as a historic international settlement. After Xiamen opened as a treaty port in the mid-19th century, Western powers and overseas Chinese merchants built homes, consulates, churches and schools here, leaving behind more than a thousand colonial-era villas that mix European, southern-Chinese and a hybrid local style sometimes called 'Amoy Deco'. Walk a few steps and the building beside you is in a completely different style, until the whole island feels like an open-air museum.
So where does the 'piano island' nickname come from? Families here have loved classical music for generations — Gulangyu is said to have one of the highest numbers of pianos per resident in China, and it has produced several famous concert pianists. Today the island has a Piano Museum displaying rare antique pianos from around the world inside the seaside Shuzhuang Garden, and as you wander you really might catch someone practising at a window in one of the old houses.
