An older romanisation is "Foochow". Population is about 4. Fuzhou is an old port city and has been an administrative center since the Qin Dynasty; the traditional date for its founding is BC. Marco Polo visited it around In the era of tea clippers, Fuzhou exported more tea than any other Chinese port. Much of the best tea came from Wuyi Mountain area, up the river from Fuzhou.
Today, it is the provincial capital and administrative center, and also a major center for light industry. Nike has a factory there, and a Taiwanese firm that makes shoes for Adidas, Reebok and others has four. All are large factories, with several thousand employees each. Fuzhou is right across the straits from Taipei , and there is fairly heavy Taiwan investment. The city is on the Min River, a few km inland from the sea, and the actual port is in the downstream suburb Mawei which has been a center for shipbuilding for several hundred years.
In , the French destroyed a dockyard at Mawei, sinking a good part of the Chinese navy and killing hundreds. There is a museum to commemorate this. For a more general view of Fujian's seafaring history, visit the Maritime Museum in Quanzhou. There are many mountains and waterfalls in the hinterland around Fuzhou, while sandy beaches are abundant in the coastal areas, especially in the town of Changle and the island of Pingtan.
The region also has its own culture and an architectural style distinct from other regions in China and Fujian, which can be found both in the city and in the towns and rural areas around it. The city has the oldest wood structure in South China Hualin Temple and has one of the largest historic downtown districts in China "Three Lanes and Seven Alleys" with over residences from the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Fuzhou, and more generally Fujian, has always been outward-looking and some people in more-or-less every overseas Chinese community in the world can trace their ancestry to the area. There is also an enclave of Fuzhou people in Shanghai. In recent decades, most of the illegal Chinese immigrants smuggled to Western countries and to Japan and Taiwan have come from the Fuzhou region, with Changle , Fuqing and various more rural areas as the main sources.
