Xiamen
Xiamen (Mandarin pronunciation: [ɕjâmə̌n]), also known as Amoy (English: /əˈmɔɪ/), is a coastal city in southeastern China. It is administered as a sub-provincial city under Fujian province in the People’s Republic of China. It looks out to the Taiwan Strait and borders Quanzhou to the north and Zhangzhou to the south.
Xiamen and the surrounding countryside are famous for being an ancestral home to overseas Chinese. It became one of China’s earliest Special Economic Zones in the 1980s. Xiamen covers an area of 1 565 km² with a total population of 2.5 million. It has been ranked as China’s second ‘most suitable city for living’.
Earlier, the name was written as “下門” (pinyin: Xiàmén; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Ē-mn̂g; literally “lower gate”), possibly referring to its position at the mouth of the Nine Dragon River. The Zhangzhou dialect of Hokkien reads these characters as “ε̄-mûi”, the source of the name “Amoy”. The dialect is still spoken in the west and southwest of the city.
Later, the authorities found “下門” too unrefined and changed the name to the modern toponym “廈門”, which has the same pronunciation in Mandarin (although 廈 is usually read hā in Hokkien) and literally means “The Gate of the Grand Mansion”. The name continues to be pronounced Ē-mn̂g in Hokkien, effectively using the older name, “下門”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiamen
Xiamen (conosciuta anche come Amoy) è una città della Cina nella provincia del Fujian. È posta di fronte all’isola di Taiwan e confina a nord con la città di Quanzhou e a sud con la città di Zhangzhou.
Nata nel 1394 come fortezza contro le incursioni dei pirati, divenne in seguito porto marittimo. Nel 1842, in seguito alla sconfitta nella guerra dell’oppio, Amoy, come era conosciuta dagli inglesi, divenne uno dei cinque porti franchi aperti ai commerci internazionali. Più tardi divenne un importante centro industriale. A partire dal 1980 fu una delle prime quattro zone economiche speciali a