A Harbour Dug Out of the Coast

A river port on a silting estuary cannot simply be declared deep. The Port of Tianjin is described as the largest artificial deep-water harbour in China, and the word artificial is the important one: the channel and the basins were made, not found. Its water and land area totals nearly 260 square kilometres, divided into four port areas. Beijiang handles containers and general cargo; Nanjiang, Dongjiang and Haihe carry the rest of a trade that reaches more than five hundred ports in over 180 countries. The port's throughput capacity is the fifth largest in the world, while on a different measure the sources call it the world's fourth largest comprehensive trading port.

The harbour's early twentieth-century problem was winter. Once icebreakers began working the river, the share of Tianjin port's January to March customs revenue rose from 1.2 per cent in 1911 to 19.33 per cent in 1922, which is a measure of how much trade had previously been lost to the closed season. The port also changed the shape of the coast: with the building of new port areas such as Dongjiang and Nangang and the reclamation that came with them, the Tianjin coastline grew from 146.53 kilometres in 2000 to 302.62 kilometres in 2012, doubling within twelve years.

On 12 August 2015 a fire and explosion occurred at a hazardous chemical warehouse inside the port. The sources record 173 deaths, hundreds of injuries and property losses, and describe serious effects on an area of several kilometres around the site. The incident is part of the port's record and is not separable from it: a harbour handling chemicals for a national industrial base carries risks that a harbour handling general cargo does not. The port continued to operate, and the sources also note a later change of policy, when in 2017 the port stopped accepting coal carried by diesel lorries in an effort to improve air quality.