Quanzhou is easy to reach and easy to arrive at wrongly. The rail connection is excellent; the station names are the problem.
The line#
The Fuzhou–Xiamen high-speed railway (福厦高铁) opened on 28 September 2023 — 277 km, China's first sea-crossing line built for 350 km/h, running Fuzhou South to Zhangzhou via eight stations. It put the whole Fujian coast within about an hour end to end, and Quanzhou sits in the middle of it.
From Xiamen North (厦门北站, the northern terminus of metro Line 1, at the station's north square) the trip is under an hour. From Fuzhou it is a similar hop. The older 2010 conventional line still runs too, which is why some services are D trains rather than G trains — both are fine.
The three stations, and which one you want#
This is the whole reason this page exists.
- Quanzhou station (泉州站) — in Fengze district, at the junction of Puxian Road and Dongxi Avenue. This is the one to book. It is the closest to the old town, roughly a 25-minute taxi ride from the Kaiyuan Temple area, and about ten minutes from the foot of Qingyuan Mountain.
- Quanzhou East (泉州东站) — in Dongyuan township in the Taiwanese Investment Zone, around 17 km from the municipal government and considerably further out than the name suggests. Buses run into the city, but the last one is in the late evening.
- Quanzhou South (泉州南站) — in Jinjiang, the separate city to the south. Right for Jinjiang and the coast, wrong for the old town.
There is also Quangang (泉港站) at the northern end of the municipality. Booking systems will happily sell you any of them for a search on "Quanzhou", so read the station name on the ticket, not just the city.
Getting around once you are there#
Quanzhou has no metro. The old town is compact and walkable — Kaiyuan Temple, the Qingjing Mosque on Tumen Street and the Tianhou Temple are all on foot from each other. The outlying UNESCO components are not: the Cao'an Manichaean Temple is about 19 km south in Jinjiang, and Luoyang Bridge is north-east of the centre. Both need a taxi and half a day each.
Pairing it with Xiamen#
Most visitors reach Quanzhou through Xiamen, and that is the sensible shape: Xiamen's airport is the international gateway for this part of Fujian, and the two cities are close enough that you never need to backtrack. Two or three nights in Quanzhou after two or three in Xiamen is a comfortable trip, and Quanzhou is the one that repays the extra night — twenty-two inscribed component sites, and almost no foreign visitors at any of them.
If your time is genuinely tight, Quanzhou can be done as a long day from Xiamen. You will see Kaiyuan Temple and the old town and miss everything else, which is a real loss but better than skipping the city.
For what the port actually was and which of the twenty-two sites are worth the taxi, see the Quanzhou travel guide; for the other end of the line, the Xiamen travel guide.