Typhoons struck China, congestion hit Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Qingdao

Overview 

Five typhoons made landfall on China’s coast in eight weeks: Bavi (Jul 11–12, Zhejiang), Noul (Jul 26, Guangdong), Dolphin (Aug 7–10, Zhejiang), Narra (Aug 25–26, Hainan and Guangxi), and Saudel (Aug 27–28, Zhejiang), per public shipping-industry and news reporting. 

• National weekly vessel calls show four dips this season, one for four of the five landfalls; Narra and Saudel land too close together to separate. 

• Weekly vessel calls haven’t returned to their pre-season range (2,491–2,817 per week) since Bavi’s landfall in early July, not even at their best week since (Aug 17). 

• Import dwell rose 35%–48% at Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Qingdao.

• Saudel hit a network already strained by Dolphin’s closures roughly three weeks earlier, leaving little slack to absorb a fifth storm. 

Five storms, one network that never reset 

National weekly vessel calls held a stable 2,491–2,817 range through most of June. It has not returned to that range since the first week of July. Reading the season week by week: the deepest dip of the whole run, the week of Jul 6, contains Bavi’s landfall on the night of Jul 11 into Jul 12 in Zhejiang. Volume partially recovers over the following two weeks, then drops again in the week of Jul 27, which follows Noul’s landfall in Guangdong in the very last hours of the week before (Jul 26, a Sunday); some of that dip may also be lingering Bavi backlog rather than Noul alone, since backlogs of this size typically take longer than a week to clear. The week of Aug 17 is the strongest recovery of the season, still short of the pre-July baseline. Then volume drops a fourth time in the week of Aug 24, which contains both Narra’s landfall in Hainan and Guangxi (Aug 25–26) and Saudel’s landfall in Zhejiang (Aug 27–28). Given Zhejiang’s far larger container-port footprint compared with Hainan and the Guangxi border, Saudel likely accounts for most of that week’s decline, but the data can’t rule out a Narra contribution. 

The ports that closed weren’t the ones with the worst delays 

Import dwell moves on a slower clock than vessel activity. Comparing the last clean pre-storm reading (Sunday, Aug 23, before preemptive closures began) to the most recent available reading (Sep 1), Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Qingdao show the largest increases, rising 35%–48%, and none of the three was ever ordered shut. Shanghai, which was closed, shows a much smaller rise (+8.0%), and Ningbo, closed at the highest tier, barely moved (+5.9%) and doesn’t rank in the top four at all. 

Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Qingdao are still climbing

The daily trend shows the shared shape behind the ranking: Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Qingdao all climbed through late August and show no turnover point yet. Shanghai and Ningbo’s dwell, by comparison, show only a small, leveling bump around the landfall date.  

The impact

The underlying issue isn’t any one single storm; it’s that five landfalls arrived faster than the network could recover between them, so a backlog from Bavi in July was likely still working through the system when Saudel hit in late August. Saudel hit a network already strained by Dolphin’s closures roughly three weeks earlier, leaving little slack to absorb a fifth storm.

Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Qingdao were never placed under an official closure order, and they are the three ports still showing rising import dwell as of September 1, the last day in this data. Whether the three still-rising ports level off in the days after September 1 is not something this dataset can show yet.

We’ll be watching to see if they do.