Located at the southeast coast of China, Quanzhou was the fulcrum of East and Southeast Asia that functioned as an engine for the trade across the vast expanses of maritime Asia during the 10th-14th centuries. It was as well a window for the exchanges and interactions of Song-Yuan China and the outside world. Song-Yuan Quanzhou was functioning centered and powered by the city located at the junction of river and sea, whilst with oceans at the southeast that connected it with the world, with mountains at the far northwest that provided for production and with a water-land transportation network that joined them together. Song-Yuan Quanzhou presented a prosperous picture and symbolic relationship among ports, city and hinterland. The 22 component sites conveying the key attributes of the serial property of Quanzhou include sites of administrative buildings and structures, religious buildings and statues that witnessed multi-cultural communities, cultural memorial sites and monuments, production sites of ceramics and iron, as well as a transportation network formed by bridges, docks and pagodas that guided the voyages. These component sites and their settings comprehensively reflect the distinguishing maritime trade structure and the multi-cultural social structure of Song-Yuan Quanzhou.

　　The serial property witnesses the extraordinary prosperity of Song-Yuan Quanzhou as a world emporium that facilitated the Asian maritime trade. It demonstrates a highly-integrated spatial structure that combines production, transportation and marketing in one place and a morphology shaped by diverse and cosmopolitan cultures. It presents the interchange of values of economic and cultural development concepts between the agricultural civilization of the East Asian empire and the commercial civilization cross the world oceans, and witnesses the ever-lasting maritime trade tradition that cherishes diversity and common prosperity. As the window of Song-Yuan China probing the outside world, Quanzhou with its comprehensive institutions, dynamic economy and values of inclusiveness and tolerance provided indispensable contributions to the prosperity of Asian maritime trade of that time and the development of East and Southeast Asia.