Seen from the deck, the arrival at Ningbo-Zhoushan looks like a show of strength: cranes as far as the eye can see, container ships waiting in line and hills of stacked metal boxes. This is the beating heart of the largest cargo port on the planet by tonnage. But behind this industrial façade lies a city of scholars several millennia old, where books have been preserved longer than anywhere else in China.

Getting away from the containers

Cruise ships dock in the port areas of Beilun or the Zhoushan archipelago, far from any pedestrian district: allow about thirty kilometres and 30 to 45 minutes by road to reach central Ningbo. Organized excursions remain the simplest way to manage the day: taxis require negotiation, cash or Chinese mobile payment, and an address written in characters, which complicates improvisation. The journey is nonetheless part of the experience: elevated highways, estuaries spanned by colossal bridges and then, suddenly, the towers of the business district and the parks that open up between them. Contemporary China streams past the window before the old China takes over, and the contrast between the two is, in the end, the real subject of the day.

The oldest library in China

The historic heart is concentrated around Moon Lake, a body of water lined with willows, pavilions and Sunday calligraphers. Nearby lies the local treasure: the Tianyi Ge, a private library founded in 1561 by a high-ranking official of the Ming dynasty, the oldest still standing in the country. You move from courtyard to courtyard, among ponds, rockeries and rooms where ancient volumes rest in the half-light, protected by conservation rules that the same family enforced for thirteen generations. The gardens are worth as much as the shelves: bamboo, worn paving stones and a studious calm a few streets from the traffic. Allow a good hour on site, more if the calligraphy and bookbinding exhibitions catch your interest, then finish with a walk around the nearby lake, where residents practise tai chi in the shade of the willows.

From the old bund to the museum of salvaged bricks

On the opposite bank stretches the Laowaitan, the old waterfront of the foreign concessions, opened to international trade in 1844, even before Shanghai's. Its restored European façades house cafés, restaurants and galleries, and in the late afternoon the promenade takes on the air of a photo studio, as newlyweds come to pose in front of the red bricks. Another, more contemporary curiosity: the Ningbo Museum, the work of architect Wang Shu, whose walls incorporate millions of bricks and tiles salvaged from demolished villages. Here you travel through seven thousand years of regional history, from the Hemudu culture, one of the first rice civilizations, to the city's great mercantile age. When it is time for a break, local tables serve seafood and tangyuan, glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame, which Ningbo claims to have invented.

The Zhoushan option

When the ship calls on the archipelago side instead, the day changes entirely in nature: the sacred island of Putuoshan, a major Buddhist site dedicated to the goddess Guanyin, lines up golden temples, camphor forests and beaches in an atmosphere of peaceful pilgrimage, the complete opposite of the container terminals. Whichever shore you choose, you return on board with the same impression: that of an industrial giant that has never stopped being an old place of merchants and scholars. The cranes then file past in a different light, simply the last chapter of a very long history of trade that began well before the container was invented.