Largest Container Port in World

When Port of Shanghai can no longer handle the ever growing size of the container ships, this man made structure was built. Just south of Shanghai, the Yangshan Deep Water Container Port (洋山深水港) now can accommodate a world class container port. When the Yangshan island was first considered, over 60% of the port didn't exist. It was just a collection of tiny islands with fishing villages 32 km out from the mainland. The engineers thought about flatting the hills to create flat land. But they decided to build around the islands by filling the East China Sea. Area equivalent of 20,000 basket ball courts had to be built from scratch for phase 1 which started building in 2002.

Currently, the port can unload 3,000 and load 3,000 containers in under 20 hours (12 seconds per container!) with their state of art computer tracking and crane system. The port has 13 Ship to Shore cranes working around the clock to maintain schedule. Those beasts are 50 meters high. After the containers are unloaded, they are trucked off the port via Donghai Bridge. The bridge is 32 km long, six lanes wide and built on the open sea in 42 months. It is 12 times longer than the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fransico.

When Yangshen completes its construction in 2020, it will be the world's biggest container port.

Here are some more Yangshan Port stats when its completed:

• 50 ships can dock at one time
• The port quay will be 20 km long
• 25 million containers will be processed in 1 year or 70,000 containers in 1 day
  
• will cost approximately $18 billion USD