even so its not the whole story. There's more to come.
This map will help explain it
You can locate Shanghaiat the top (right) of the map. The new port of Shanghai is located off-shore to the right.
But to the south (or, the bottom of this map) is another port located at the city of Ningbo. Often freight has to be transported from adjacent ports, but it was a long way round
via the city of Hangzhou.
The solution was to cut some hours off the trip by building a new bridge 35 km long bridge across Hangzhou bay. This would provide more flexibility, facilitating cargo handling.
The red line shows the new highways and the bridge. Ningbo port was also expanded to handle more ships. Its a very ancient port, way back in the Tang Dynasty (7th to 10th C) it was already one of the three main ports (in the China of that time) for imports and exports.
Today Ningbo is also one of the largest ports in the world:
(extract from wikipedia for Port of Ningbo)
The port is at the crossroad of the north-south shipping route and the important waterway of the Yangtze River. The port comprises several ports which are Beilun (seaport), Zhenhai (estuary port) and old Ningbo harbor (inland river port), Daxie and Chuanshan. It is one of a growing number of ports in China with a cargo throughput volume exceeding 100 million tons annually. [2]
Ningbo Port is involved in economic trade with cargo shipment, raw materials and manufactured goods from as far as North and South America and Oceania. It has economic trade with over 560 ports from more than 90 countries and regions in the world. [2] [3]
The Port of Ningbo has recently been merged with the neighbouring Port of Zhoushan to form a combined cargo-handling centre. The combined Ningbo-Zhoushan Port had a traffic of 627,000,000 tons of cargo in 2010, making it the second-largest port in the world (after Shanghai) in terms of cargo volume.
With the new Hangzhou Bay bridge complete, the Shanghai/Ningbo area is a super class freight handling centre.
