Handling nearly 0.3 million-ton goods each day in 1999, Guangzhou Port, the third largest port in China next to Hong Kong and Shanghai, becomes one of the 14 large ports of the world with an annual handling capacity of over hundred million tons of goods.

Guangzhou Port is situated at the juncture of the Pearl River valley densely crisscrossed with roads, railways and waterways leading from the Pearl River estuary to the Pacific Ocean. The water channel nearly hundred-kilometer long to the Pacific Ocean bridges Guangzhou City up with all countries of the world and with the economically developed zone along the Pearl River delta and even farther with the inland places of Guangdong and Guangxi as well as Hunan and Hubei. In recent years, Taking containerized traffic as a new economic growth point Guangzhou Port has devoted more efforts to its development, which has greatly helped its handling of large freighters. The largest freighter it has ever handled has a displacement of 0.31 million tons. In 1999, it handled as many as 101,565,000 tons of goods with a net growth of 2,293 tons as compared with that of the year before, setting a record of year net growth of Chinese ports in China's mainland. It handled 117 containers of international standard last year, earning a place among the 50 top international ports of containers.