During the early Jin Dynasty, the place was made Tong'an District in 282. During the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), the city was a seaport open to foreign trade. The Chinese scientist and statesman Shen Kuo (1031–1095) spent some of his youth there while his father was a local bureaucrat on the government staff.
In 1387, the Ming Dynasty built a fort in Xiamen, then part of Quanzhou, to guard against pirates. After the Manchu Qing Dynasty overthrew the Ming in 1644, Ming loyalist Koxinga, used Xiamen as a base to launch counterattacks against the invading Manchus from 1650 to 1660. In 1656, he named Xiamen Island, Siming, or "Remembering the Ming". In 1661, Koxinga drove the Dutch from Taiwan and moved his operations there. The Manchus renamed the island Xiamen. The city was renamed by the Manchus in 1680 to Xiamen Subprefecture. The name "Siming" was changed back after the 1912 Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing Dynasty and the settlement was made a county. Later it reverted to the name Xiamen City. In 1949, Xiamen became a provincially administered city, then was upgraded to a vice-province-class city, or a municipality. Today, Siming is the name of main city district of downtown Xiamen.
In 1541, European traders (mainly Portuguese) first visited Xiamen, which was China's main port in the nineteenth century for exporting tea. As a result, Hokkien (also known as the Amoy dialect) had a major influence on how Chinese terminology was translated into European languages. For example, the words "Amoy", "tea", "cumshaw", and "Pekoe", kowtow, and possibly Japan (Ji̍t-pún) and "ketchup" originated from the Hokkien.
During the First Opium War between Britain and China, the British captured the city in the Battle of Amoy on 26 August 1841. Xiamen was one of the five Chinese treaty ports opened by the Treaty of Nanking (1842) at the end of the war. As a result, it was an early entry point for Protestant missions in China. European settlements were
