After the Second Opium War, Qing Government signed the Treaty of Tianjin with Britain and France in 1858, according to which Dengzhou (i.e. Penglai City of Shandong Province) should be opened as a port. Through a visit to Dengzhou, however, the British Consul found that the water is relatively shallow in Dengzhou and thus made a proposal of replacing Dengzhou by the neighboring Yantai. On 22 Aug. 1861, Port of Yantai was opened for trade. At the same time, a customs was established.

　　During the period from 1901 to 1921, several public terminals and two breakwaters, respectively located in the east and the west of the port, were built up. As of the end of 1930s', the port throughput had been up to 680,000 tons. From then on, however, the port traffic experienced a sharp decline until to 47,000 tongs in 1949.

　　After the foundation of PRC in 1949, Yantai Port started its brand new era of development. Large-scale expansions have been carried out especially since the year of 1973 in accordance with Premier Zhou Enlai's instruction, i.e. “To change the looks of ports in three years”. By the year of 1979, the berths for cargo and passenger had been increase to be 12, including 3 berths over 10,000 DWT, with an designed annual traffic capacity of 3.01 million tons.

　　Yantai Port has, since the reform and opening up policies adopted in China, witnessed remarkable achievements in every aspects by: (i) improving management mechanism; (ii) promoting transformation in the way of economic growth; (iii) enhancing the competitive capacity of the port; and (iv) increasing the economic benefit. This has enabled the port to win quite a few State Prizes such as:

　　•  State Prize for Excellent Enterprise Management;

　　•  State Prize for Quality Control;

　　•  National Prize for Excellent Ideological Work;

　　•  National Advanced Port for Civilization in Transportation Sector;

　　•  National Customer-satisfying Enterprise; and

　　•  National Quality-and-Benefit Oriented Enterprise.

　　With the proceeding of the reform and the national economic growth, the State attaches great importance to the development of Yantai Port and the port expansion projects have been rated as major ones of the State. The major development projects are listed as follows:

　　•  The Ro-Ro Terminal for ferry service between Yantai and Dalian was completed in 1989.

　　•  Under the 1 st and the 2 nd Phases of port construction project, 12 deep water berths were completed and put into operation in 1990 and 1997 respectively, allowing the harbor to have an additional annual design capacity of 7.3 million tons for cargo handling.

　　•  The International Passenger Terminal was put into operation in June 1996.

　　•  A new Ro-Ro terminal for ferry service between Yantai and Dalian was completed in Dec. 1996.

　　•  To meet the development demand of containerization and the vessels' upgrading trend, the 3 rd Phase Project was commenced in 1997, consisting of 7 deep-water berths to be completed in two periods. During the first construction period, two container berths (with the alongside depth of – 14 m) and two conventional cargo berths (with the alongside depth of – 16 m) were completed in December 2001 and were accepted after inspection by the relevant authorities of the State, with a newly-increased design capacity of 2.55 million tons per annum. The other facilities under the second stage of the 3 rd Phase was included in the Tenth-Five Year Plan of MOC and the construction works was commenced in Oct. 2004, with a construction period of 2 years. This project consists of a deep-water terminal with a depth of –20 m and a length of 608 m. The depth of the turning basin and the approaching channel is –17 m. The project cost is estimated to be RMB 400 million Yuan.

　　•  To meet the development demand of domestic container business, the construction project of #38 and #39 berths were commenced in June 2002, comprising of a container berth of 30,000 DWT and a multi-purpose berth of 20,000 DWT, with a total annual design capacity of 960,000 tons (including a container traffic of 100,000 TEU and a bulk cargo traffic of 160,000 tons). The project was completed in April 2004.

　　As of the end of 2004, there were 49 berths in Yantai Port, including 23 ones of over 10,000 DWT. The annual throughput is over 50 million tons, the container traffic is 550,000 TEU per annum and the annual passenger throughput is 4 million person-times.