Gulei () is a town in

Zhangpu County Zhangpu County () is a county of Zhangzhou prefecture-level city in far southern Fujian province, People's Republic of China. The county seat is located in the town of Sui'an (). Zhangpu is bordered by the Longhai City in the north, the counties ...

in the far south of

Fujian Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its cap ...

province, China. It lies on a long peninsula, also called Gulei, which projects into the

Taiwan Strait The Taiwan Strait is a -wide strait separating the island of Taiwan and continental Asia. The strait is part of the South China Sea and connects to the East China Sea to the north. The narrowest part is wide. The Taiwan Strait is itself a ...

, enclosing the

Zhang River The Zhang River is a tributary of the Wei River in China. The river commences at the confluence of the rivers Qingzhang (or Clear Zhang, 清漳河) and Zhuozhang (or Turbid Zhang, 浊漳河), where between She county of Hebei and Linzhou of ...

estuary / Dongshan Bay to its east. The town is the furthest south of any in Zhangpu, one of its villages (called Gulei) being only from the main island of Dongshan. By 2017, Gulei town and the entire Gulei peninsula have been cleared of population for the construction of the Tenglong Chemical Complex.

Gulei in the News

On January 9, 2009, China's Environmental Protection Ministry authorized the construction in Gulei of a two-plant chemical project: a Tenglong (腾龙)(DAC - Dragon Aromatics Co.) company factory to produce

p-Xylene ''p''-Xylene ( ''para''-xylene) is an aromatic hydrocarbon. It is one of the three isomers of dimethylbenzene known collectively as xylenes. The ''p-'' stands for ''para-'', indicating that the two methyl groups in ''p''-xylene occupy the diamet ...

, and a Xianglu (翔鹭) company factory to use ''p''-xylene to produce polyethylene terephthalate. Tenglong is partly owned and Xianglu wholly owned by

Chen Youhao Chen may refer to: People *Chen (surname) (陳 / 陈), a common Chinese surname * Chen (singer) (born 1992), member of the South Korean-Chinese boy band EXO * Chen Chen (born 1989), Chinese-American poet * (), a Hebrew first name or surname: * ...

. Both companies have factories in

Xiamen Xiamen ( , ; ), also known as Amoy (, from Hokkien pronunciation ), is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, People's Republic of China, beside the Taiwan Strait. It is divided into six districts: Huli, Siming, Jimei, Tong'an ...

Haicang District Haicang () is one of the six county-level districts of Xiamen, People's Republic of China, and one of the four located on the mainland proper, as opposed to on Xiamen Island. History Haicang has always been the port of call for incoming trade ...

. Residents' protests there in June 2007 forced the two-plant project to cease construction and move elsewhere. The delay and the move, together with a new 830 million to meet pollution control guidelines, have apparently added RMB 3 billion to the cost of the investment, which in 2007 was stated to be 10.8 billion. In 2008 thousands of people in Gulei town and in neighbouring Dongshan county protested the coming construction. Zhangzhou municipal authorities insisted they had exaggerated the impact of the chemical project and did not understand the economic benefits it could bring. In January 2012, precommissioning operation of the two plants began. In April 2015, one of the plants suffered from an explosion and fires caused by an oil leak; after two days, the fires were extinguished.China's chemical plant fire put out
2015-04-09

Notes and references

{{reflist *South China Morning Post, ''Environmental Chiefs Approve ..'', by Shi Jiangtao and Kristine Kwok, 2009 Jan 14. Township-level divisions of Fujian Peninsulas of China Zhangzhou