Shuitou Town Stone Industrial Park, Nan'an City

Shuitou Town (水头镇) Stone Industrial Park, Nan'an — "Capital of World Stone"

Shuitou Town (水头镇) is a small town under Nan'an City (南安市), Fujian Province (福建省), China — roughly equivalent to a township in Korea. A coastal city about 50 minutes by car from Xiamen (厦门) and 15 minutes from Jinjiang Airport (晋江), it has long been a transport hub linking Xiamen, Quanzhou (泉州), and Jinjiang, and is known as the ancestral homeland of Southeast Asian Chinese. Remarkably, neither marble nor granite is mined locally — yet this region processes and trades roughly 40% of global stone output and 70% of China's total, earning the title "Capital of World Stone" (世界石都) — much like Singapore becoming a global refining hub without producing oil.

Until the late 1980s, Shuitou was an ordinary rural village sustained by farming and fishing. After residents learned skills at granite factories in nearby Jinjiang and Tong'an (同安), the town's first stone factory opened in 1995, planting the seeds of an industry. From the 2000s onward, the "buy globally, sell globally" (买全球·卖全球) model took shape: rough blocks (荒料) imported from Iran, Turkey, India, Brazil, Ukraine, and elsewhere are precision-processed locally and re-exported worldwide. Today the trade network spans 130–150 countries, including Korea, Japan, the United States, Southeast Asia, and Europe — which is why stone passing through Shuitou is commonly seen on Korean construction and interior sites.

As of February 2026, Shuitou alone hosts some 800 stone production and processing factories; across Nan'an City there are more than 1,700 stone enterprises and over 250,000 industry workers. Combined stone and ceramics output has surpassed 100 billion yuan (approx. 19 trillion KRW), making Nan'an's first "hundred-billion-yuan industrial cluster." Like Korea's Janghang refinery complex or Ulsan petrochemical district, roads lined endlessly with processing plants, trading centers, showrooms, and logistics warehouses are everyday scenery in Shuitou. Each November since 1999, the China (Nan'an) Shuitou International Stone Fair (石博会) draws overseas quarry delegations from Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and beyond — by 2024 its 24th edition had grown into the world's largest specialized stone exhibition.

In technology, Nan'an partnered with Huaqiao University (华侨大学) to establish the Nan'an Intelligent Manufacturing Research Institute, commercializing in early 2023 the innovative "wire saw" (线锯, diamond wire cutting) technology. In simple terms, a thin metal wire replaces circular saw blades, raising usable yield from 77% to as much as 97%, cutting noise by 30% and slurry waste by 80%. Roughly 550 machines have been deployed across Nan'an, upgrading the city from merely trading stone to manufacturing and selling advanced stone equipment — including international standards led by Nan'an.

High-value cultural products such as ultra-thin stone sheets (0.5 mm thick, usable for smartphone cases), natural stone mosaic art, and stone lacquer painting (漆画) extend stone beyond building materials into furniture, interiors, sculpture, and fashion. The national 4A-rated Yingliang (英良) Warehouse No. 5 Stone Natural History Museum exhibits meteorites, fossils, ancient stone tools, and contemporary stone art — a new model combining industry with tourism and culture.

On January 1, 2026, Phase I of the Nan'an International Stone Smart Industrial Park (南安国际石材智慧产业园) — built with Haier's COSMOPlat (卡奥斯) industrial internet group since 2023 — officially opened. Covering 2,002 mu (approx. 1.33 million ㎡, about half the area of Seoul's Yeouido), with total investment of 4 billion yuan (approx. 750 billion KRW), the park positions itself as the stone industry's first "lighthouse base" (灯塔基地) for smart manufacturing. Phase I includes smart demonstration factories, intelligent processing plants, and a master craftsman's creative center; five projects including Lumistome have confirmed tenancy, with 17 more companies expressing intent, and interior fit-out and equipment installation are underway. The COSMOPlat digitizes the full chain from rough-block procurement through slab processing, supply-chain management, and precision marketing — replacing fragmented per-company operations with an integrated platform.

In summary, Shuitou is a unique case of a fishing village with no stone resources transforming in barely 30 years into the heart of global stone trade. Nan'an's GDP reached roughly 130 billion yuan (approx. 24 trillion KRW) in the first three quarters of 2024 alone, with stone and ceramics growing 13.1% and exports up 16.0% — living proof of the saying "one stone holds up a city" (一块石头托起一座城).