Freight volume at Tianjin Port, the largest in northern China, recovered last month, the municipal communications commission said Friday.

Cargo throughput rose 4.3 percent from a year earlier. Container movements totaled 730,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), up 5.5 percent.

During the first quarter, the port served about 4,800 inbound ships and about the same number of outbound vessels, both down about 16 percent.

Freight volume fell 2 percent in the first quarter. However, because of the recovery in March, the decline was 3.5 percentage points less than the January-February level.

As the third-largest port in China and the fifth-largest in the world, Tianjin handled 356 million tonnes of cargo in 2008.