It's 1,200 feet from stem to stern - four-football-fields long. Along its deck you could lay out end-to-end the Tower of Big Ben and the Statue of Liberty and still have room for the Washington Monument.

The largest ship to ever visit a US East Coast port - China-based shipping giant COSCO's Development - lumbered into the Port of Virginia as scheduled in the wee hours of Monday morning and people scrambled for a glimpse of the behemoth, which can carry 13,000 standard 20-foot-long cargo containers.

They had to hurry too because its departure had been moved up. The estimated 4,000 containers to be off- and on-loaded turned out to be more like 1,500, Virginia Port Authority executive director John Reinhart told the Virginia Pilot.

Reinhart said he expected the volume to rise in the future. "It's like starting up a hotel, anything," he said. "You get a little lighter impact when you first open up."

By Monday afternoon Virginia Gov Terry McAuliffe along with a gaggle of 80 or so local dignitaries was on hand to welcome the monster.

"You see that?" McAuliffe said pointing at the berth. "You know what that is? That's money. This is what I love to see here in the Commonwealth of Virginia."

From there it was on to its next port of call, Savannah, Georgia, where it trundled past dozens of cheering on-lookers along the downtown riverfront on Thursday, The Associated Press reports.

"It takes up the whole river!" Andrew Evans, who served as a ship's officer in the 1960s, exclaimed to his wife as the ship slowly loomed into view, its stacked containers towering above the trees.

"The largest ships I was on, you could fit 10 of them on that ship," Evans said. "Maybe more."

The big ship, flagged out of Hong Kong, is also the largest to pass through the Panama Canal following its major expansion last year and its arrival in US East Coast ports shows shippers aren't waiting for other seaports that are scrambling to deepen their harbors to accommodate the big ships.

The Port of Virginia is one of only four East Coast ports with the ideal minimum of 50 feet of depth at low tide. Savannah has been spending $973 million to deepen its shipping channel starting in 2015 but won't be finished for another five more years.

The COSCO Development had to make its 39-mile trip up the Savannah River at high tide Thursday morning to ensure it would fit - that was with its cargo deck about 80-percent full, according to Griff Lynch, executive director of the Georgia Ports Authority.

The Development heads next to the Port of Charleston, South Carolina, before heading back to Asia by rounding South Africa's Cape of Good. Charleston is planning to start dredging this fall.

The ship will not be visiting the East Coast's largest port of Call - New York/New Jersey - because of height restriction imposed by the Bayonne Bridge. Last week, New Jersey Gov Chris Christie announced that the $1.6 billion project to raise the bridge would be completed by the end of June, six months ahead of schedule.

Overall, 15 US seaports on the East and Gulf coasts are seeking $4.6 billion after being authorized by Congress to make room for bigger ships.

Manuel Benitez, the Panama Canal Authority's deputy administrator, told The AP that the surge in ship traffic between the US East Coast and Asia has exceeded expectations since the canal opened its expanded locks last June.

The canal authority initially thought two or three larger ships would pass through each day, he said, but the daily average has been nearly six.

Lynch said dockworkers in Savannah were planning to use six cranes to load and unload a total of about 5,600 cargo containers on and off the big boat. That's more than five times what the harbor normally handles for most freighters.

"It's everything we've talked about for years," Lynch said. "Now what you're going to see is one after the other. This is going to become more of the norm."

Contact the writer at chrisdavis@chinadailyusa.com.