The relationship between seaports and inland regions not only impacts the development of coastal areas and port logistics, but influences land-sea resource flows and industrial linkages, constituting a crucial issue in national spatial planning for coastal and inland territories. The classification and naming of port hinterland types reflect the functional relationships and their evolution between seaports and hinterlands. This study integrates the smoke plume model with a hierarchical clustering model, considering multiple functional factors including transportation, economic, and logistics. It calculates the influence intensity values of ports on different hinterland cities, and categorizes the hinterland into four types in descending tier order——direct, competitive, peripheral, and potential hinterland. Furthermore, the study depicts and and visualizes the evolving spatial patterns of Ningbo Zhoushan Port's hinterland types in the four provinces of Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Jiangxi over five periods: 2009, 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2022. This research explores a new quantitative methodology for identifying different types of seaport hinterlands, characterizes the spatial and temporal dynamics of hinterland typologies of the case port, reveals regional distribution features of hinterland types, and analyzes the changing influence of location factors. The findings may derive insights for ports and their hinterlands relationship, and the coordinated development between coastal and inland areas.