Qingdao

The bay was a minor fishing and garrison site until the late 19th century, when the Qing government built a small naval station at Jiaoao. In November 1897 Germany seized the bay after the killing of two missionaries in Shandong, and the following year forced a lease of the Jiaozhou concession. German planners laid out a new town of separate European and Chinese quarters, with granite streets, a sewer system, a harbour and a railway inland to Jinan, and the Germania brewery opened in 1903.

Japan took the territory in 1914 after a siege at the start of the First World War. The Versailles conference awarded Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan rather than returning them to China, and the news set off the student demonstrations in Beijing on 4 May 1919 that gave the May Fourth Movement its name — an episode still marked by the square on the Qingdao seafront. The city returned to Chinese control in 1922, and was occupied by Japan again from 1938 to 1945 before Communist forces took the city in June 1949.

Under the People's Republic it grew as a port and an industrial city, and after the reforms of the 1980s it became the home of Haier and Hisense, two of China's largest appliance and electronics makers. The port expanded across the bay, the eastern districts were rebuilt with high-rise offices around Fushan Bay, and the city hosted the sailing events of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The older German quarter, long neglected, has been progressively restored.

Qingdao's identity rests on the sea and on beer. The brewery founded under German rule is the best-known Chinese beer brand abroad, and locally beer is an everyday drink poured from barrels into bags rather than a special occasion; the August beer festival is the city's largest event. Seafood, the summer beach season and sailing shape the calendar in a way unusual for northern China.

The city sits within Shandong's Confucian and northern Mandarin culture, with a reputation for straight talking, generous hospitality and heavy toasting at dinner, yet its architecture and its history as a leased territory give it an outward-facing edge. The local dialect is a Jiaoliao Mandarin variety, noticeably different from the speech of inland Shandong and a source of local humour.

Higher education and marine science are part of the character too: the Ocean University of China and a cluster of national marine research institutes are based here, and the city has long been a summer retreat for writers and academics, among them Lao She, who lived and wrote in Qingdao in the 1930s. Church buildings from the German and Japanese periods remain in use, and the old villa quarters are protected heritage areas, filmed and photographed constantly for weddings and television.

The seven urban districts that make up the built-up area held about 7.2 million people at the 2020 census, running from Huangdao in the west through Shinan and Shibei to Laoshan and Jimo in the east. Growth has pushed the centre of gravity eastwards and across the bay; the old town has an older, poorer population than the tower districts around Fushan Bay.

The economy rests on the port, among the ten busiest in the world by cargo volume, on manufacturing — appliances, electronics, rubber and shipbuilding — and on beer, which is exported worldwide. Marine research, higher education and tourism add to it, and the western districts hold a large free trade and industrial zone. Wages and property prices are high for Shandong but well below Shanghai's.

Daily rhythms follow the coast. Residents swim from the city beaches from early summer, and older people swim year-round; markets sell the morning's catch; evenings in summer are spent outdoors at plastic tables with shellfish and barrel beer. Traffic is the common complaint, along with summer crowds from the rest of the country, and the long commutes created by a city shaped like a ribbon along the sea.

The kitchen here is a coastal branch of Lu cuisine, Shandong's classic school, which favours clear broths, braising and heavy use of scallion and garlic. Seafood dominates: clams — gala in the local pronunciation — stir-fried with chilli, sea snails, razor clams, squid grilled on skewers, mantis shrimp steamed in spring, and sea cucumber, the region's luxury ingredient, braised with scallion. Fish is often simply steamed or stewed with soybean paste.

Beer accompanies almost all of it. Unpasteurised draught is sold by weight from barrels at small shops and carried home in plastic bags, and restaurants along the street beside the brewery serve it with shellfish. Other staples are northern rather than coastal: jiaozi dumplings, often filled with mackerel or with pork and sea-urchin roe, steamed wheat buns, and Shandong jianbing, the thin grain pancake rolled around raw spring onion and bean paste.

Street food runs to grilled squid and lamb skewers, fried dough sticks with soy milk for breakfast, and seasonal fruit from the peninsula — peaches, cherries and the apples grown around Yantai and Laiyang. Markets such as Pichaiyuan in Shibei let customers choose raw shellfish and have it cooked at a nearby stall, a form of eating particular to the city, and sweetened fried sugar cakes and steamed cakes appear at the autumn festivals.