Shandong, China — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Shandong known for?

Shandong is the birthplace of Confucius, and the town of Qufu still holds the temple, cemetery, and family mansion raised in his name. Mount Tai rises just south of the capital, the most revered of China's five sacred peaks. The province gives its name to a whole cuisine.

Along the coast sit Qingdao, the beer port the Germans built, and Yantai, while inland the Yellow River finishes its long run to the Bohai Sea.

Where is Shandong?

Shandong sits on the eastern edge of the North China Plain, where the Yellow River finishes its journey to the sea. The name means "east of the mountains," a reference to the Taihang range that walls the province off from the interior. Much of the west, north, and south is flat, fertile plain, part of the wider North China Plain that feeds much of the country.

The land is not all level, though. A belt of hills runs through the centre, crowned by Mount Tai south of the capital at Jinan. The east is different again.

There the province throws out the Shandong Peninsula, a broad tongue of hilly land that pushes into the water and splits one sea from another. The Bohai Sea lies to its north, the Yellow Sea to its south and east, and the peninsula divides the two. Qingdao stands on the southern shore, Yantai and Weihai on the northern one.

The Yellow River enters Shandong from the southwest, loops northeast across the plain, and empties into the Bohai Sea near the province's northern edge. Hebei borders it to the northwest, Henan to the west, and Jiangsu to the south.

What is Shandong like?

Shandong is often called Qilu, after the two ancient states of Qi and Lu that once split the land between them. That old pairing still marks the province. Lu, in the southwest, was the small state where Confucius was born, and its thinking outlasted the armies of its larger neighbour.

Qufu keeps that inheritance alive, with the Temple of Confucius at its heart and the descendants of the Kong family beside it. The sage's teaching spread from this corner of China across the whole of East Asia. Faith runs through the province as much as philosophy does.

Mount Tai has drawn worshippers and emperors up its stone stairways for longer than almost any other holy place on earth, the foremost of China's five sacred mountains. Food is its own tradition here. Shandong cuisine, or Lu cuisine, is one of the great regional schools of Chinese cooking, built on seafood from the two seas, wheat from the plain, and a taste for briny, savoury flavours.

Qingdao adds a stranger legacy, the brewery the Germans left behind, whose beer carries the city's name far beyond the coast. The spoken language is Mandarin, in the blunt northern accent of the plain.

What is the history of Shandong?

Two rival states shared this ground in the Spring and Autumn period, powerful Qi in the northeast and smaller Lu in the southwest. Confucius was born in Lu in 551 BC, and taught in Qufu until his death in 479 BC. His ideas outlasted every dynasty.

They would shape Chinese thought for the next two thousand years, and spread far past the province. Later rulers dug the Grand Canal through the western plain, tying Shandong into the great north-south trade route, and in the late nineteenth century Germany seized Qingdao and built the port, the railway, and the brewery that still define it.

What is the climate of Shandong?

Shandong has a warm temperate monsoon climate, with hot, wet summers and cold, dry winters. Rain falls heavily in July and August. Spring and autumn are short but pleasant, and the stretch from May to October is the easy time to travel.

The coast at Qingdao runs milder and more humid than the open plain inland, cooled by the Yellow Sea, while Jinan and the interior swing harder between the seasons.

How do you get to Shandong?

Air is the usual way. Most visitors fly into Qingdao on the coast or the capital at Jinan, both served by international airports with links across China and the rest of East Asia. High-speed rail is the other route, linking Jinan and Qingdao to Beijing and Shanghai in a few hours.

Qingdao is also a working seaport. Inside the province, fast trains and expressways connect the coast, the capital, and the pilgrim towns of Qufu and Tai'an below Mount Tai.