Short answers, pulled from the story.
Shandong means "east of the mountain," referring to its location east of the Taihang Mountains. The name first came into use as a formal administrative term during the Jin dynasty. A common nickname is Qilu, after the ancient states of Qi and Lu.
Shandong is the birthplace of Confucius, who was born there in 551 B.C., and the city of Qufu became the center of Confucianism. His disciples Mencius, Zisi, Zengzi, and Yan Hui also came from the province. Each year thousands of people visit Shandong to study his culture.
Shandong is home to over 100 million people, making it the world's sixth-most populous subnational entity and China's second-most populous province. Its economy is China's third-largest provincial economy, with a GDP of about US$1.3 trillion in 2021, equivalent to the GDP of Mexico.
Germany took the Shandong peninsula in 1898, leasing Jiaozhou Bay and the port of Qingdao under threat of force and investing over 200 million marks in harbor facilities. Japan seized the German holdings during the First World War, and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles transferred them to Japan. Shandong reverted to Chinese control in 1922 after United States mediation at the Washington Naval Conference.
Shandong ranks first among China's provinces in producing cotton, wheat, garlic, gold, and diamonds, and it holds one of the biggest sapphire deposits in the world. Its Jiaodong region is the largest gold-producing area in China and the third-largest gold concentration zone in the world. The province also has the Shengli Oil Field in the Yellow River delta and is the largest agricultural exporter in China.
Mo Yan, born in Gaomi, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature and became the first Chinese national to receive it. Other notable figures from Shandong include actress Gong Li from Jinan, actor Huang Bo from Qingdao, and singer Peng Liyuan from Yuncheng.
During the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962, about six million people in Shandong starved to death. The province recovered over later decades, becoming the first in China to achieve full electrification of all households in 1996 and overtaking Guangdong in industrial output in 2004.