Shandong

• 1. East Of The Mountain

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  Shandong is a coastal province in East China, and its name means "east of the mountain." The mountain in question is the Taihang range, and the title first became a formal administrative name during the Jin dynasty. Its mirror image to the west is Shanxi, "west of the mountains."

  A second name, Qilu, carries more of the province's soul. It comes from two states that occupied this region during the Spring and Autumn period: Qi and Lu. Qi was the political heavyweight. Lu was small and weak, yet it produced Confucius, and its cultural shadow eventually grew longer than Qi's. The province still abbreviates itself after Lu.

  This is a place that helped shape Chinese civilization itself. Mount Tai here is the most revered mountain of Taoism. The city of Qufu was the birthplace of Confucius and became the center of Confucianism. More than 100 million people now live here, making Shandong the world's sixth-most populous subnational entity. How did a stretch of the North China Plain become a cradle of religion, a battleground for foreign empires, and the home of a Nobel laureate? The chapters ahead follow the threads of faith, conquest, harvest, and fame that run through this single province.

• 2. Cradle Of Three Faiths

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  Confucius was born in Shandong in the year 551 B.C., and the province has never stopped circling back to him. His teachings survive in the Lunyu, or Analects, and he is credited with helping edit The Five Classics, among them the Classic of Poetry and the Spring and Autumn Annals. His disciples Mencius, Zisi, Zengzi, and Yan Hui also came from this soil. Each year thousands of people travel to Shandong to study his culture.

  Mount Tai gave Taoism one of the longest records of continuous religious worship anywhere in the world. During the Han and Tang dynasties, Taoist priests performed ceremonies on the mountain to communicate with the heavens and seek peace and prosperity. The Dai Temple at the mountain's foot was built during the Song dynasty. The coast carries its own Taoist lore, tied to the master Qiu Chuji and the legend of the Eight Immortals.

  Buddhism left a buried surprise. In 1996, over two hundred buried Buddhist statues were discovered at Qingzhou and hailed as a major archaeological find. They are thought to have been hidden because of Emperor Huizong's repression of Buddhism, since he favored Taoism. Centuries earlier, in 412 AD, the monk Faxian landed at Laoshan on the peninsula's southern edge. He went on to Qingzhou to edit and translate the scriptures he had carried back from Pakistan and India.

• 3. Empires Carve The Coast

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  After the defeat in the First Opium War, China grew more exposed to Western influence, and a coastal province like Shandong felt it sharply. The Qing court opened Cheefoo as a trade port, and consulates, missionaries, Christian schools, and factories followed. In the 1880s the province became the logistics and training base of the Beiyang Fleet, with Weihaiwei as its headquarters.

  The killing of two German Catholic missionaries in Juye triggered the Juye Incident, and the Qing government was forced to cede Qingdao to the German Empire. Germany took the peninsula in 1898, leasing Jiaozhou Bay under threat of force. Development was a high priority: over 200 million marks went into world-class harbor facilities, including berths, heavy machinery, rail yards, and a floating dry dock. In 1898 Weihaiwei was handed to Britain instead, under pressure from the Russian Empire.

  The First World War let Japan seize the German holdings, and the 1919 Treaty of Versailles gave them to Japan rather than returning them to China. The fury over this outcome, known as the Shandong Problem, fueled the student protests of the May Fourth Movement. Shandong finally reverted to Chinese control in 1922 after United States mediation at the Washington Naval Conference. Weihai followed in 1930. The pressure also pushed people outward: roughly 200 thousand Chinese laborers once worked in the Russian Far East, 95 percent of them from Shandong.

• 4. Warlords And War

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  In April 1925 the Fengtian clique installed Zhang Zongchang, nicknamed the "Dogmeat General," as military governor of Shandong. Time dubbed him China's "basest warlord." He held the province until 1928, when the Northern Expedition swept him out. His successor Han Fuju later ousted the warlord Liu Zhennian, the "King of Shandong East," and unified the province under one rule.

  Han Fuju's command collapsed when Japan invaded in 1937. Put in charge of defending the lower Yellow River valley, he abandoned his base, and about 600,000 ethnic Chinese civilians fled Jinan as Japanese troops crossed the river. Only the elderly, too old to leave, remained. He was executed shortly afterward for disobeying orders.

  The Chinese Civil War turned the province red. In May 1947, during the Menglianggu Campaign in the Yimeng Mountains, the Communist East China Field Army annihilated the Nationalist 74th Corps, widely considered the most elite unit of the National Revolutionary Army. In 1948 Communist forces took Weixian, the "fortress of central Shandong." On the 2nd of June 1949 the People's Liberation Army entered Qingdao, and on the 12th of August the Third Field Army won the Changshan Islands Campaign, completing the conquest of the province.

• 5. The Long Climb

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  Under the new Communist government, parts of western Shandong were briefly carved off into the short-lived Pingyuan Province, and the borders settled close to what they are today. Then came catastrophe. During the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962, about six million people in Shandong starved to death. On the 25th of August 1966 the "Qingdao Incident" between cadres, workers, and students marked the start of the Cultural Revolution in the province.

  The Reform and Opening Up changed the trajectory. By 1986, the total output value of township and village enterprises across the province surpassed that of agriculture for the first time. In 1996, Shandong became the first province in China to achieve full electrification of all households. In 1999, Zhanhua County, the last officially designated impoverished county, was declared poverty-free. In 2004, Shandong overtook Guangdong in industrial output and profits to become China's top province in industrial strength.

  The world started arriving for sport and diplomacy. In August and September 2008, Qingdao hosted the sailing competitions of the 29th Summer Olympic Games and the 13th Summer Paralympic Games. In 2009, Jinan hosted the 11th National Games. On the 16th of July 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited China, and both sides agreed to back a Sino-German Ecopark within the Qingdao development zone. By 2020 the Shandong Peninsula urban agglomeration was expected to exceed 103 million people.

• 6. What The Land Gives

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  Shandong ranks first among China's provinces in producing cotton, wheat, and garlic, as well as gold and diamonds, and it holds one of the biggest sapphire deposits in the world. Its Shengli Oil Field, the "Victory Oilfield," sits in the Dongying area of the Yellow River delta. The province also draws bromine from underground wells and salt from seawater, and it is the largest agricultural exporter in China.

  Gold makes the Jiaodong region exceptional. It is the largest gold-producing area in China and the third-largest gold concentration zone in the world. Across the province, 128 types of minerals have been found, accounting for 78 percent of all known mineral types in China. Native sulfur reserves here exceed 90 percent of the national total, and gypsum reaches about 70 percent.

  The fields and waters are just as productive. Shouguang is known as the birthplace of modern solar-heated greenhouses in China and has been named the "Hometown of Vegetables in China" by the State Council. Its vegetables reach over 200 cities and are exported to Japan, South Korea, and Russia. In 2014, the province's aquatic product output topped 9 million tons. The fossil record runs deep too. In 2008, about 7,600 dinosaur bones from Zhuchengtyrannus and other genera were found near Zhucheng, likely the largest such collection ever discovered at one location.

• 7. Tsingtao And Beyond

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  Tsingtao Beer, Haier, and Hisense all call Qingdao home, three of China's best-known brand names clustered in one coastal city. The richest part of the province is the Shandong Peninsula, and its economic weight has lifted modern cities at Qingdao, Weihai, and Yantai. Shandong's 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.

  Wine grows in the second-largest industry in the province, ranking just behind agriculture. The region around Yantai holds more than 140 wineries, concentrated in the Nanwang Grape Valley and along the Yan-Peng Sightseeing Highway. It produces more than 40 percent of China's grape wine, working varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Chardonnay.

  Research power has followed the money. Shandong has 153 higher education institutions, second in East China after Jiangsu. The Nature Index ranked two of its cities in the global top 35 for scientific research output, Jinan at 27 and Qingdao at 31. Yet the energy that drives all this carries a cost: despite its oil fields, the province ranks as the largest consumer of fossil fuels in all of China.

• 8. Sons And Daughters Of Lu

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  Mo Yan, a native of Gaomi, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature for combining hallucinatory realism with folk tales, history, and contemporary society. He became the first Chinese national to receive the honor. He stands at the end of a literary lineage that runs through Li Qingzhao and Xin Qiji of the Song and Yuan periods and the novelists Luo Guanzhong and Pu Songling.

  Gong Li, born in Jinan, has won the Best Actress Award at the 49th Venice International Film Festival and the Hong Kong Film Award for Best Actress at the 26th edition. Huang Bo, from Qingdao, won the Golden Horse Award for Best Actor in 2009 and 2017 for Cow and The Conformist, and in 2016 he signed with Sony Music Entertainment as a musician. The singer Peng Liyuan, from Yuncheng, was the first person in mainland China to earn a master's degree in ethnic vocal music.

  Shandong cuisine is one of the eight great traditions of Chinese cuisine, known for corn-based bread, fresh seafood, hearty soups, and bold savory flavors. It splits into inland, seafood-oriented Jiaodong, and the elaborate Confucius's Family branch built for imperial feasts. Its reach extends north: during the Ming and Qing dynasties, imperial chefs in the capital mostly came from Shandong, and their influence still shapes Beijing cuisine's braising, roasting, and deep-frying. The same outward pull defines the aircraft carrier Shandong, commissioned on the 17th of December 2019, carrying the province's name onto the open sea.