The Kiln Town Under the Ridge

Boshan lies 42 kilometres south of the centre of Zibo, in the mountains rather than on the plain, and that single fact shaped the town. In the early twentieth century it was the administrative capital of the district, but the rail line to Zibo was on the main corridor while the line to Boshan was only a spur, so Zibo took over as the commercial and administrative centre and Boshan became a smaller place beside it. What it became was an industrial town: ceramics, industrial pumps, vacuum pumps, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and it advertises itself as the Pump Capital of China. The pumps are a modern industry; the pottery is older, and it is the reason the town's name belongs next to Zibo's reputation as one of China's ceramic centres.

The mountain above Boshan is Yuan Shan, and on its summit is Yuan Shan National Park, with a reconstructed section of the wall of the state of Qi. Near the wall is a field of strangely shaped limestone stones that used to be part of the sea floor, which is also why a Daoist temple stands on the mountain and still stands there today. A large statue of Jiang Ziya, the old minister whom Zhou King Wu enfeoffed to build Qi, has been put up at the north gate of the park. It is an unusual thing to find in a working industrial town: a hilltop that puts a piece of the Warring States back together while the pump factories run below. The town also keeps visible traces of the period when eastern Shandong was a German protectorate — a railway station that looks Bavarian, and a Siemens plant that sold its Boshan factory in 2005.

Boshan cooking is different from most of China in one immediate way: the food here is not hot and peppery. People lean towards sour or salty dishes, and some of the local cooking uses a good deal of white pepper, which is the Chinese stand-in for black pepper. The commonest restaurants are hot pot places, and there are many seafood restaurants, but pickled vegetable fish soup is the local favourite: fish and pickled Chinese cabbage stewed together with other vegetables thrown in. In summer the mountains fill with small open-air restaurants along the streams. People hike up, follow the water, and eat at stone tables under gazebos — range chickens, fish, and sometimes locusts or scorpions from the forest. It is the kind of eating that depends on where the town is rather than on what the town makes.