The Town That Was a Province

The name Qingzhou first appears in the Yu Gong chapter of the Book of Documents, in the line that between the sea and Mount Tai there is Qingzhou, and it was one of the nine provinces of antiquity. The Zhou Li says that the region due east is Qingzhou. East corresponds to the element of wood, and the colour of wood is qing, a green-blue, which is where the name comes from. From the second century BC to the seventh century it described a province-sized region covering much of north Shandong, and from the seventh century it was a prefecture with its seat in this town. The county-level city took the name in 1986, when Yidu county was abolished.

Six walled cities have stood on this ground since the Western Han, and their names are still used. The first was Guang county, set up in 204 BC; then Guanggu, built in 311 when Cao Yi abandoned the old county seat; then Dongyang, laid out after Liu Yu destroyed Southern Yan and razed Guanggu; then Nanyang, made when the southern outer wall was extended in 517; then the walled suburb outside the east gate; and last the Manchu garrison city of the Qing. Guanggu had been the capital of Southern Yan, the only place in Shandong to have served as a dynastic capital. The protected area is about ten square kilometres, of which 1.4 are open, mostly the Nanyang city.

Inside the walls the town is a set of streets and gardens. The East Gate street is the main axis and is now the folk-craft and shopping street of the scenic area. Ou Yuan is a Ming garden, the garden of a Ming prince and later the residence of the Qing grand secretary Feng Pu, with osmanthus bushes that have lived since the Ming, rockeries and strange stones. The Zhenjiao Mosque is Chinese and Arab in style at once and dates to 1302, which places it among the three best-known mosques of the Yuan dynasty. There is a memorial hall to Li Cheng, the landscape painter, and a Hui community of about twenty thousand people in twenty-five neighbourhoods.