How Winter Became Possible

Shouguang has been a farming place for a very long time. It sits on an alluvial plain drained by the Mihe river, in one of the first parts of China where grain was cultivated, with Dawenkou and Beixin culture sites and a Dongyi settlement from around 3000 BC. In the Han dynasty it was a county and already one of the largest grain bases in China and a salt trading centre. In the sixth century Jia Sixie was born here and wrote the Qimin Yaoshu, the earliest book on agriculture in China. Under the Ming and Qing the county belonged to Qingzhou prefecture, and the vegetables grown here were already well regarded.

Then the trade was lost. After the establishment of central planning the city lost its standing as a vegetable producer, and it was a wholesale market that brought it back. In 1984 the city government built a vegetable wholesale market and improved the transport of produce, and the market grew into China's largest vegetable trading centre. In 1989 farmers started using plastic greenhouses and began to focus on higher quality produce. The greenhouse is the change that matters: it moves the season, and a county that could sell fresh vegetables in January had something that no other county had.

The results were measured. In 2000 Shouguang hosted the World Vegetables Expo, and between 2000 and 2011 the annual growth rate of the local agricultural industry was 11.12 per cent. Around the growing came the industries that follow it: packaging, food processing and fertilizer, and in 2011 the city was the largest producer of glossy and coated paper in China. Along the coast there are fisheries, aquaculture and salt works. The vegetable expo became one of the festivals, with the kite festival, through which the city opened itself to the outside from the 1980s, and Shouguang became a county-level city in 1993.