In 1891 the Qing court decided to fortify Jiao'ao and ordered a wooden pier for the naval harbour; that jetty is the ancestor of the structure that now runs 440 metres into the water off Zhongshan Road on the southern shore. A municipal account of the city dates its first artificial wharf, today's Zhanqiao, to 1892 and the beginning of its bridge building to a front-sea pier of 1893. The pier was a working jetty before it was a promenade. Behind it the city grew in the German years: Zhongshan Road was built in 1897 under its German name, Friedrich Straße, and the quarter around the front bay filled with narrow streets and colonial houses of German, Russian and Japanese periods, among them the walled courtyard compounds called liyuan, built in Chinese style during the first Japanese occupation.
From the journal
The Pier That Opened the Harbour
Qingdao's first wharf is 440 metres of timber jetty with a pavilion at its end, and the octagonal image of that pavilion is the trademark drawn on a beer bottle.
In the same city · Qingdao ↗A Jetty for Warships
The Pavilion and the Label
In 1930 an octagonal pavilion was put up at the seaward end of the pier. Huilan Pavilion, loosely translated as the Tower That Billows Back and Forth, is the image on the trademark of Tsingtao Brewery, whose first beer had been served three years earlier. A little way offshore lies Little Qingdao, and the China Navy Museum stands in the vicinity of the pier. In the evening the whole front bay is lit up, with spotlights on the older buildings and several neon signs along the coast. It is one of the few places in the city where the harbour the pier was built for still reads as a harbour.
