A Straight Line of Sand, and the Boats That Use It
Ninety-nine kilometres of straight sand and gravel, a fishing coast, the ports of Rizhao and Lanshan, and a city built around 2,310 hours of sunshine a year.
Rizhao is a prefecture-level city on the Yellow Sea coast in southeastern Shandong, and its name means the place where the first light of the sun arrives. It keeps that claim literally: the city averages 2,310 hours of bright sunshine a year, and since the early 1990s it has required solar water heaters in every new building. It covers 5,359 square kilometres with two urban districts and two counties, and the 2020 census counted 2,968,365 residents, 61 per cent of them living in towns. The economy rests on the water: the Port of Rizhao, a fishing industry of more than eighty kinds of economic fish, and a coast that also carries the country's Olympic water park.
Ninety-nine kilometres of straight sand and gravel, a fishing coast, the ports of Rizhao and Lanshan, and a city built around 2,310 hours of sunshine a year.
Ninety-nine kilometres of straight sand and gravel on the Yellow Sea, with fishing grounds behind it and the ports of Rizhao and Lanshan in front of it.
The fishing port at the easternmost tip of the Shandong peninsula, facing Korea across the water, with the largest fishing market and shipbuilding base in northern China.