The City That Made a Festival of a Toy
Weifang has flown kites for centuries and has held an international kite festival every April since 1984; in 1988 it declared itself the kite capital.
Weifang.
Weifang is a prefecture-level city in the middle of the Shandong peninsula, facing Laizhou Bay to the north along 113 kilometres of coast. Older records call it Weizhou and Weixian, and its other name is Yuandu, the kite capital, because the headquarters of the International Kite Federation stand here. The prefecture covers 16,000 square kilometres, about a tenth of Shandong and second in size among the province's cities, and counted 9,386,705 residents at the 2020 census. In the Ming and Qing it was a famous handicraft town, summed up in a local count of two hundred furnaces, three thousand bronze smiths, nine thousand embroiderers and a hundred thousand looms. It is a national historical and cultural city.
Weifang
The Village That Printed the Gods
Yangjiabu has cut and printed New Year pictures since the end of the Ming, and is counted with Yangliuqing and Taohuawu among the three great print towns.
ReadPaper, Scissors and Ash
Gaomi makes two kinds of paper picture: the small paper-cut, a Jiaodong craft with a delicate local style, and the ash print, listed as national heritage in 2006.
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The Town That Was a Province
Qingzhou gave its name to one of the nine provinces of the Book of Documents, and six walled cities have stood on the same ground since the Western Han.
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The Statues Under the Ground
More than two hundred painted Buddhist statues were buried at Qingzhou and later dug up; the city museum, the only first-class museum in a county-level city, holds some of them.
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How Winter Became Possible
Shouguang lost its vegetable trade, built the country's largest wholesale market in 1984, and from 1989 used plastic greenhouses to give China fresh vegetables in winter.
ReadPlaces
The Weifang World Kite Museum
China's first museum devoted to kites, opened on 1 April 1989 in a building shaped after a dragon-head centipede kite, with more than a thousand kites.
Yangjiabu
A village in Hanting district, one of the three great woodblock New Year print towns of China, and still a place where the trade can be watched.
Gaomi
A county-level city of Weifang, the home town of Mo Yan, known for paper-cuts and for ash prints that are on the national heritage list.
Qingzhou
A county-level city west of Weifang whose name is one of the nine provinces of the Book of Documents, and whose old town sits on six successive walled cities.
The Longxing Temple hoard
More than two hundred painted Buddhist statues were buried at Qingzhou and later dug up; some are in a museum that is the only first-class one in a county-level city.
Shouguang
The county-level city that calls itself the home of vegetables, where a wholesale market and then plastic greenhouses changed what China eats in winter.
Photo credits and rights
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Weifang: the twin towers over People's Square.Ngguls / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
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Weifang: the World Kite Museum with its dragon roofline.Ngguls / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
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Qingzhou: the museum behind trees and a pond, its roof echoing the old town.Rolfmueller / CC BY-SA 3.0 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
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Qingzhou: the national heritage stele marking the Longxing Temple site.三猎 / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
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Shouguang: the city skyline across its lake.Dabao qian / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
