Jining
Temple of Confucius, Qufu
The largest and most renowned temple of Confucius in East Asia, and since 1994 one of the three parts of the Qufu World Heritage site.
A province read from its mountain to its sea
Shandong.
The mountain, the classics and the coast
Shandong is a province of edges. Mount Tai rises in the middle of it, the Yellow River makes new land in the north and the sea takes the coast away again. Between them sit the old capitals of the plain, where Confucius taught and his family kept the rites for two thousand years, the canal towns of the west, and a southern belt of workshops that make kites, New Year prints and greenhouses for winter.
Mount Tai
Mount Tai is the one place in the province that everything else answers to: emperors climbed it, pilgrims left steles on it, and the poems written there gave the province its name in the outside world. Start on the mountain, then move outward to the plain and the sea.
Explore this placeBegin with the classics
Three places open onto the three landscapes of Shandong.
Dongying
Yellow River Delta
The fan of new land the Yellow River is still pushing into the Bohai Sea, and the wetland that keeps arriving at an oilfield's expense.
Weifang
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.
Look a little closer
Follow stories of books on bamboo, bricks for a capital and the winter vegetables a greenhouse made possible.
From the journal
The Text That Came Up on Bamboo
A Han tomb opened at Yinqueshan in 1972 gave up the Sun Tzu's Art of War on bamboo slips, and the writing is still in the province it came from.
From the journal
The Bricks That Went to the Capital
Linqing sat where the Wei River joined the Grand Canal, and its kilns made the tiles that roofed the Forbidden City and faced the Great Wall.
From the journal
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.
Keep exploring
Choose a city: start with its highlights or continue reading in the full article collection.
Liaocheng
A prefecture-level city in western Shandong, once Dongchang Prefecture, where the Grand Canal crosses the Yellow River and six canal sites are on the World Heritage list.
All articlesHeze
The westernmost prefecture-level city in Shandong, called the Peony Capital of China and known for centuries as Caozhou.
All articlesJining
A prefecture-level city in southwestern Shandong that administers both Qufu and Zoucheng, the towns where the Confucian and the Mencian sites stand.
All articlesZaozhuang
The smallest prefecture-level city in Shandong, with a canal town and its battlefields in the south and a line of forest hills in the north.
All articlesQingdao
The port on the south coast of the Shandong Peninsula was a German leased territory from 1898 to 1914, and still carries the streets, villas and lager of that period.
All articlesYantai
The fishing port on the Bohai Strait that foreign maps long called Chefoo, with Penglai's cliffs and the island chain of the strait beyond it.
All articlesWeihai
The harbour at the eastern tip of the peninsula, guarded by a Royal Navy base on an island for thirty-two years and returned to China in 1930.
All articlesJinan
Shandong's capital on the Yellow River plain, a city of springs that has taken its name from the Ji river for two thousand years.
All articlesTai'an
The city at the southern foot of Mount Tai, whose name means peace under heaven and whose tallest peak is the highest in Shandong.
All articlesZibo
The industrial city built around the ruins of Qi's capital, and one of the places China calls its ceramic capital.
All articlesWeifang
The city that calls itself the world's kite capital, and one of China's great handicraft towns, with a 113-kilometre coast on Laizhou Bay.
All articlesDongying
A prefecture-level city on the Bohai coast that grew up around an oilfield, built on the youngest ground in Shandong.
All articlesBinzhou
The salt and oil city on the south-west shore of Bohai Bay, where the ground falls from the Zouping hills in the south to tidal flat in the north.
All articlesDezhou
The gate city where the Grand Canal crosses the Yellow River plain, and the home of the braised chicken that travelled on the railway.
All articlesLinyi
Shandong's largest prefecture-level city by area and by population, standing where the Yimeng hills give way to the plain and three rivers run down to the sea.
All articlesRizhao
A Yellow Sea city whose name means the place where the first light of the sun arrives, with a working port, a fishing coast and 2,310 hours of sunshine a year.
All articlesPhoto credits and rights
-
Qufu: the Wanren Gongqiang gate of the old city wall.brett Vachon from Montreal, canada / CC BY 2.0 · CC BY 2.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
-
The Yellow River delta: its channels seen from the air.NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland. / Public domain · Public domain Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗
-
Weifang: the World Kite Museum with its dragon roofline.Ngguls / CC BY-SA 4.0 · CC BY-SA 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗