After the balmy spring weather of Guangxi province in the south, Qingdao was cold. I only knew two things about this coastal city in the north-east of China, and they were its beer and its German colonial heritage, neither of which I had much hope for.
I was not a fan of the rather bland Tsingtao brand lager that used to be the only beer you could get in many parts of China. And having been disappointed by Shanghai’s ‘French’ Concession and the old ‘legation’ parts of Beijing, I didn't hold out much hope for Qingdao’s German old town. How wrong I was.
While now only a small corner of a city of 10 million people, Qingdao’s German quarter comprises a remarkably well-preserved and self-contained area of European colonial-era urban buildings. Like a distant cousin of the Hanseatic League Baltic cities, it was as if a little bit of Danzig or Königsberg had been replicated in the East China Sea. And all the more remarkable given that it was created in just a few years of German colonial occupation of Qingdao, from 1898 to 1914.
arrived in Qingdao by train in early April after an almost 2,000-kilometre train ride from Guilin. The ten-hour trip on a high-speed train had cost me 1,000 yuan and had taken me from the warm climate of southern China through central Chinese cities such as Quanzhou, Changsha, Wuhan, and Zhengzhou, to deposit me in chilly Qingdao at 7 pm in the evening. The taxi drivers outside the station looked on in scorn and then curiosity as I lugged my bike through the barrier, unpacked it from its bag, and unfolded it, until I was ready to pedal away without the need for their services.
My destination was the Observatory Hotel located on top of Observatory Hill (观象山, Guanxiang Shan) overlooking the port. It took me a while to find, but it was worth it.
The hotel was located in what was once the astrodome annex of the Qingdao Observatory. Its history was a testament to the turbulent changing control of the city during the early and mid-period of the 20th century. Originally built in solid granite by the German occupiers in 1905, the Qingdao Observatory was created to provide accurate weather and star observations for the Imperial German Navy using the port at the time. In less than a decade, control passed to the Japanese during the First World War. A decade later, they reluctantly ceded control of the Observatory to China’s new republican government.
The astrodome was added to the Observatory by Chinese astronomers in the 1930s, built to a French design. But again control was short-lived as the Japanese military occupied Qingdao in 1937 and the Imperial Japanese Navy took over management of the Observatory until their defeat in 1945. After four years back under control of the Kuomintang Chinese government, the Observatory was eventually taken over by the PLA Navy in 1949, who still maintain control of the building today.
While the Observatory is not open to the public, the astrodome was operated as a youth hostel until 2018. Again reflecting the changing trends of China and the move away from the budget backpacker tourist market, the building has recently been converted into a boutique hotel.
I found the hotel to have retained some aspects of its old-world architecture: wooden floors and art deco window frames. The new managers had renovated the place in an ‘Asian chic’ style that I would find was common across Chinese designer hotels: light, airy, IKEA-style furnishings with modern paintings, bookshelves and houseplants and a scattering of vaguely Eastern religious icons.
The young couple who ran the place were friendly and welcoming: I was the only foreign guest they had seen for some time and they practised their seldom-used English on me. They unlocked the door to a spiral staircase that led me up to the rooftop deck area, with its sweeping views over the city.
On my first day in Qingdao, I took my bike for a ride around the old town area. I’d expected to see a handful of preserved buildings from the colonial era, so I was surprised to see almost every house on the street down from my hotel was built in the traditional German style. Many had the classic hipped gable roof or a curved baroque facade, not unlike the Cape Dutch style seen in South Africa. Other streets had houses and apartments in a more generic Western style from the early 20th century and reminded me of the colonial-style architecture in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs.
Riding down Jiangsu Road, which had once been Bismarck Strasse, I was amazed to see the well-preserved Qingdao Christian (Protestant) Church amongst a row of opulent colonial-era houses and public buildings. Turning the corner, there were more mansions, and then the road opened out into a public square dominated by a large neo-classical government building that had once been the centre of Germany’s Qingdao concession administration. It looked far too grand for what was effectively a local council responsible for a population of less than 100,000 city dwellers. This European building was now home of the Qingdao People’s Consultative Committee. Around the corner was another government building that looked in style more like the town hall of a provincial German town— a modest Rathaus from a town in Munster. And yet now it had a Communist red star emblem above the gatehouse.
I cycled back uphill through the old town to see one of the main landmarks - the Catholic St Michael’s Cathedral. Situated in an open square, it looked very European and was the focus of many local tourists and couples using it as a backdrop for wedding photos. I parked my bike up down a nearby lane and popped into a café on the corner of what once would have been Friedrich Strasse, now like many Chinese cities, the main street was renamed Zhongshan Lu. Looking up the road towards the cathedral and squinting a bit to ignore the Chinese language signs, it could still have been a German town centre.
The people of Qingdao also looked different to their counterparts in Guilin. They were northern Chinese, Shandong natives, and had ruddy complexions to match the brisk offshore wind and cooler climate of these higher latitudes. To me, they also seemed a bit more reserved and composed compared to the brash and busy southern folk.
My tour continued down past the old German-built Hauptbahnhof - still in use as a railway station - and down along the shore. There was the pier where the German military landing forces had first come ashore from their warships in 1897. There were no sunbathers or swimmers lingering on the sands of Qingdao Bay in April, but there were some hardy keep-fit types doing weight lifting and other exercises on the beach.
I pedalled round to the east and bypassed the monolithic PLA Naval museum to enter a different world of ornate European beachside villas and gardens. This was Badaguan (八大关), where in just a few years of the early 20th century, the colonists had lived a lifestyle to match those of Cap Ferret and Catalina Island. Many of the mansions were hidden behind walls, but it was possible to see their elegant designs and quirky mish-mash of features from the wide tree-lined avenues. The large gardens were filled with neatly trimmed fir trees and blossoming plum branches, set amid landscaped gardens and lawns.
Who, I wondered, had the wealth and taste to build and enjoy living in such residences in those brief early years of the 20th century? Were they German citizens? And if so, what was their fate after the Japanese took over Qingdao? Did they stay on or have to return to the turmoil of Hitler’s Third Reich? In modern-day Qingdao, there was no information provided about the former residents of these villas, nor of their modern-day occupants.
Badaguan marked the boundary of old and new Qingdao. Beyond the mansions and gardens lay another beach that provided the foreground to a wholly different modern city of glass and concrete skyscrapers, highway bridges, and shopping malls. I cycled into the downtown area of this new city and used my map app to locate a bakery. Ironically, despite its German heritage, European-style bread had not been available anywhere in the old town section of Qingdao. I was however, able to find schwarzbrot, pretzels, fresh baguettes, ciabatta, and Galette des Rois for sale among the trendy boulangeries and coffee shops of Zhangzhou Erlu ( 漳州二路).
Foodwise, Qingdao was my first taste of a minor culinary culture shock that I was to experience in northern China. Being married to a girl from Guangxi, I was accustomed to a southern Chinese rice-based diet of spicy dishes that included a wide variety of fresh vegetables, herbs and sauces. When it came to lunchtime in Shandong, I could find no rice dishes. Everything seemed to be based around noodles, steamed bread, and large quantities of meat. And in Qingdao in particular, the emphasis was on seafood and beer. At lunchtime, I settled for simple beef noodles, without the usual ‘lajiao’ chilli flavour that I was used to. But for subsequent evening meals, I could not get around my perception of noodles being only a lunch item.
With its German heritage, I fancifully imagined that Qingdao might have retained some elements of European cuisine. In Vietnam the locals had taken the baguettes and coffee introduced by the French colonial occupiers and transformed them into Banh Mi and Phin cà phê. Might not the Shandongers have kept the German bratwurst sausage as part of their diet? Or developed a taste for pretzels and apple strudel? The only German legacy seemed to be the lager beer.
In the evening, I took my bike down to the imposing buildings of the Tsingtao Brewery. I had heard there was a nearby beer street where I could enjoy some local dishes washed down with freshly brewed local ale. I was right in one respect, but the food was almost all seafood, which I’m not too fond of. The street opposite the brewery was lined with restaurants, all advertising their fresh beers on tap, combined with various combinations of seafood meal deals. There were prawns, lobster, crab, locally caught fish and squid … but little else to suit my taste.
And I was disadvantaged as a solo traveller, because the restaurants were geared up for group dining: they offered a smorgasbord range of dishes and hotpot or barbecue cooking at the table. All a bit much for me as a solitary customer. To find something suitable I had to walk a couple of kilometres down the road to find the night markets, where I ended up opting for an Indian curry.
Pedalling back up the hill to my hotel, I finished the day with a Kronenbourg 1664 beer from the local minimart, having missed out on trying the famous local brand fresh from the brewery. So no Tsingtao in Qingdao, but a French brand beer made in China under licence from the Danish-owned Carlsberg.
Nevertheless, I was enjoying my time in Qingdao and decided to linger in the city for an extra day before setting out towards the start point of my Yellow River cycling trip.
The next morning I took the bike out for another ride around the streets of the old German town. At the bottom of Observatory Hill I went past another church and followed a street of German-style houses to the base of a similar-looking hill about one kilometre away, which from a distance had what looked like a retro-futuristic space station domes on the summit. This was Signal Hill (信号山, Xinhao Shan: formerly Diedrichsberg), which as its name suggested had been the location of the old signal tower used for communicating with shipping in the port.
The streets such as Qidong Lu (齐东路) leading up to the top were lined with European colonial houses and apartments that reminded me of the Montmartre area of Paris. One of the space station domes in the park on top of Signal Hill housed a café that was both cosy and offered panoramic views of the city and its harbour, as well as more distant landmarks such as Jiazhou Bay (胶州湾) to the southwest and the hills of Laoshan (崂山, where Tsingtao beer spring water is sourced) to the north-east.
More immediately in view, just below the hill was the roof of a grand and gaudy European-style building that I identified as the residence of the former German governor of Qingdao. After finishing my coffee I went down to have a look. It was an extravagant three-storey yellow mansion built in an extraordinary turn-of-the-century German Art Nouveau style that my guidebook told me was Jugendstil.
The granite and wood structure had been designed by leading German architect Werner Lazarowicz and built at a staggering cost of 850,000 marks. Legend says the Kaiser was furious about the huge expense of the building and recalled governor Admiral Oskar von Truppel to Germany to dismiss him. However this appears to be just hearsay.
As with many of Qingdao’s colonial-era buildings, the Governor’s Residence was to go through a rapid series of ownership changes and functions in the next few decades. It was taken over first by the Japanese in WW1, became an official guesthouse and Qingdao mayor’s residence in the interwar period, and was again a Japanese military governor’s residence in WW2 before becoming a Chinese government state guesthouse housing visiting dignitaries including Mao and Ho Chi Minh. It is now officially a museum and is open to the public, with the interiors reminiscent of some UK stately homes.
After a pleasant hour swanning around the swanky residence and its peaceful gardens, I took off down the hill to explore that last bit of old German Qingdao. I walked my bike down Longshan Road (龙山路) to the junction with Longkou Road (龙口路) - the view at the crossroads was quintessentially middle European: the clocktower and spire of the church on the hill above, with the yellow-painted half-timbered frontages of houses and their red tile roofs in the foreground around the square with its old cinema building and a pedestrian crossing.
Continuing down Longkou Road, the colonial houses and apartments again reminded me of the similar tree-lined streets in Sydney’s posh Bellevue Hill beachside suburb.
Turning up the narrow Longjiang Road (龙江路) was more reminiscent of an Old German town, something not lost on the many local tourists snapping photos of the facades now converted into cafés and craft shops.
Down a side street was the former residence of writer Lao She. It was an unremarkable building, but the European milieu was perhaps not an unusual location for a man who had spent some of his formative years in London, where he based several of his early works on those of Charles Dickens. Lao She had been a lecturer at the nearby Shandong University, whose campus was now the Institute of Oceanography. Running alongside it, University Avenue was another tree-lined road whose residences and shopfronts would not look out of place in western university suburbs.
Back at the hotel on Observatory Hill, I took a walk around the park area that overlooked the city. In the mornings, it was the haunt of groups of retired residents who came here to do tai chi or practice their dance moves. At dusk, however, there were just a handful of younger people here to savour a few moments of the sunset.
I said hello to one guy standing nearby and told him I was impressed with the preservation of the old town of Qingdao.
He responded: “The buildings are well looked after because Shandong people appreciate classic old things - we like to preserve historical and cultural items. Did you not see the many antique and retro shops selling old objects?”
I asked him what it was like to grow up in a city with such a European heritage, and whether locals felt differently to people from other Chinese cities. He looked at me as if I’d asked a stupid question.
“The foreign influence in Qingdao was brief, just a few years in the last century, and the government does not want to promote foreign influence in China,” he replied.
“I never saw any foreigners when I was growing up except some Russians. That’s why I cannot speak English to you, I never had a chance to practice,” he added.
He asked me what I was doing in China, and I told him about my plans to cycle along the Yellow River.
“Shandong is the province where Chinese history and culture are strong - we have scholars like Confucius, and we have thousands of years of history of Buddhism and Taoism. You should visit the Confucius Mansion in Qufu,” he told me.
This place was already on my itinerary, I told him. But first I had to see one last remaining bit of recent colonial history in this part of the world - the former British naval base at Weihaiwei.
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