German leasehold port that brewed Tsingtao and tech giants
Qingdao—once Tsingtao—is a Shandong prefecture-level seaport on the Yellow Sea, a naval base, finance node, and Belt and Road hinge. Ceded to Germany in 1897 as East Asia Squadron harbor, it now hosts Haier and Hisense plus China's second-largest brewery under German-style roofs.
People have lived around Jiaozhou Bay for 6,000 years; the Dongyi left Dawenkou and Longshan remains, and in the Eastern Zhou the town of Jimo grew to be Shandong's second largest. Under the Qing the area was Jiao'ao, and in 1891 the court began fortifying it against naval attack. German officers surveyed the bay in May 1897, and after the Juye Incident that November Germany forced a lease, running the 552-square-kilometre Kiautschou concession from 1898 to 1914.
The navy, not the colonial office, governed it, basing the East Asia Squadron there. Engineers turned a poor fishing village into a planned town with broad streets, electricity, sewers and clean piped water, rare in Asia then, and missions and the imperial treasury funded schools that gave it China's highest enrolment per head. A brewery founded in 1903 as Germania became Tsingtao, now the country's second largest.
In 1914 Japan, allied with Britain, besieged and took the city, and China's protests changed nothing. Chinese rule returned in December 1922, though Japan kept economic control of the railway, and in July 1929 the Republic made it a directly governed municipality with beach villas and banks rising in the 1930s. Japan returned in 1938, and after 1945 the US Navy's Western Pacific Fleet was headquartered there until late 1948. Communist forces entered on 2 June 1949.
The 2020 census counted about 7.2 million people in seven urban districts, fifteenth in China, and the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge links the centre with Huangdao. Haier and Hisense are based here, the city hosted the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in 2018, and the Nature Index places it among the top 35 cities for research, home to the Ocean University of China.
Source: Qingdao
