Qingdao Old Town and Beer Street

German-era old town at the heart of Qingdao. The Beer Street (Dengzhou Road) is the working night-time food strip.

Qingdao's old town occupies the southern tip of the Shandong peninsula city, clustering around Zhongshan Road and the hillside streets behind the harbour. The city was a German colonial concession from 1898 to 1914 — seized under the pretext of a missionary murder incident two years after the Triple Intervention that denied Japan its post-Sino-Japanese-War territorial gains — and developed rapidly as a planned port city with an orderly grid of colonial architecture. The German colonial tenure lasted only 16 years, ending with Japanese occupation in the First World War, but the built environment it created has survived with unusual completeness.

The architectural inventory in the old town includes St Michael's Cathedral (Tianzhujiaotang, completed 1934 in a German Romanesque style with twin spires), the former German Governor's Mansion (Yingshibin Guan, an Italianate villa now operating as the Qingdao Welcoming Guests Hotel), a Lutheran church, a former colonial administrative building now housing a museum, and several hundred residential buildings in the vaguely Germanic style of late 19th-century European residential architecture. The red-tiled rooftops that characterise the Qingdao skyline — visible most coherently from the Xinhao Hill viewing platform — come directly from this construction period. The streets are hilly and the walking circuit through the densest old-town blocks takes two to three hours.

Dengzhou Road, a few blocks north of the main old town area, is Beer Street (Pijiu Jie) — the functional night-time food and drinking strip rather than a heritage attraction. Tsingtao Brewery, founded here by German investors in 1903 and continuous ever since, produces the beer sold in plastic bags at the open-air restaurants and street stalls. The peak evening hours from 6pm to 11pm in summer bring a street party atmosphere that gives the area a different character from the quiet colonial architecture a short walk away.

For travel planning, the old town is reached on Metro Line 3 to Qingdao Station, and the Xinhao Hill viewing platform mentioned above is the vantage point for the red-tiled roofline view. Zhongshan Road, around which the old town clusters, runs down to Zhanqiao Pier on the sea.

Other Qingdao attractions covered on this site sit close by. Zhanqiao Pier extends 440 metres into the Yellow Sea off Zhongshan Road, and the octagonal Huilan Pavilion at its end appears as the logo of Tsingtao Brewery. Badaguan (八大关, 'the eight great passes') is a historical villa district near the coast: its streets are named after passes, each street is lined with a single species of tree, and the houses are built in a variety of European styles. Further east at Fushan Bay, the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre (known in English as the Qingdao International Sailing Centre) hosted the Olympic and Paralympic sailing competitions in 2008 and is now a public marina and leisure park. Each has its own page in the list of other attractions in Qingdao below.