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.