City guide · Shandong
A provincial capital with 700 springs under the pavement — people still queue at the spouts to fill their kettles.
Reviewed by our Beijing team Updated 2026-10-10
The short version
City guide
Photographs from the coast, and what other travellers wrote afterwards.
In the middle of a busy modern city, Daming Lake, Baotu Spring, Thousand Buddha Spring, Black Tiger Spring, Pipa Spring and Pearl Spring sit like bright beads strung through old Jinan — and they make it perfect. I once said that having seen Water Margin you never want to read its sequels; I say now that having seen Jinan's springs you never want to see another spring.
A traveller's note, 'No Springs After Jinan'
I always thought well of Shandong people, and after Jinan I thought better of them: warm, ready to help, taxi drivers who do not cheat you, honest shopkeepers, platefuls of food — everything I imagined northerners to be. But if you think Shandong people are not sharp, you are very wrong indeed.
A traveller's note, 'Jinan: First Look at the North'
Jinan has a trick no other Chinese capital has: the city is built on top of its own drinking water. Some 700 springs rise inside the built-up area, and in the old quarter they still surface in courtyards and lanes. You will see people crouched at a roadside spout filling jugs, not for the tourists but for the kettle.
The geography explains it. Jinan sits with Mount Tai to the south and the Yellow River to the north; rain and snowmelt soak down through limestone, run north beneath the plain, and are forced back up where the rock meets impermeable layers — right where the city stands. Hence the four great spring groups of Baotu, Black Tiger, Pearl and Five-Dragon, 136 springs inside 2.6 square kilometres, and a thousand-year-old moat that runs on spring water.
For all that water, Jinan is a low-key capital. It was a walled city for more than two thousand years, and in the twentieth century it became the setting for two of the best-loved pieces of Chinese writing about a place: Lao She's essay Winter in Jinan and Liu E's novel The Travels of Lao Can, which together fixed the image of willows, springs and old lanes. The poets Li Qingzhao and Xin Qiji — the two An of Jinan — were both born here.
Practically, it is small, flat and walkable, and it makes the perfect hinge for the province: Mount Tai an hour south, the Confucian temples at Qufu an hour beyond that, Qingdao two hours east. Come for two days, eat seriously, and use the third to go somewhere else.
Jinan
Seven things that are worth rearranging a day for.
Highlights
Roughly 700 springs rise inside the city, with four great groups and 136 named springs in the old town. People queue at the spouts with bottles and jugs all day, and the teahouses brew with the same water. Watching a city use its own groundwater is the whole reason to come.
First of Jinan's seventy-two named springs, where three jets push up day and night from a clear blue pool. The park holds twenty-odd more springs, a memorial hall to the poet Li Qingzhao, and a teahouse at the water's edge. ¥40, and the number everyone quotes.
Furong Street, Qushuiting Street, Jianzi Lane, Laohuaqiangzi Street — lanes as good as any hutong in Beijing, with spring water running beside them and families still washing and drawing water at the edge. The moat around the old city is the only one in China fed entirely by springs.
A 285 m hill south of the centre, the northern tail of the Mount Tai range, whose Tang-era Xingguo Temple and cliff of carved Buddhas gave it its name. Out in Changqing, Lingyan Temple is first among the four great monasteries of the land and holds the statues Liang Qichao called the finest sculpture in China.
Jinan is the home kitchen of Lu cuisine, the first of China's eight great cuisines, and it is the school of it that locals actually eat. Sweet-and-sour carp, nine-turn intestines, braised knuckle, milk-broth cattail shoots — savoury, generous, and cheap in the places that matter.
Fenmo, the Jinan acrobatic troupe's Peking-opera-infused show, is the city's best night out. And at Chenguang Teahouse in the Daguanyuan market, the crosstalk is free on Saturday nights — a comedian's son founded the place, in a city that was once one of the three great variety stages in China.
Suggested routes
Springs, lake and lanes in one walking loop — the classic first day, and the whole city in miniature.
After breakfast, start at Baotu Spring, the finest under heaven, and take in the other springs in the park — Gold Thread, Shuyu, Mapao. Come out of the north gate and Five-Dragon Pool is straight across the road.
Follow the moat north to the south-west gate of Daming Lake and climb Huibo Tower for the willows and the lotus. Out of the south gate, walk east into Qushuiting Street — old houses on one side, spring water with green weed swaying in it on the other.
Follow the street to Pearl Spring inside the provincial government compound, where bubbles rise off the floor like scattered pearls. On the way, walk the flagstones of Xigengdao Street, look at the green water of Wangfu Pond, and detour into Furong Street for cheap snacks.
South again to the shopping at Henglong Plaza, then Quancheng Square, the city's front room with its blue spring sculpture. East of it is Black Tiger Spring, where three stone tiger heads roar water into the moat, and next to it Liberation Pavilion. Finish there.
Stops: Baotu SpringFive-Dragon PoolDaming LakeQushuiting StreetPearl SpringFurong StreetQuancheng SquareBlack Tiger Spring
The same spring loop, plus the hill, the park and a show. The pace most people actually want.
The classic loop: Baotu Spring, Five-Dragon Pool, Daming Lake, the old quarter, Quancheng Square and Black Tiger Spring. Or swap part of it for the boat and see the spring landscape belt from the water.
Evening in the lanes around Furong Street and Quancheng Road — this is where the cheap food and the evening crowds are.
Stops: Baotu SpringFive-Dragon PoolDaming LakeBlack Tiger Spring
Get up early for Thousand Buddha Mountain — if you can manage four in the morning you even get a sunrise, and the real attraction is the dawn crowd who come up to shout and exercise. Bus to the stop, walk south to the main gate; the hill is under 300 m and takes less than an hour.
Buy incense at the gate rather than inside, and keep your wallet handy — there are a lot of attractions on the hill. The best view is the whole city from the top.
After lunch, Quancheng Park, the largest city park in the country and the old botanical garden. Finish with Fenmo, the acrobatic show, at the Pearl Spring hotel — a proper ending to two days.
Stops: Thousand Buddha MountainQuancheng ParkFenmo acrobatics
Sights
Finest under heaven
The symbol of Jinan and first of its seventy-two named springs, where three jets of water push up day and night, several feet high when the water is strong. The name is onomatopoeic as well as elegant — it imitates the sound of the spring. The park holds twenty-odd more named springs, plus the Eying Shrine, a memorial hall to Li Qingzhao, the Guanlan Pavilion and the Bamboo Garden.
Tip The Wanghe Pavilion teahouse in the north-east corner of the park brews with spring water — that cup is the reason people say the water tastes of something. Come early if you want the three jets without a wall of shoulders.
The city's lake
A natural lake formed where the springs gather, thick with lotus in summer and fringed with willow, and dotted with more than thirty monuments — Lixia Pavilion, the Tie Gong shrine, Nanfeng Shrine, the North Pole Temple. 'Lotus on four sides, willow on three, hills over half the city and the lake over the rest' is the line everybody quotes.
Tip Summer is the season — lotus and green water together. The old garden has a sightseeing shuttle (¥10 return, hailed like a bus); the new zone one costs ¥20. Buy combination tickets at the gate, not inside, where they cost double.
Free and local
One of the four great spring groups: the water comes out through three carved stone tiger heads with a roar like a tiger, and people queue all day to fill bottles. The moat around the old city is the only one in China fed entirely by springs, and it threads nearly every sight in the city together — hence the local saying that you have not been to Jinan until you have floated the moat.
Tip Bring an empty bottle. This is the spring people actually drink from, and the queue is the point of the visit. The boat ticket does not include entry to the parks it passes.
Quietest spring group
Twenty-six old named springs scattered through one small park, making up the Five-Dragon group — the least crowded of the four and the one where the water is clearest. Five yuan, and directly across the road from the north gate of Baotu Spring, so it costs you nothing in time.
Tip Do it immediately after Baotu, while you are already standing there. Small park, twenty minutes, and it is the one where you can hear the water rather than the crowd.
Springs in the lanes
Pearl Spring is Jinan's third famous spring, inside the provincial government compound — the Shandong governor's residence under the Ming and Qing, with a plaque written by the Qianlong emperor. Strings of white bubbles rise off the floor as though pearls were being scattered. Around it, the Pearl group: Chu Spring, Xiting Spring, Shun Spring, Yuhuan Spring, Taiyi Spring.
Tip Wangfu Pond is the most democratic spring in Jinan — the banks are literally the walls of people's houses, and in summer somebody is always in it. Walk Xigengdao's flagstones between the two.
Old lanes
Qushuiting Street runs from Daming Lake in the north to Xigengdao in the south, and it is the street that still looks like the book: old houses of grey brick and broken tile on one side, clear spring with weed swaying in it on the other, residents washing rice and clothes at the edge. Furong Street, 432 m and named for the Furong Spring beneath it, is called the first snack street of Shandong and runs cheap food from morning to night.
Tip A few yuan buys you a full stomach on Furong Street. Walk it slowly, then cut through to the springs behind it — the lanes and the water are the same sight seen from two sides.
The southern hill
A Buddhist mountain and one of Jinan's three great sights, once called Lishan because the sage Shun is said to have ploughed at its foot. At 285 m it is the northern tail of the Mount Tai range; from the top, Daming Lake is a mirror below and the Yellow River a ribbon beyond. Xingguo Temple from the Tang, the Guanyin Garden, the Thousand Buddha Cliff, the Tang locust tree pavilion and the Ten Thousand Buddha Cave.
Tip There is a cable car at ¥30 return, but the hill is under 300 m — walk it. Come before seven if you can: the dawn crowd shouting and exercising is the most Jinan thing on this list. Buy incense at the gate.
The city's front room
The central square of the provincial capital, ringed by hill, spring, river and city — old town to the north, Baotu Spring to the west, Thousand Buddha Mountain green to the south, Liberation Pavilion to the east. It is the only square in China awarded UNESCO's International Art Square title, and the blue sculpture of a spring at its heart is the symbol of the city.
Tip Come at night. The fountain show and the lit towers around the square are what the city does with its evenings, and it costs nothing.
Out in Changqing
North-west of Mount Tai in Wande, Changqing: founded in the Eastern Jin, at its height under the Tang, and ranked first among the four great monasteries of the land. The Ming writer Wang Shizhen said a trip to Mount Tai was incomplete without it; the arhat statues in the Thousand Buddha Hall were called by Liang Qichao the finest sculpture in China. Xuanzang stayed here translating sutras, and emperors came to worship after performing the rites on Tai.
Tip This is a half-day with a car, and the single best temple trip within reach of Jinan. Pair it with Mount Tai or do it on the day you leave town.
Free and indoors
Hongjialou is a twin-towered Gothic church begun in 1901, the largest Catholic church in north China and one of the three most famous in the country, built with Boxer indemnity money. The Shandong Museum, out on Jingshi Road, holds one of the country's largest collections of oracle bones and the Han bamboo strips of The Art of War and Sun Bin's Art of War — one of the decade's great archaeological finds.
Tip Two free, weather-proof hours. Do the museum on a Monday-free day and the cathedral on the way back into town.
Food
The city's signature: carp from the deep water of the Yellow River, golden head and tail, firm flesh, in a sharp, garlicky sweet-sour sauce. By local custom the head, tail and remaining sauce are made into a soup afterwards — called head-and-tail soup, or paddling.
A Jinan classic: pork intestines blanched, deep-fried, then filled with a dozen-odd seasonings and braised slowly. Sour, sweet, fragrant, hot and salty all at once, red and glossy, soft to the bite. The dish by which a Lu kitchen is judged.
A Shandong speciality said to have been invented here: pig stomach tip and chicken gizzard, flash-fried in boiling oil so the parts that normally need hours of stewing come out in seconds. It was called fried double slices until customers started praising how crisp and tender it was.
Cattail shoots from Daming Lake — pale, tender, faintly sweet — cooked with daylily buds and mushrooms in a white broth. The broth is thick and milky, the shoots crisp, the flavour quiet in a way people either find extraordinary or odd. Try it once.
Jinan's snack: crisp outside, soft inside, scallion running through it, golden and oily, shaped like a coil — hence the name. Locals eat it hot with a bowl of chicken-thread wonton, which is the correct way.
The everyday dish of the city, and the reason the fast-food chain that sells it is packed at noon and evening. A slab of braised belly over rice, salty-sweet, soft enough to cut with a chopstick. Thirteen yuan if you eat where the locals eat.
Made in Jinan since the early twentieth century: soft, rich, fine-grained and red-glossy, the meat falling off the bone while the skin stays whole. Salty, mellow, deeply aromatic — good for anyone from eight to eighty, and cheap.
Chicken with bamboo shoots and wood ear, braised until the meat gives way, with the sauce poured over rice. Sweet-savoury, unpretentious, and the dish that has quietly spread from Jinan across the country.
Where to eat
Master's kitchen
Opposite Daming Lake, down the lane from the park's south gate. The master is over ninety and no longer cooks, but he sits upright in the room himself, which sets the tone for the whole meal. This is the serious Lu kitchen of the city.
Old Lu house
A long-established Lu restaurant with a decent room, a short walk west of the north gate of Baotu Spring — the obvious stop if you have been spring-hopping all morning. Order the family platter, nine-turn intestines, quick-fried kidney, three-style fry and sweet-and-sour pork. There is a guotie branch in Jianzi Lane nearby that has its own following.
Old brand
Founded in the 1930s and named for the nickname of its honest, slow-spoken founder. Thin skins, plenty of juice, more than ten fillings led by the pork soup bun. The business is inexplicably good for a shop of its size, and it is a real Jinan institution.
Cheap and famous
Made in Jinan since the early twentieth century: knuckle braised until it is soft and red-glossy, the meat off the bone with the skin still whole, salty and mellow and deeply fragrant. Rich without being greasy, and about thirty yuan a head.
Century-old stall
The Huang family has been roasting meat in Jinan since the Guangxu reign and took the shop name in 1917 — a hundred years in the city. Roast pork, soy-braised beef shin and roast duck are what they sell, and sixteen yuan buys a great deal of it.
Local fast food
The chain famous for braised pork on rice, with branches all over the city and a loud local following — cheap and good, and the fastest way to eat what ordinary Jinan people actually eat for lunch. The main branch is by the railway station, two hundred metres down the lane west of the exit.
Where to stay
Closest to everything
Twenty-eight metres from the spring sculpture on Quancheng Square, with Baotu Spring, Thousand Buddha Mountain, Daming Lake and Black Tiger Spring all around it. If you want to step out of the door and be at a spring in five minutes, this is the one.
Budget chain
On the north-east corner of Quancheng Square: twenty metres to the moat, 500 m to the square, ten minutes on foot to Baotu Spring, twenty to Daming Lake, and next door to the shopping and Furong Street. Everything about it is location.
By the lake
In a quiet spot by the lake with transport, sights, food and entertainment all clustered around it. Good value, and the right base if your plan is early mornings on the water and evenings in the lanes.
Near the station
A tourist-class hotel in the Daguanyuan business district, next to Wanda Plaza and the financial district, about a kilometre from the railway station and two from the main coach station. Convenient if you are arriving or leaving by train.
Mid-range
Small American-mixed design with wrought-iron furniture, comfortable and reasonably fashionable — the sort of room that costs a little more than a chain and feels like it. East of the centre, handy for the university quarter.
Top of the range
Next to Wanda Plaza and close to the main sights, ten minutes by road to Baotu Spring, Daming Lake and Thousand Buddha Mountain, and about thirty-five minutes to the airport, with floor-to-ceiling windows over the city. The expensive option, and the one with the view.
Getting around
Jinan Yaoqiang International (TNA) sits about 30 km north-east of the centre. The airport coach costs ¥20 and takes about an hour, running to Daming Lake north gate and the railway station square by day and to Lishan Road South and the Yiquan Senxin Hotel for late arrivals; from the city, line 1 leaves the station square hourly from 6:00 to 19:00 and line 2 leaves the Yiquan Senxin.
Jinan is one of the country's major rail junctions, where the Beijing–Shanghai, Qingdao–Jinan, Handan–Jinan and high-speed lines cross. Three stations: Jinan station, the oldest and busiest, in the city; Jinan East, the secondary stop for services to the peninsula; and Jinan West, one of five originating terminals on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed line, with around 150 trains a day.
Jinan West and Jinan station are more than 20 km apart, and with buses slow and taxis dear, locals invented taking the train between them — eight services a day, from ¥6, sixteen minutes. It only works if you build in the ticketing time.
Coaches are the standard way to travel inside Shandong — Qingdao, Tai'an, Qufu, Yantai all connect by road. There are seven long-distance stations; the main one is on Jiluo Road in the north of the city, and the one by the railway station square handles a lot of arrivals.
Cheap and dense: BRT lines at ¥1 with free transfers inside the stations, ordinary buses ¥1 or ¥2, trolleybuses 101–104 at ¥1 and K-prefixed air-conditioned routes at ¥2. Sightseeing routes to the outskirts run at weekends from 2 April to 31 October. Tour bus 777 is an open-top double-decker looping the springs, with commentary.
Metered from ¥7.50 for 3 km including a ¥1 fuel surcharge, then ¥1.50 per km to 6 km and ¥2.25 beyond, with waiting charged at ¥1 per five minutes and a further ¥0.50 fuel surcharge per ride. Higher rates after dark.
You rarely need one: the sights are all within a few kilometres of each other and the flatsuit walking better than driving.
Two ways to let the water do the work. The moat boat runs the spring landscape belt — Black Tiger Spring, Quancheng Square, Baotu Spring, Five-Dragon Pool, Daming Lake, Sima Dock, Little East Lake, Old East Gate, back to Black Tiger Spring — at ¥10 a stop or ¥100 for the whole loop. Separately, the four main sights run a free shuttle: buy any one park ticket at any of their gates and ride to the next one for nothing.
Shopping
The tonic of tonics, ranked with ginseng and deer antler as one of the three treasures of Chinese medicine, and made in Dong'e county in Shandong. The Dong'e brand has been the name in gelatine for so long that it has become almost synonymous with the product itself. Buy it from a proper shop, not a market stall.
Grown around Pingyin south-west of the city and used for tea, preserves and rose oil. Cheap, light, and the most pleasant-smelling thing you can bring back from Shandong — the dried buds keep well and make a decent cup.
Muyu stone comes from Mantou Mountain in Changqing and is a rare hollow stone, nicknamed the resurrection stone or phoenix egg, supposed to bring luck and turn away harm. Teapots, cups and caddies are carved from single blocks of it — heavy, odd, and unmistakably a Jinan souvenir.
The representative embroidery of Shandong, worked on patterned ground fabric with strong twisted double-ply thread, in the folk subjects people actually like: figures, mandarin ducks, butterflies and hibiscus. Clothes and household things, but also framed pieces meant purely for looking at.
The two craft souvenirs you will see all over the old town: polished black pottery from the Longshan tradition, and the small coloured dough figures that have been made here for generations. Both are light, cheap, and sold in the Daguanyuan market alongside the local dates and dates-and-walnut sweets.
Not a thing to buy but a thing to do, and free: Jinan was one of the three great variety stages of China and the saying ran that you learned in Tianjin and proved yourself in Jinan. Chenguang Teahouse, founded by the son of Sun Shaolin, still puts on free crosstalk on Saturday nights in the Daguanyuan market.
Practical
The whole city fits into a day's walking if you keep it tight, and two if you do not. The one mistake people make is drinking the water without thinking: it is untreated spring water, and in July that matters.
| Key tickets | Baotu Spring ¥40; Daming Lake old garden ¥30 (combination tickets ¥35/¥40/¥45); Thousand Buddha Mountain ¥30; Five-Dragon Pool ¥5; Lingyan Temple ¥45; Baimai Spring ¥50; Black Tiger Spring, Pearl Spring, Wangfu Pond, Furong Street, Quancheng Square and the cathedral free |
|---|---|
| Hours | Baotu 7:00–21:00; Daming Lake 6:30–17:30 / 18:30; Five-Dragon 7:00–18:00; Thousand Buddha Mountain 6:30–18:30; Lingyan 9:00–17:00; museum 9:00–17:00, closed Mondays |
| Boats | Moat boat ¥10 a stop, ¥100 the full loop; Daming Lake shuttle ¥10 old garden, ¥20 new zone; tour bus 777 ¥12 |
| Best months | September–October: the summer rain has pushed the groundwater up, so the springs are at their strongest, and Hongyegu turns red. Winter has its own version — the springs never freeze and steam in the cold |
| Drinking the water | Fine at the public spouts and in teahouses; the water is untreated, so do not gulp it in hot weather or drink from pools away from the filling points |
| Festivals | Baotu lantern fair from the first day of the lunar year for a month; Daming Lake lotus festival and mid-autumn moon evening; Thousand Buddha Mountain temple fair at Chongyang, matchmaking fairs on the third day of the third lunar month and at Qixi |
| Complaints | Jinan tourism complaints 0531-87937762; Shandong tourism complaints 0531-82963423 |
| Hospitals | Shandong Provincial Hospital, 324 Jingwu Weiqi Road, 0531-87938911; Qilu Hospital, 107 Wenhua West Road, 0531-82169114; Jinan Military General Hospital, 25 Shifan Road, Tianqiao, 0531-51666114 |
Tips
You can drink it — people do all day — but the filling points are untreated. In hot weather do not gulp it down, and do not drink from the pools away from the official spouts. Tea brewed with it is the safest and best introduction.
Jinan has had heavy summer rain in recent years and the low-lying parts of the city flood. When it rains, do not shelter in a dip or an underpass, and give yourself extra time to get anywhere.
The sights are remarkably concentrated — the furthest, Thousand Buddha Mountain, is only about 10 km out — and everything else is a few kilometres apart. Take the bus or your own feet; a car is a liability in the old town.
Thousand Buddha Mountain before seven is a different place: the shouting crowd, the exercisers, the whole city below you in flat morning light. It is also the only time the climb is pleasant in July.
On the hill there are a lot of built attractions and a lot of people selling things. Buy what you need at the entrance, keep your wallet where you can feel it, and treat the hillside add-ons as optional.
Daming Lake's combined tickets — for the old theatre and the stone hall — cost half as much bought at the entrance as they do once you are inside. Same principle as the free inter-park shuttle: ask at the gate before you walk in.
Background
Jinan takes its name from its position south of the Ji River — in the old scheme of three mountains, five peaks and four waterways, the Ji was one of the four, though the Yellow River has since taken its channel. The city leans on Mount Tai to the south and crosses the Yellow River to the north, high in the south and low in the north, with a warm-temperate semi-humid monsoon climate: dry windy spring, hot wet summer, clear dry autumn, cold snowless winter. The topography makes the extremes sharper here than in the country around it.
People have lived here since the early Neolithic, some 9,000 years ago; the Longshan culture, named in 1928 for the town of Longshan in the eastern suburbs, is four to five thousand years old. Qi built a city here in the Spring and Autumn period; from the Western Jin it was the administrative seat of commandery, province and prefecture; by the Tang it was prosperous enough that the iron-working Qin family — of Qin Qiong fame — was a local institution. Marco Polo described its gardens and silk in startling terms in the Yuan, and from the Ming it has been the capital of Shandong. South about 70 km is Tai'an and Mount Tai; 60 km further, Qufu — together the so-called line of mountain, water and sage.
Du Fu wrote that this ancient pavilion is old and that Jinan has produced many famous men, and the city has spent two thousand years proving it. The medical sage Bian Que of the Warring States, the Han scholar Fu Sheng, the Tang chancellor Fang Xuanling and the general Qin Qiong were all locals. The Song gave it the two poets known as the two An of Jinan — Li Qingzhao, the restrained one, and Xin Qiji, the one who wrote of looking back and finding her in the dim light — and between them they cover both halves of the Chinese literary temperament.
In the twentieth century two outsiders fixed the city in the national imagination: Liu E in The Travels of Lao Can and Lao She in his essay on winter in Jinan, between them establishing the picture of willows, springs and old lanes that everyone still carries. Locals also have their own habit of address — calling a stranger teacher as a form of respect, which people put down to two thousand years of Confucian habit. Lao She's challenge still stands: if you cannot picture it, come and look.
Buddhism has flourished here since the Sui and Tang; the monk Yijing followed Xuanzang to India and translated more than a hundred sutras, and the city is full of Buddhist sites — the Four Gate Pagoda in Licheng, the oldest stone pagoda in China, and Xingguo Temple on Thousand Buddha Mountain, a national key temple. Daoism has its Yuan-dated North Pole Pavilion on the shore of Daming Lake, sacred to the Dark Warrior.
Islam has the mosque on Libaishi Street, one of the earliest mosques in China, whose two great round rear windows carved with Koranic text are a rare treasure of Chinese Islamic art. Catholicism has Hongjialou, built by Dutch missionaries with Boxer indemnity money and still the largest church in north China. The city also counts forty-eight minority nationalities among its people, the largest by far being the Hui.
Travel with them
Liu E
Ranked by Lu Xun among the four great indictment novels of the late Qing, it follows an itinerant doctor who drifts through the country, refuses office, and involves himself in other people's troubles. Liu E knew Shandong and loved Jinan, and the book paints the city — spring water at every door, willow at every house — in plain, bright prose.
Niu Guodong
Illustrated throughout, it covers the sights and the local history: classical buildings and courtyard houses, old commerce and street life, customs and cultural character. Finish it and you will both know the city's hills and water better and understand how it became what it is.
Directed by Wang Wenjie, 2009
A thirty-four-part drama of warlord-era Jinan: a scholar's two children are stolen by traffickers on the journey north and bought by a poor couple who run a steamed-bun shop. The sister grows up, learns Shandong ballad singing and then Peking opera, and becomes a star — the city's underworld told through one family.
Sung by Qu Quancheng
Among Chinese-style pop, this record is unusually clean and plain rather than ornate — which is exactly why it suits a slow walk round Daming Lake with the lotus out. Play it with the water in front of you and it lands.
The questions visitors ask us most about Jinan, answered plainly.
Prices and practical details are reviewed every month by our Beijing team and updated the day a rule changes.
Autumn, and specifically September and October. The summer rains have pushed the groundwater up, so the springs are at their strongest, the heat has broken, and the maple valley at Hongyegu turns red. Lao She said autumn was Jinan's own season and he was right. Spring is pleasant but dry and dusty; summer is hot and humid; winter is cold but the springs keep running and steam in the frost.
Very likely. Lu cuisine is savoury, fresh and fragrant rather than hot, and most dishes are not spicy at all, so anyone avoiding chilli can eat freely. Portions in Shandong are large — glance at the next table before ordering and think about waste rather about going hungry.
Yes, and they are stranger than in summer. Spring water is warmer than the air, so it never freezes: it comes out of the ground and condenses into vapour, misty close up and cloud-like from a distance. Early morning and just after snow are the best moments.
Worth two days of its own. A capital city where water wells up in the streets and residents drink it from the source is genuinely unusual, the lane-and-canal quarter is lovely to wander, and the home-style Lu cuisine is the best in the province. It earns its place rather than merely being a gateway.
At the public spouts and in the teahouses, yes — people do it all day, and tea brewed with Baotu or Black Tiger water is the local ritual. But that water is untreated: do not gulp it down in hot weather, and do not drink from pools away from the official filling points.
Start with sweet-and-sour Yellow River carp — the fish is golden, the flesh firm, and by local custom the head, tail and leftover sauce come back as a soup. Then nine-turn intestines, quick-fried double crunch, milk-broth cattail shoots from Daming Lake, and braised pork knuckle. For breakfast, join the queue for a bowl of tianmo with a spiral oil pastry.
Very easily — it is the standard pairing. High-speed trains run the 90 km to Tai'an in about an hour, dozens a day, and coaches leave roughly every twenty minutes taking about eighty minutes for ¥25. Many people sleep in Jinan and day-trip the mountain; staying in Tai'an is what lets you start the sunrise climb at a civilised hour.
Not much beyond the large hotels. Signage at the main springs and the museum usually has English, but buses, taxis and small restaurants are Chinese-only. Have your destinations written in Chinese on your phone, carry a translation app, and keep some cash for buses and the lakeside stalls.
Plan this trip
The same places, with a driver, an English-speaking guide and the tickets already bought.
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Dali
City guide · 12 tours
A walled Bai town between a 4,000 m mountain and a great lake — wind, flowers, snow and moon, and life at a slower speed.
Shuhe
City guide · 12 tours
The quiet version of Lijiang — a Tea Horse Road village of canals, stone bridges and slow afternoons, 4 km from the crowds.
Lijiang
City guide · 12 tours
A UNESCO Naxi old town of canals and cobbles beneath a 5,596 m snow mountain — the cultural heart of north-west Yunnan.
Xiamen
City guide · 12 tours
A subtropical island city of temples, fishing-village lanes and the best street food in Fujian — with the car-free islet of Gulangyu a 20-minute ferry away.
Gulangyu
City guide · 12 tours
A car-free island of colonial villas, pianos and cats, twenty minutes off Xiamen — and the one place where the trick is simply to stay the night.
Fuzhou
City guide · 12 tours
A 2,200-year-old capital of banyan trees and mountains-within-the-city, where the Ming lanes of Sanfang Qixiang meet the dockyard that built China's modern navy.
Lugu Lake
City guide · 12 tours
A 2,680 m lake on the Yunnan–Sichuan border, home to China's last matrilineal people, pig-trough canoes and a great deal of doing nothing.
Xishuangbanna
City guide · 12 tours
China's tropical south — rainforest, wild elephants, Dai villages and the Mekong, wrapped around the gateway city of Jinghong.
Shangri-La
City guide · 12 tours
A Tibetan town at 3,300 m in Yunnan's Diqing prefecture — monasteries, grassland, prayer wheels and cold thin air.
Nanchang
City guide · 12 tours
Jiangxi's 'hero city' on the Gan River — one great Tang pavilion, a 160-metre Ferris wheel, and the best claypot soup you will eat in China.
Hefei
City guide · 12 tours
Anhui's 2,000-year-old capital: the hometown of China's model judge, a moat-turned-garden ring, and the fast rail gateway to Huangshan.
Hongcun
City guide · 12 tours
A 900-year-old Hui village laid out as an ox, with water running to every door and a mirror-still crescent pond at its heart.
Wuhan
City guide · 12 tours
Three towns, two rivers and the best breakfast in China — a huge, blunt river city of bridges, lakes and cheap, brilliant street food.
Changsha
City guide · 12 tours
Hunan's loud, young capital: a 3,000-year-old city that eats chilli-hot food, stays up all night and treats foot massage as a civic duty.
Fenghuang Ancient Town
City guide · 12 tours
The stilt-house river town of Shen Congwen's 'Border Town' — glowing lanterns, stepping stones and the best two nights in western Hunan.
Lushan
City guide · 12 tours
A cloud-wrapped granite mountain with a Victorian hill station on top, waterfalls in three tiers, and the mist that Su Shi said you could never see through.
Wuyuan
City guide · 12 tours
China's 'most beautiful countryside' — dozens of white-walled Huizhou villages strung along streams and terraced into the hills, and two weeks a year of gold.
Mount Heng (Hengshan, Hunan)
City guide · 12 tours
The South Great Peak: a pilgrimage mountain of 72 summits where the temples run all the way to the top, and the sunrise over the cloud sea is the whole point.
Huangshan
City guide · 12 tours
Yellow Mountain: 82 granite peaks of twisted pines and grotesque rock, a sea of cloud that changes by the hour, and hot springs at the foot.
Wudang Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
The Taoist first mountain of China — a gilded bronze hall on a 1,612 m summit, temples hung off cliff faces, and the birthplace of tai chi.
Luoyang
City guide · 12 tours
Thirteen dynasties, 100,000 Buddhas carved into a river cliff, China's first Buddhist temple — and a whole city that turns peony-pink every April.
Yuntai Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
A UNESCO geopark in Henan where red-stone gorges squeeze a river to a slot, a 314 m waterfall drops in one plunge, and every path leads to another pool.
Rizhao
City guide · 12 tours
A low-key Shandong beach town where the sun rises straight out of the Yellow Sea, the sand runs 60 km and a seafood dinner costs less than a coffee in Shanghai.
Yantai
City guide · 12 tours
A northern Shandong port of fairy-tale cliffs, wine cellars and long golden beaches — where emperors once hunted the elixir of life and China's wine industry still begins.
Lianyungang
City guide · 12 tours
A working Jiangsu port with a myth in the middle of it — the Flower-Fruit Mountain of Journey to the West, a sea causeway to a big island beach, and some of the cheapest seafood on the coast.
Sanqing Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
A vertical forest of granite pillars in Jiangxi — the Python Out of the Mountain, the Goddess of the East Sea, two cable cars and a cliff-hugging walkway at 1,660 metres.
Tianjin
City guide · 12 tours
Beijing's port city next door — a river of 24 bridges, 2,000 colonial villas, and the best street breakfast in northern China.
Datong
City guide · 12 tours
A frontier capital of carved Buddhas — the Yungang Grottoes, a temple pinned to a cliff, and the oldest wooden tower in China.
Taiyuan
City guide · 12 tours
Shanxi's provincial capital and noodle heartland — the spring of Jinci, two Ming pagodas, and a museum that explains the whole province.
Pingyao
City guide · 12 tours
China's best-preserved ancient walled town — a Ming wall, the first Chinese bank, and two temples of painted clay just outside the gates.
Wutai Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
China's foremost Buddhist mountain — fifty-plus temples in one valley, crowned by five flat-topped peaks up to 3,058 m.
Hulunbuir
City guide · 12 tours
China's finest grassland — a 263,000 km² sweep of steppe, birch forest and border river, best driven with the windows down.
The Forbidden City
City guide · 12 tours
Beijing's 600-year imperial palace — 8,700 rooms behind a 72-hectare wall, and the largest surviving wooden palace complex on earth.
Sanya
City guide · 12 tours
China's only true winter-sun coast — four very different bays, a coral island and a 108 m sea Buddha, all at 18° north.
Haikou
City guide · 12 tours
Hainan's capital is the island's living city — 600-year-old arcade streets, a volcanic village, and a morning-tea-to-midnight food culture.
Beihai
City guide · 12 tours
24 km of fine white sand on one side, a volcanic island of coral and lava on the other — plus a 19th-century arcade old street in between.
Nanning
City guide · 12 tours
Guangxi's green capital is a gateway to Detian Falls, Beihai and Vietnam — and a genuinely excellent food city if you let it slow you down.
Guangxi
City guide · 12 tours
One autonomous region, a dozen landscapes — limestone peaks and rice terraces in the north, a Vietnam border and a warm gulf coast in the south.
Huizhou
City guide · 12 tours
A free West Lake, a Taoist mountain and 200 km of white-sand coast — the Pearl River Delta's most underrated weekend.
Beidaihe
City guide · 12 tours
Northern China's classic beach escape — one sunrise headland, 10 km of calm swimming water, and a bird flyway overhead twice a year.
Shanhaiguan
City guide · 12 tours
The town where the Great Wall stops being a rumour of mountains and walks into the Bohai Sea.
Baiyangdian
City guide · 12 tours
The biggest freshwater lake on the North China Plain — and almost none of it can be reached except by boat.
Qinhuangdao
City guide · 12 tours
126 km of Bohai coast in one municipality — a working port, two famous resorts, and the only desert dunes that meet this sea.
Yesanpo
City guide · 12 tours
Gorge country where the Taihang and Yan ranges collide — 52.5 km of canyon walls, a cave that spits fish, and a river to fall off.
Zhuhai
City guide · 12 tours
The delta's slow city: a 28 km promenade, 146 islands, oysters fattened where the river meets the sea.
Wuyi Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
Nine bends of clear water, red sandstone cliffs, and the tea that made a mountain's name.
Jiuzhaigou
City guide · 12 tours
108 mineral-blue lakes in one 55 km valley — the place that ruins water everywhere else for you.
Mount Siguniang
City guide · 12 tours
Four snow peaks, three valleys, and the friendliest 5,000 m mountain in China to stand on top of.
Hailuogou
City guide · 12 tours
A glacier that comes down to 2,850 m, hot springs in the forest, and Gongga Shan filling the sky above both.
Daocheng Yading
City guide · 12 tours
Three 6,000 m sacred peaks, glacial lakes at 4,600 m and twenty hours of road — the hardest, highest payoff in Sichuan.
Shunan Bamboo Sea
City guide · 12 tours
Seventy thousand mu of bamboo over twenty-eight hills, a red sandstone corridor under a closed green roof, and a banquet made entirely of bamboo.
Dujiangyan
City guide · 12 tours
Not a monument but a machine: three pieces of engineering with no dam, still doing their job after 2,270 years.
Qingcheng Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
The mountain where Daoism was organised, and the one Chengdu escapes to when the basin turns into an oven.
Qingdao
City guide · 12 tours
Red-tiled roofs, cold beer and a granite mountain that walks straight into the sea — the easiest good time on the Yellow Sea.
Mount Tai
City guide · 12 tours
1,545 metres, 6,290 stone steps and three thousand years of emperors — the one mountain in China that is also a document.
Weihai
City guide · 12 tours
1,000 km of clean coast, a free bathing beach, the island where the Beiyang Fleet died — and thousands of wild swans every winter.
Qufu
City guide · 12 tours
One family, two thousand years of steles, and a ¥150 pass that covers the lot — the easiest serious day trip in Shandong.
Penglai
City guide · 12 tours
China's immortals' coast — a Song-dynasty naval harbour you can walk for free, a mythology nobody ever found, and the ferry to 32 islands.
Changdao
City guide · 12 tours
32 islands, one causeway, a ¥150 land pass, tens of thousands of gulls and nowhere you can drive — the place where everything happens by boat.
Nanjing
City guide · 12 tours
Capital of six dynasties, capital of the Republic, and the city that eats more duck than anywhere else on earth.
Suzhou
City guide · 12 tours
Two thousand five hundred years of canals, sixty surviving gardens, and a city that shuts its gates at half past five.
Zhouzhuang
City guide · 12 tours
Nine hundred years, fourteen bridges, one ticket — and a town that only makes sense before eight in the morning.
Tongli
City guide · 12 tours
Fifteen canals, seven islets, forty-nine bridges — and a town that still gets up at dawn because it lives here.
Wuxi
City guide · 12 tours
Taihu on one side, a Grand Buddha on the next hill, and ribs sweet enough to argue about — the most underrated city on the Yangtze delta.
Yangzhou
City guide · 12 tours
A city built by salt merchants who had more money than restraint — gardens, a narrow lake, and the best breakfast in China.
Zhenjiang
City guide · 12 tours
Three hills, one ferry landing, and an unreasonable share of Chinese literature — the Yangtze city people drive past.
Changzhou
City guide · 12 tours
A 2,500-year-old canal city that built a dinosaur park and refuses to apologise for it.
Wuzhen
City guide · 12 tours
A town that is two towns: the older, quieter East Zone and the lit-up West Zone you sleep inside.
Xitang
City guide · 12 tours
Nine canals, 122 lanes, one long roofed corridor — and a town that still works for a living.
Hangzhou
City guide · 12 tours
A lake in the middle of a city, a tea village in the hills, and two thousand years of getting the mood right.
Xixi Wetland
City guide · 12 tours
Ten square kilometres of marsh inside Hangzhou, and the only way into half of it is a boat.
Ningbo
City guide · 12 tours
A 7,000-year-old port with Asia's oldest private library, a free waterfront 20 years older than Shanghai's, and the best seafood before the islands.
Mount Putuo
City guide · 12 tours
A Buddhist island with no cars, three great temples and a ¥10 lunch that is the point of the place.
Qiandao Lake
City guide · 12 tours
A thousand islands that did not exist sixty years ago, and the cleanest big-lake water in China.
Shaoxing
City guide · 12 tours
Two and a half thousand years of water-town China, and Lu Xun's house is free.
Zhoushan
City guide · 12 tours
1,390 islands, one road bridge in, and a harbour that lands more fish than almost anywhere on earth.
Hengdian
City guide · 12 tours
A backlot the size of a town, where the palaces are copies and the film crews are real.
Yandang Mountain
City guide · 12 tours
A volcano that weathering turned into scenery — 500-odd sights of peak, cave and waterfall across eight scenic areas.
Zhejiang
City guide · 12 tours
One small, mountainous, absurdly rich province that holds a lake, two canal towns, a Buddhist island and a dead volcano.
Hong Kong Outlying Islands
City guide · 12 tours
Two hundred-odd islands, half an hour of ferry from the financial district, and not a car on three of them.
Hong Kong Shopping
City guide · 12 tours
A duty-free port where the tag starts lower, two citywide sale seasons knock a third off, and every mall sits on an MTR exit.
Macao
City guide · 12 tours
Four hundred years of Portuguese streets, a fake Venice under a painted sky, and the best egg tart in Asia.
Urumqi
City guide · 12 tours
The city furthest from the sea, with a snow range on its doorstep and dinner starting at nine.
Hong Kong SAR, China
City guide · 11 tours
A harbour skyline you already know by heart, dim sum trolleys at dawn, and 260 islands an hour from the neon.
Taiwan, China
City guide · 11 tours
Night-market alleys, high-mountain railways, and a coastline that changes character every hundred kilometres.
Qinghai Lake
City guide · 12 tours
A 4,400 sq km inland sea at 3,200 m, ringed by rapeseed gold, prayer flags and the best cycling road in China.
Mount Emei
City guide · 11 tours
A 3,099-metre Buddhist summit you can reach by cable car before lunch — and a mountain full of monkeys that will absolutely rob you.
Beijing
City guide · 11 tours
Six centuries of imperial red walls, a Great Wall you can climb before lunch, and the best roast duck on earth.
Taipei
City guide · 11 tours
A 24-hour bookstore, a night market that never stops sizzling, and a city that apologises when you bump into it.
North Xinjiang
City guide · 11 tours
Alpine lakes the colour of poured enamel, a village of log cabins under birch trees, and the last tear the Atlantic ever sheds.
Lanzhou
City guide · 11 tours
A city split in half by the Yellow River, where beef noodles are a breakfast ritual and the Silk Road still runs through the streets.
Mount Hua
City guide · 11 tours
Five granite peaks, one plank road bolted to a cliff face, and a sunrise that justifies the 2am start.
Dunhuang
City guide · 11 tours
A desert oasis where Buddhist cave art survived a thousand years and a crescent lake refused to dry up.
Gannan
City guide · 11 tours
433 kilometres of the Yellow River's first bend, a 3.5 km prayer-wheel circuit, and Tibetan grasslands almost nobody has commercialised yet.
Sichuan–Tibet Highway
City guide · 11 tours
2,142 kilometres of cliff-edge switchbacks, four of China's most beautiful mountains, and a road the Tibetans walk on their knees.
Kangding
City guide · 11 tours
The town that gave Asia its most famous love song, a 7,556m sacred peak on its doorstep, and the last real Tibetan town before the road climbs to Lhasa.
Lhasa
City guide · 12 tours
A city of prayer wheels and butter lamps at 3,700 metres, where the sun shines 3,000 hours a year and the world's highest palace watches over it all.
Nyingchi
City guide · 11 tours
Tibet's greenest corner — peach blossom valleys, a 7,782 m peak that hides from almost everyone, and the world's deepest canyon.
Namtso
City guide · 11 tours
A 1,920-square-kilometre sheet of impossible blue at 4,718 metres, ringed by snow peaks and prayer flags.
Chongqing
City guide · 12 tours
A vertical city of fog, cable cars and cliff-side stilt houses, where the火锅 never stops boiling and the night skyline outshines Hong Kong.
Qiandongnan
City guide · 11 tours
A thousand Miao households stacked up a mountainside, drum towers and wind-rain bridges in Dong villages, and a 600-year-old Ming garrison town on the road to Guiyang.
Libo
City guide · 11 tours
Emerald rivers threading through karst peaks, a 600-metre forest growing out of a riverbed, and China's largest wild plum grove.
Guiyang
City guide · 11 tours
China's summer capital at 1,100 metres, where the nights run on sour fish soup, street-side barbecue and mahjong that never quite stops.
Zhenyuan
City guide · 11 tours
A 2,000-year-old river town where the Wuyang River carves an S through the mountains and every lane hides a story.
Huangguoshu
City guide · 11 tours
Asia's biggest waterfall, and the only one on earth you can walk behind, above and around — plus 600-year-old Ming dynasty villages a short drive away.
Harbin
City guide · 11 tours
Minus 30 degrees, a frozen river you can walk across, and a cathedral built by Russians who never went home.
Yunnan
City guide · 11 tours
Snow mountains, tropical rainforest, twenty-five minorities and a plate of rice noodles — all in one province.
Shanghai
City guide · 11 tours
A 1920s waterfront of colonial banks facing a science-fiction skyline, soup dumplings you eat with a straw, and 20 million people moving like clockwork.
Zhangjiajie
City guide · 11 tours
Three thousand sandstone pillars straight out of Avatar, a glass skywalk bolted to a cliff, and a cable car that leaves from downtown.
Guangzhou
City guide · 11 tours
A 2,200-year-old trading port where dim sum is a religion, colonial islands sit beside 600-metre towers, and the food never stops.
Guilin
City guide · 11 tours
Karst peaks rising straight out of a green river, rice terraces carved into mountainsides, and the best bowl of noodles you'll eat in China.
Shenzhen
City guide · 11 tours
A fishing village that became a megacity in forty years — and it still has 500-year-old banyans, empty beaches and dim sum worth the border crossing.
Chengdu
City guide · 11 tours
A 3,000-year-old city where the schedule is tea, mahjong and hotpot — and the pandas are just the opening act.
Xinjiang
City guide · 11 tours
Snow peaks, grassland, desert and oasis — one-sixth of China, and the longest road you will ever ride.
Xi'an
City guide · 14 tours
Thirteen dynasties of emperors, a terracotta army buried for 2,200 years, and a walled city you can cycle in 100 minutes.
Qinghai
City guide · 11 tours
China's high-altitude blue heart: a salt lake you can walk on, a 3,200-metre sea, and yak butter tea at the roof of the world.
Tibet
City guide · 11 tours
A plateau the size of Western Europe where the sky starts at your feet, prayer flags carry the wind, and the roads run past 8,000-metre peaks.
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