With 25.67 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) of containers in 2022, the Port of Qingdao was the fifth-busiest container port in the world that year, according to Lloyd's List. It sits on the Yellow Sea at the mouth of Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern coast of the Shandong Peninsula, and is made up of four port areas: the old Dagang harbour in the city, the Qianwan port area, the Huangdao oil port for tankers, and Dongjiakou, about 40 kilometres south of the city. By total cargo it ranked seventh in the world in 2019. Qingdao's first wharf, the Zhanqiao Pier, was built in 1891, and the harbour was developed by Germany after 1898. It matters because it is a hub for local and international trade, with cooperative relations with some 450 ports in 130 countries, and South Korean and Japanese investment has poured into the city it serves. Its story runs in clear phases, from a Qing coastal fort to a German naval base, a prize of two wars and finally one of China's largest ports.
1891: Qing Forts and the Zhanqiao Pier
Under the Qing, the area was called Jiao'ao, and the village of Qingdao was a place of fishermen and farmers. In 1891 the Qing government decided to fortify Jiao'ao against attack from the sea, and the same year the Zhanqiao Pier was built, the first wharf in what would become the city. The pier, now 440 metres long, still runs out from the southern shore off Zhongshan Road. The octagonal Huilan Pavilion at its tip was added in 1930 and now features in the logo of Tsingtao Brewery. Around it today are Little Qingdao Island, the China Navy Museum and streets of German colonial buildings, a reminder of who came next.
The bay had already caught foreign attention. The German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen, after travelling in China between 1868 and 1871, recommended Jiaozhou Bay as a possible naval base, and in 1896 Rear Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz inspected it in person. German naval officers surveyed the bay formally in May 1897 and reported on the new Qing defences.
1897–1914: Admiral von Diederichs and the German Harbour
The pretext came in November 1897. On the night of 1–2 November, two German Catholic missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word, Richard Henle and Franz Xaver Nies, were killed in Juye County in southern Shandong. Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered the East Asia cruiser division to Jiaozhou. Rear Admiral Otto von Diederichs arrived off Qingdao on 13 November with SMS Kaiser, SMS Prinzess Wilhelm and SMS Cormoran, and went ashore at the Zhanqiao Pier to look around. At 06:00 the next morning, a landing force of 717 officers and sailors marched on the Chinese garrison, and by 08:15 the forts and powder magazines were in German hands.
On 6 March 1898 China signed a 99-year lease of the bay, and the Reichstag ratified it on 8 April. The Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory covered 552 square kilometres with about 83,000 inhabitants. Because the base mattered chiefly to the navy, it was run by the Imperial Naval Office rather than the Colonial Office, and Captain Carl Rosendahl became its first governor. The East Asia Squadron made Qingdao its home port. The lease also set off a scramble along the coast: Russia took Port Arthur and Dalian, Britain took Weihaiwei further along the Shandong shore, and France took Guangzhouwan in the south.
The Germans built the city outward from the harbour. Chinese residents along the shore were moved away in 1898, and a sequence of projects followed: new wharves, a railway station, locomotive works, sewers and a safe drinking-water supply. Construction of the 393-kilometre railway to the provincial capital, Jinan, funded by Adolph von Hansemann and other German financiers, began on 23 September 1899 and was finished in 1904, giving the port a direct line into the Shandong interior. The Germania Brewery, founded in 1903, later became Tsingtao Brewery. German banks followed the ships, the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank most prominent among them, and by 1910 the railway's connection to the Trans-Siberian line made it possible to travel by train from Qingdao to Berlin. When Sun Yat-sen visited in 1912 he praised the city as a model for China's future.
1914: The Siege of Tsingtao
The German harbour lasted barely sixteen years. When the First World War began, Japan, allied to Britain since 1902, issued an ultimatum on 15 August 1914 demanding that Germany hand over Qingdao. The day after the ultimatum, Major-General Mitsuomi Kamio of the 18th Infantry Division was ordered to prepare to take Qingdao by force. The ultimatum expired on 23 August and Japan declared war, and the same day its navy bombarded the German territory. Japanese and British forces besieged the port from 27 August until 7 November 1914, when the bay fell. It was the first clash between Japanese and German forces and the only major land battle of the war in Asia and the Pacific. Admiral Maximilian von Spee's squadron was away on routine missions in the central Pacific when war broke out, and chose to head for home rather than be trapped at its base.
Japan held Qingdao for the next eight years and used it as a base for exploiting the natural resources of Shandong and northern China, building a new commercial district for Japanese settlers. When the Paris Peace Conference decided in 1919 not to return the former German concession to China, the decision set off the May Fourth Movement of 4 May 1919, a wave of anti-imperialist and nationalist protest across China.
1922–1949: Chinese Rule, Occupation and the US Fleet
Qingdao returned to Chinese rule on 10 December 1922, though Japan kept economic control of the railway and much of the province. In July 1929 the Republic of China made it a directly governed municipality. The city grew as a resort and summer retreat, with villas along the beaches and banks in the business district, and by 1937 its urban population had reached 385,000.
Japanese troops returned in 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. They drew up plans for a "Greater Tsingtao" that were never carried out; the main addition to the harbour in those years was the No. 6 Wharf. After Japan's surrender in 1945, the Nationalist government allowed the US Navy's Western Pacific Fleet to use Qingdao as its headquarters until late 1948. On 2 June 1949 the People's Liberation Army entered the city.
1984–1986: Opening the Port
The change came with China's open-door policy: in 1984 a district of Qingdao was named a Special Economic and Technological Development Zone, and the city began to grow into a modern port. Qingdao is also the headquarters of the Chinese navy's northern fleet.
A sign of the new mood arrived by sea. On 5 November 1986 three US Navy ships, the frigate USS Rentz, the cruiser USS Reeves and the destroyer USS Oldendorf, moored at Qingdao, hosted by the People's Liberation Army Navy. It was the first American naval visit to China since 1949, when the last US ships had left the mainland.
2003–2011: From 100 Million Tonnes to the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge
Growth after 2000 was rapid. In 2003 the port's annual cargo handling passed 100 million tonnes for the first time, and it moved 3.41 million TEU of containers. By 2011 it was handling 372 million tonnes a year, sixth in the world by total cargo. That same year Qingdao joined the Shandong ports of Yantai, Rizhao and Weihai in a strategic alliance with the Port of Busan, South Korea's largest, to build a shipping and logistics centre for Northeast Asia.
The two sides of the bay were finally joined on 30 June 2011, when the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge and the Jiaozhou Bay Tunnel opened on the same day. The 26.7-kilometre bridge links Licang District with Huangdao District and cuts the road journey around the bay by 30 kilometres. Its three navigable spans, the Cangkou, Dagu and Hongdao channel bridges, keep the shipping lanes into the inner bay open.
2014–2022: A Listed Company and 25.67 Million TEU
In May 2014 Qingdao Port International announced a Hong Kong share offering to raise up to US$377 million. Later that year the company was drawn into two lawsuits brought by the warehousing firm Pacorini Logistics, claiming a total of US$58.4 million, following an earlier suit from CITIC Resources. Container volumes kept rising regardless: from 18.0 million TEU in 2016, when Qingdao ranked eighth in the world, to 21.0 million in 2019 and 25.67 million in 2022.
The port also experimented with new ways of moving boxes. Since 2020 it has been building a suspended monorail able to carry fully loaded 20-foot and 40-foot containers, the first of its kind in the world, and the first phase entered service in 2021. Passenger ships still sail from the old harbour: the Orient Ferry to Shimonoseki in Japan, and the New Golden Bridge II and Blue Sea Ferry to Incheon and Gunsan in South Korea.
More than 130 years after the Qing built a single pier, Qingdao now spreads from Dagang to Dongjiakou and forms part of China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road. Its trade still follows the same water the German cruisers crossed in 1897, described in our guide to the Yellow Sea.