The capital of Shandong and a busy industrial city with three million inhabitants,
JI'NAN is the province's major transit point and communication centre, which anyone travelling in the area is bound to visit at some point. It's possible to kill a day here, but as the tourist sights are unspectacular and the hotel situation is poor, the city is best thought of as a stop off on the way to or from Qufu and Tai'an, a few hours south.
Though you'd never guess it, the city has an illustrious past. It stands on the site of one of China's oldest settlements , and pottery unearthed nearby has been dated to over four thousand years ago. The present town dates from the fourth century AD when Ji'nan was a military outpost and trading centre. The town expanded during the Ming dynasty, when the city walls were built - they're no longer standing but you can see where they were on any map by the moats that once surrounded them. Present development dates back to 1898, when the Germans obtained the right to build the Shandong rail lines. Track was laid from Qingdao, another German concession town, and the line completed in 1904. The city was opened up to foreign trade in 1906, and industrialized rapidly under the Germans, English and Japanese.
Ji'nan is famous in China for its natural springs , which are actually rather dull. Once impressive sights - the poet Li Fenggao wrote of the Qing city, "Waterlilies on four sides, willows on three, half the city is a mountain, half is a lake" - and earning the town a reputation for cleanliness and health, these days the springs resemble little more than muddy pools. Some of the nineteenth-century German and Japanese architecture remains, but Ji'nan's buildings aren't pretty. The fashion for facing buildings with white bathroom-style tiling seems to have reached its zenith here, and to Western eyes the city looks like an enormous complex of public conveniences. The most interesting places are all outside the centre, and the most rewarding way to spend any time in the city is to stroll through the parks with their attractive lakes, or slog your way up Thousand Buddha Mountain in the south.
The City
Ji'nan is frustratingly spread out and there's no real downtown shopping district. However, the centre of town is easily identifiable on maps as a rectangular area south of Daming Hu bounded by streams and fed by springs which, bafflingly, are regarded as the city's main attraction - a case of historical precedent overriding reality. The
springs have always been synonymous with Ji'nan and acquired their romantic names around the tenth and eleventh centuries, when they were compared by poets to pearls arising from the earth and tigers springing from their lairs. Now, like the rest of the city, they are somewhat uninspiring: half of them don't even seem to exist any more, or are slyly assisted with hoses; pollution and droughts seem to have caused the drying up. The most famous is
Black Tiger Spring on Heihuquan Dong Lu, which rises from a subterranean cave and emerges through tiger-headed spouts. The stone pools here are a popular bathing spot. There are a few sights in Ji'nan worth checking out while you're waiting for connections. The park (daily 6am-6pm; ¥5) around
Daming Hu , on the route of bus #11 from the train station, is quite pleasant, containing some quaint gardens, pavilions and bridges, and the lake is edged with willow trees and sprinkled with water lilies. On an island in the centre the
Li Xia Pavilion holds portraits of the Tang poet Du Fu and the calligrapher Li Yong; they were supposed to have met here. To the south is the
Memorial Hall to Xin Qiji, a famous Song poet who was banished for his political views and his poems criticizing the monarch for failing to resist the Jin invasion from the north. The pleasant and restrained building has a couple of courtyards and exhibition halls displaying calligraphy.
Ji'nan Park (6am-6pm; ¥5), south of here on the route of bus #3 from the train station, is nice enough, though little remains of its three springs, which were mentioned in the Spring and Autumn Annals, government texts of 694 BC. Luoyuan Pavilion on the north side was originally constructed in the Song dynasty, and is inscribed with a couplet by Zhao Mengfu, a thirteenth-century artist, which reads:
" Clouds and mist in wet vapours, glory unfixed; the sound of the waves thunders in the Lake of Great Brightness. "
In the east of the park, next to the trickle that is "Gushing from the Ground Spring", is the Hall to Commemorate Li Qingzhao , one of China's most famous woman poets, born in 1084 in Ji'nan. The modern hall contains portraits, extracts from her work, and poems and paintings by well-known contemporary artists.
The other scenic spot worth a trip is Thousand Buddha Mountain (daily 8am-6pm; ¥6), to the south of the city, on the route of bus #31, which leaves from a terminus in the northeast corner of Daming Park; the journey is about 5km. The mountainside is leafy and tracked with winding paths, the main one lined with painted opera masks. Most of the original statues that once dotted the slopes, free-standing images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, were destroyed by Red Guards, but new ones are being added, largely paid for by donations from overseas Chinese. The new statues, though, tend not to have the simplicity and purity of the old. It's quite a climb to the summit (2hr), but the sculptures, and the view, get better the higher you go. Behind the Xingguo Si near the top are some superb sixth-century Buddhist carvings. The temple courtyard contains a sculpture of the mythical Emperor Shun, supposed to have reigned around 2000 BC, who, legend has it, ploughed the soil in Ji'nan, as well as inventing the writing brush.
Near the mountain, and accessible on the same bus, is the Shandong Provincial Museum (daily 8am-5pm; ¥12), which contains a number of fine Buddhist carvings as well as exhibits from the excavations at Longshan and Dawenkou, two nearby Neolithic sites noted for the delicate black pottery unearthed there. The remains date back to 5000-2000 BC and consist mostly of pottery and stone and shell farming implements. The society is judged to have been agricultural, settled and fairly sophisticated, practising ancestor worship. Also on display is China's earliest extant book, found at a Han tomb nearby. Preceding the invention of paper, the book was written with brush and ink on thin strips of bamboo which were then sewn together. It includes a full calendar for the year 134 BC, and a number of military and philosophical texts, including Sun Bin's Art of War. Though these exhibits are historically very important, it does take a degree of imagination to find them impressive in themselves.
