Shandong Culture & Language

Shandong’s culture is Confucian in a way that is both ceremonial and everyday.

The Kong family

Confucius’s descendants held a hereditary dukedom for over eight hundred years and lived in the mansion at Qufu until 1948, when the head of the family left for Taiwan. The genealogy has been maintained continuously since the sage’s time and now records more than two million living descendants across eighty-plus generations — the longest documented family tree in the world. The cemetery outside the town is a walled forest of a hundred thousand graves.

The Confucius ceremony

The shidian rite, performed at the temple on his birthday with eight rows of eight dancers holding pheasant feathers and flutes, reconstructs a Zhou-dynasty court ritual. It was suppressed for decades and revived from the 1980s.

Mount Tai inscriptions

Some two thousand carvings on the rock along the ascent, spanning two millennia of emperors, officials and calligraphers, which makes the mountain an outdoor museum of Chinese writing.

Shandong opera and Lu embroidery

Lu ju opera, and the province’s embroidery tradition, one of the older regional schools.

Shadow puppets and clay figures

The province keeps several folk traditions in working use: Shandong shadow theatre with translucent donkey-hide figures, the painted clay figurines of Nie Family Village made from river mud and sold at temple fairs, and the woodblock New Year prints of Yangjiabu, whose workshops still cut pear-wood blocks and print by hand for the spring festival.

Kites

Weifang is the historic centre of Chinese kite-making and holds the world’s largest kite festival each April.

Mandarin is universal. The Shandong dialect is a northern variety, closer to standard Mandarin than the southern languages but with distinctive tones and vocabulary, and it is strongly associated in Chinese popular culture with bluntness and comedy.

English is limited outside Qingdao’s international hotels and the main sites at Qufu and Mount Tai. A translation app is necessary.

Korean is widely heard and seen on signage in Qingdao and Weihai, which have large Korean business communities and are a short flight from Seoul.

German appears on some historical signage in Qingdao and nowhere else.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian, mai dan for the bill, and ganbei for the toast, which in Shandong means the glass is emptied.