Shandong historical timeline

Shandong’s history is foundational to Chinese thought and, more recently, to Chinese grievance.

Qi and Lu

In the Zhou period the province held the states of Qi, a wealthy commercial and military power on the coast, and Lu, smaller, more conservative and the birthplace of Confucius around 551 BC. He spent his life as an unsuccessful office-seeker and a successful teacher; the system his students recorded became the framework of Chinese government, education and family life for two thousand years.

Mount Tai and the emperors

From the Qin onward, emperors climbed Mount Tai to perform the fengshan sacrifices, announcing to heaven that their rule was legitimate. Relatively few did it, because a ruler had to be confident enough of his mandate to risk the claim, which made each occasion significant. The inscriptions carved up the mountain record them.

Qingdao and Versailles

Germany seized Qingdao in 1897 and built a planned colonial city with a brewery, a railway and a sewer system. Japan took it in 1914, and the Versailles conference in 1919 awarded it to Japan rather than returning it to China. The news triggered the May Fourth Movement — student protests that became a cultural and political turning point and fed directly into the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Boxers

The Boxer Rising of 1899 to 1901 began in Shandong, driven by drought, foreign missionary activity and the German presence.

Laozi and the hundred schools

Shandong was not only Confucian. The Qi capital at Linzi housed the Jixia Academy, a state-funded gathering of scholars from every competing school of the Warring States period — Daoists, Legalists, Mohists and logicians argued there for over a century, subsidised and left alone. It is arguably the earliest institution of its kind anywhere, and the intellectual ferment it produced shaped everything Chinese thought did afterwards.

Since

Heavy industry, agriculture and, since the 1990s, one of China’s largest provincial economies.