Qingdao
Germany built Asia's most modern city in 1898, including its most exported beer. Five ownership changes later, Qingdao runs China's second-largest port and headquarters Haier—colonial infrastructure compounding across regimes.
Germany forced a 99-year lease on Jiaozhou Bay in 1898 and built the most modern city in Asia: paved streets, electricity, sewers, and clean drinking water—infrastructure that most Chinese cities would not match for decades. Twenty-seven years of German and Japanese occupation left Qingdao with two things that outlasted every colonial power: a deep-water port and a brewery.
Tsingtao Brewery, founded in 1903 by a German-British joint venture, brewed its first pilsner in 1904 using Laoshan spring water and the Reinheitsgebot purity law. The brewery changed hands from German to Japanese (1916), to Chinese Nationalist (1945), to PRC state ownership (1949), to private listing (1990)—five ownership changes in under a century, each transferring the recipe and brand intact. This is horizontal gene transfer in commercial form: a German brewing technique implanted into a Chinese city, replicated through successive regimes, now exported as China's best-known beer worldwide.
The port tells the same story at industrial scale. Germany's Imperial Naval Office chose Jiaozhou Bay for its natural deep harbor and Pacific proximity. Japan besieged and captured it in 1914, held it until 1922, and left behind expanded port facilities. Today Qingdao operates China's second-largest port—roughly 28.8 million TEU annually—connecting to over 450 ports worldwide. Haier, the world's largest home appliance manufacturer by unit sales, and Hisense both headquarter here, giving Qingdao an electronics export base that rides the colonial-era shipping infrastructure.
Qingdao's GDP exceeds 1.5 trillion yuan, the highest in Shandong province. The city was designated one of China's 'open cities' for foreign investment in 1984, formalizing a pattern set in 1899 when Germany declared it a free port. Shipbuilding, petrochemicals, automotive, and biopharmaceuticals layer atop the original German infrastructure like successive generations building on a termite mound's architecture—each occupant modifying the structure but never starting from scratch.
The colonial question haunts Qingdao's brand identity: its most famous exports—beer and port capacity—were designed by Europeans for European purposes. But the city's genius has been absorption without erasure. The German architecture draws tourists. The brewery earns billions. The port moves a quarter of Shandong's trade. Every colonial investment compounded.