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Shandong. Shandong is a province in China. Also referred to as Chiloo, The Giant State, and the hometown of Confucius. The name means east of the mountains. Shandong is a coastal province situated by the Bohai Sea to the north and the Yellow Sea to the south. Photo: Leon petrosyan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo: Hshook, CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Overview
- Relief
- Drainage
- Soils
Shandong, northern coastal sheng (province) of China, lying across the Yellow Sea from the Korean peninsula. Shandong is China’s second most populous province, its population exceeded only by that of Henan. The name Shandong, which means “East of Mountains,” was first officially used during the Jin dynasty in the 12th century.
The province consists of two distinct segments. The first is an inland zone bounded by the provinces of Hebei to the north and west, Henan to the southwest, and Anhui and Jiangsu to the south. The second is the Shandong Peninsula, extending some 200 miles (320 km) seaward from the Wei and Jiaolai river plains, with the Bo Hai (Gulf of Chihli) to the north and the Yellow Sea to the south; the peninsula accounts for a large share of the province’s coastline of some 1,575 miles (2,535 km).
The inland zone, covering roughly two-thirds of the province’s total area, includes a hilly central region, centred on the famous Mount Tai complex, and a fertile and intensively farmed agricultural area on the north, west, and south, which forms part of the Huang He (Yellow River) basin and the North China Plain. The provincial capital, Jinan, is situated just northwest of Mount Tai and about 3 miles (5 km) south of the Huang He, which flows from southwest to northeast through the province before emptying into the Bo Hai.
The Shandong Peninsula, by contrast, is entirely an upland area and, with its seaward orientation and indented coastline, has traditionally depended on fishing, mining, and port-related activities. Long a focal area in the evolution of Chinese civilization and institutions, the province’s natural inland-peninsular division is paralleled by a dual orientation in its past and present political and economic configurations. The eastern peninsula historically had coveted autonomy, whereas the inland portion was closely tied to the inward-facing empire. Area 59,200 square miles (153,300 square km). Pop. (2020) 101,527,453.
Shandong is dominated by two hill masses to the east-northeast of the Grand Canal and to the south-southwest of the present course of the Huang He. These hills are formed mainly of ancient crystalline shales and sedimentary rocks on their flanks and of hard, very ancient rocks with granitic intrusions in their core. Both masses are detached remnants of China’s most ancient geologic core. The easternmost (peninsular) mass is connected to the Liaodong Peninsula (Liaoning province) by a submerged ridge that extends northward from the Penglai area of the Shandong Peninsula and emerges periodically between the Bo Hai and Yellow Sea as the Miaodao Archipelago. In fairly recent geologic times, the Shandong hill masses stood as islands in an inland sea that separated them from the Taihang Mountains of Shanxi province to the west.
A broad, marshy depression, the Jiaolai Plain, extends for about 100 miles (160 km) from Laizhou Bay in the Bo Hai, south to Jiaozhou Bay in the Yellow Sea, near Qingdao (Tsingtao), and westward into the North China Plain. The generally flat surface of the plain is interrupted occasionally by bedrock-derived monadnocks, or residual rocks or hills, that have resisted erosion. Another depression, part of the inland zone of western Shandong, forms the central segment of the North China Plain. It slopes eastward into a northwest-southeast trough skirting the western perimeter of the central Shandong hill mass and is filled with a mixture of loess (windblown silt) and alluvial materials (sand, clay, and gravel), along with more recently deposited alluvium, resulting from the building up of the Huang He floodplain. Four narrow lakes forming part of the Grand Canal system stretch out along this depression and are also linked to a series of saline marshes that separate the fertile margin at the western edge of the central hills from the main sections of the North China Plain to the south and west.
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Shandong’s drainage is predominantly radial and subject to the prevailing configuration of the mountains. The only navigable river (other than portions of the Huang He) is the Xiaoqing River, which emerges from a small spring-fed lake in a limestone outcrop zone near Jinan and flows parallel to the Huang He before emptying into Laizhou Bay. The sou...
The soils of Shandong fall into two broad categories associated with upland or lowland distributions. The so-called Shandong brown soils are found over most of the two major hill masses and include a variety of brown forest and cinnamon-coloured soils formed through clay accumulations and sod processes.
A distinctive variant of the typical Shandong brown soil is the recalcified soil (soil that has been made hard or stony by the deposit of calcium salts) found on the northern perimeter of the central hill mass. Calcareous alluvial soils predominate in both lowlands and plains. They are usually quite fertile, depending on both the length of time they have been cultivated and their proximity to urban centres, where heavier fertilization with human and animal wastes results in rich, dark-coloured soils. Silty alluvium covers most portions of the North China Plain area of the province.
- Baruch Boxer
The map of Shandong shows that the province lies between the geographic coordinates of 114.48o 48’E-122 o 42’E longitude and 34 ° 23’N-38 ° 24’N latitude. It is surrounded by regions like Jiangsu, Henan, Hebei and Angui. Jinan is the capital of the province of Shandong.
Shandong Peninsula is the largest peninsula in China. Stretching into the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea, it is 290 kilometers long from east to west, 190 kilometers wide from north to south, and 50 kilometers narrow. The total area of Shandong Peninsula is 73,000 square kilometers. Geologically it was once connected to the Korean Peninsula and ...
Weather forecasts and LIVE satellite images of Shandong, China. View rain radar and maps of forecast precipitation, wind speed, temperature and more.
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Famous for its Tsingtao Beer from QingDao, Shandong Province occupies an area of 156,000 Square Kilometers (or 60,235 Square Miles), from the south ShanDong shares borders with JiangSu, AnHui, HeNan, and HeBei. With a population of well over 91 million Shandong is the second most populous province of China, after HeNan and the second most ...
