— — red tile and dark beer, the sea air keeping both.
“A port city on the Shandong peninsula that the Germans laid out in colonial brick and red tile from 1898, then handed back to a Chinese century that kept the architecture and added its own. The brewery they started in 1903 still runs. The light off the Yellow Sea picks out the steeples of the old town above tiled roofs and seafood markets, and Laoshan rises green to the east.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Qingdao sits on the southern coast of the Shandong Peninsula on the Yellow Sea, in eastern China. The metropolitan area passes ten million residents and the port is among the busiest in the world by container volume. The city was a German leased territory from 1898 to 1914, leaving a stretch of red-tiled European architecture along the bay still preserved as the Eight Great Passes historic district. Laoshan, a granite coastal range rising to 1,132 metres, frames the eastern edge.
The civic year has a centre, and it is the Qingdao International Beer Festival in August. The festival has run since 1991 and now draws several million visitors across two weeks, centred on the Huangdao site across the bay. The brewery itself, founded as Germania-Brauerei in 1903 and now Tsingtao, sits on Dengzhou Road in the old town and runs museum tours through the original brewhouse, the beer still poured from the source tap.
Best between May and October, when sea fog gives way to clear afternoons. The Eight Great Passes neighbourhood holds the old German villas under sycamore shade. Zhanqiao Pier reaches 440 metres into Qingdao Bay with the Huilan Pavilion at its end. St Michael's Cathedral on Zhejiang Road, finished in 1934, anchors the old town from the hill above. Laoshan, 30 kilometres east, is a day's walk and the source of the famous mineral water.