The coastal home of Tsingtao beer is building the world’s largest movie production facility, with the latest Pacific Rim film blockbuster now wrapping up shooting. Is one of China’s most liveable cities about to become less so?

There’s a little piece of Qingdao in most Chinese restaurants around the world. Under the romanised name of Tsingtao, those emerald bottles are usually the native beer option on the menu – a legacy of the brief German occupation of this coastal city lying halfway between Shanghai and Beijing. Now home to around 9 million people, making it 20th on China’s jostling roster of urban centres, its quirky architecture and relative lack of crowding supposedly make it one of the country’s most “liveable” cities.

Make no mistake, though, Qingdao is growing. It’s one of the biggest ports in China, and is one of the top 10 busiest in the world. Now the focus is on the construction of the Qingdao Movie Metropolis in Huangdao district: a massive film-production facility and theme park that is hoped will make the city, in the words of the giant hànzi on the overlooking hill, “Movie Metropolis of the East”.

Hollywood of the east

Pacific Rim: Uprising, starring the Force Awakens’ John Boyega, has just finished shooting at the partially completed $8.2bn movie metropolis. Projected to open officially in August next year, it will contain the world’s largest production facility: 400 acres, 45 sound stages, one a record-breaking 10,000 sq metres. It’s an attempt by Wang Jianlin – China’s richest man and the founder of the overarching Dalian Wanda group – to steal some of Hollywood’s thunder. Whether demand exists for such Ozymandean facilities is open to question. So far the only big budget takers have been Legendary Entertainment’s (owned by Wang) – the Pacific Rim sequel and the Matt Damon co-production The Great Wall.

Steve Dickinson, a 63-year-old lawyer who lived in Qingdao for a decade until last year, has his doubts: “If you talk to a Qingdao person about it, they’ll say: what?” He thinks the project’s real raison d’etre may be the horde of property construction – a neighbouring artificial island, apartment blocks, hotels, marina and hospital – surrounding the studios. “They’re building condos on an incredibly beautiful strip of beaches, where they shouldn’t be permitted to build them,” he says. “But that’s the concession for doing the movie thing.”

City in numbers

26.4 – length in miles of the Jiaozhou Bay bridge, the world’s longest over water

1,960 crew aboard the Liaoning, China’s sole aircraft carrier, stationed in Qingdao

4.7 – the alcohol percentage of Tsingtao’s signature pilsner. In Qingdao, beer is often served in plastic bags

400,000 proposed daily capacity in cubic meters of desalinated water. Qingdao is one of China’s most water-stressed cities

… and pictures

Perhaps Qingdao does have movie star potential; Wang Baoqiang’s recent black-and-white shots chase after Scorsesian grit and Wong Kar-wai-esque melancholy on its streets.

History in 100 words

German military takeover changed the destiny of the sleepy Jiao’ao region – it had been settled in some measure for nearly 6,000 years, and earmarked in the 19th century as a potential Qing-dynasty naval base thanks to the bay. Hamburg architects laid down the blueprint for what is now the Old Town, near the end of the peninsula, which meant full electrification, a sewer system, clean drinking water – and some very incongruous Bavarian and Romanesque architecture, including St Michael’s cathedral. The first world war put pay to the German concession, and two periods of Japanese occupation followed. The People’s Republic of China was in full control after the second world war; it fast-tracked Qingdao in 1984 by establishing a Special Economic Zone there.

Qingdao in sound and vision

From the earlier Hong Kong generation of cinema, The Touch – starring Michelle Yeoh as a Qingdao circus performer charged with retrieving an ancient artefact – was partly filmed around the bay.

His entree to western music (the Backstreet Boys) was inglorious, but Qingdao’s first rapper, MC Sha Zhou, has come a long way – he’s even got his own Jay-Z rip off now.

What’s everyone talking about?

Someone is possibly getting over-zealous about Qingdao’s mission to become a green city. Since 2008, the city’s beaches have played host to an unwelcome summer invasion: tonnes of algae washed in from the Yellow Sea. No one knows the exact cause, and the gunk is fortunately non-toxic. Before the 2008 Olympics, 100,000 tonnes had to be cleared to allow the sailing events to take place. “Small boats would get stuck and couldn’t move,” says Dickinson.

You might think that it would threaten Qingdao’s status as China’s beach outing of choice; but holidaymakers seem to be incorporating it into their repertoire, apparently happy to frolic on, bury themselves in and make beach art with the green stuff. Surely no coincidence, then, that the inaugural Chinese algae expo took place here in 2015.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tourists play in the thick layer of green algae that appears on Qingdao’s beaches during the summer. Photograph: ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

What’s next for the city?

Working out how to get the best out of its seafront. Several schemes for bringing leisure options close to the south-facing beaches have failed, according to Dickinson. “Every restaurant, every bar, every coffee shop failed. Not a 10% failure rate – 100%.” There’s currently little conception of the area having the same kind of recreational allure as the kind of manicured seafront you see in the likes of Barcelona. “People come in tour buses, stare at the sea for an hour, then get bussed away. There’s only interest in having it available for grandmothers to walk their two-year-old grandkids along, dressed head-to-toe in their country-style clothing.”

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Plans also exist to line Jiaozhou Bay with the kind of light industry – fisheries and biomedical research – that brandishes the ecology card. But the presence of the Chinese navy in the city makes any kind of waterfront development difficult. “The city fathers and the cool people will want to open up things near the water, and then the navy shuts it down,” says Dickinson. “And that’s never discussed in public.”

Close zoom

Singaporean blogger The Smart Local gets around an impressive portion of the city in a single entry. The Qingdao(nese) blog has cast its net over the August beer festival (“the Asian Oktoberfest”) and the local propensity for “facekinis” on the beach, but doesn’t seem to have been updated recently. The state-run China Daily’s Qingdao is the most frequent English-language publisher from the region.

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