On wide, sycamore-lined Daxue Road, we passed the Qingdao Art Museum in an eclectic-style building with Roman columns and an Art Deco roof line, then passed the old Japanese Middle School, a handsome Art Nouveau structure now part of Ocean University of China, the country's foremost center for the study of marine sciences.
In the Badaguan neighborhood, once a leafy enclave for European merchants and officials, I saw Renaissance Revival facades, Victorian gingerbread, Art Nouveau grillwork, half-timbered.
From Badaguan to neighboring Fushan Bay, colonial architecture yields to the skyscrapers of the central business district, with its banks, apartment complexes and plush, international hotels. Wide open and undeveloped a decade ago, Fushan Bay now has the look of a modern Pacific Rim city, like a Seattle.
A long esplanade leads down to May 4th Square, a red metal sculpture shaped like a whirling top, the waterfront greenbelt and the Olympic yachting center.
Sailing is just beginning to catch on in China, and Qingdao has only one yacht club. Dean Brenner, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Sailing Committee, later told me that China has expended considerable effort and resources to develop the sport, with modest success. "But the winds are very light in Qingdao, and that makes it a challenging venue," he said.
Heading northeast, my guides and I passed one long beach after another, all empty under a dull sky. Wooden fishing boats moored in inlets rocked gently with the tide, their catch - cuttlefish, whelks, slugs, snails and a whole, strange bestiary of crustaceans - swimming in basins outside nearby seafood joints.
Beyond Shi Laoren, or Old Man Rock, the city thins out as the Laoshan Mountain reaches the sea in precipitous cliffs, boulder heaps and crevices giving toeholds to gnarled pines. Celebrated in classical poetry and scroll painting, the coast north of Qingdao attracted sages of Taoism, an ancient faith inspired by nature.
After that, Mr. Yang took me to the old stone Tsingtao brewery in the heart of old Qingdao, where there's a museum and tasting room. The Germans started it in 1903 chiefly to slake the thirst of their sailors and soldiers. They imported turn-of-the-last-century machinery, plus ingredients and recipes from the homeland and put the landmark Qingdao Bay pagoda on the label.
At a time when men wore long pigtails and women bound their feet, beer was virtually unknown in China. Now, Tsingtao - partly owned by Anheuser-Busch - is the No. 1 brew in the country.
