Why it looks like this

The Germans planned their model colony with un-Chinese geometry: streets curving with the hilly, bay-cut terrain, villas with red tile roofs, a Bavarian-style governor's mansion and a Protestant church — a piece of Europe laid onto the Shandong coast. Their brewery, founded in 1903, became Tsingtao, China's most famous beer.

Japan and then modern China extended the city eastward along the shore, so the map runs in generations: the winding German old town at the tip, the 20th-century grids beyond it, and the skyscraper districts around further bays — a city that grew as a chain of coastal chapters.