Why it looks like this

Zibo has no single downtown because it never was a single town: Zhangdian, Zichuan, Boshan, Zhoucun and Linzi grew up kilometres apart — on coal, ceramics, silk-trading and glass — and were bound into one municipality, leaving a constellation of urban clusters with farmland between.

The oldest bead on the string is Linzi: as capital of the state of Qi it was, over two thousand years ago, among the largest and richest cities on Earth, home by ancient accounts to hundreds of thousands. Its excavated walls and chariot pits now sit quietly at the eastern end of a 20th-century industrial chain.