September had just opened the fishing season. Skip the summer holiday crush, and it is a fine time for sand and seafood.

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Weihai is a small seaside city at the tip of the Jiaodong Peninsula, with a heavy historical side and a modern leisure side. Give it a few extra days and the holiday gets rich.

Day 1: Happiness Gate

The evening flight landed at Dashuipo Airport, a dual-use civil-military field. About half an hour before landing, the captain announced that every passenger had to close the window shades, and that photos were forbidden after touchdown.

Sure enough, on the way to the baggage carousel, we watched a J-10 land on the runway with its drag chute out.

The airport is fairly far from downtown Weihai. A taxi takes about 40 minutes.

The city does not unfold gradually. You pass through a tunnel and it is suddenly there. That was the first impression, a view with extraordinary depth rushing straight at you.

We checked into the hotel, had dinner nearby, then walked to Happiness Park by the sea. This is Happiness Gate, a Weihai landmark. The water behind it was pitch black, a cliffhanger left for the night.

Day 2: Walking the Old Town

The plan for the day was a walk through a few representative old-town streets and parks.

Qixia Street

The hotel was in the Weigao Plaza area, very close to Qixia Street. This is a purpose-built cluster of old-style buildings, filled with modern restaurants and entertainment. Call it a stylized commercial street.

Xinwei Side Road

After lunch we took a taxi to the south end of Xinwei Side Road and walked the whole street, also to duck the midday sun.

This is a rainbow-building viral street. If you are here for photos, only the northernmost 100 meters or so are worth it. The rest is ordinary local housing.

Walking up from the south end, under quiet plane-tree shade, felt easy. The sea is only a street or two away. Clouds driven by the sea breeze skimmed overhead, and the local life had a full marine flavor.

Passing a residential compound, we found a Catholic church hidden inside.

At the north end of Xinwei Side Road sit two rows of low old houses, workspaces for the Tsinghua Academy of Arts and Design. Across the street is an old porcelain factory that looks like it has been there a long time.

Haiyuan Park

A taxi took us to Haiyuan Park, a fishing harbor and fish market in one.

Across the water is Liugong Island. The bay was packed with fishing boats. This used to be the deep-water naval harbor where the Beiyang Fleet’s Dingyuan moored.

To be precise, these are not even fishing boats. They are small sampans. After the fishing boats dock, the crew switch to sampans to come ashore. The fishing boats probably draw too much water to come in close.

The waterfront market was in a slack hour. The last catch had mostly been sold, and the styrofoam boxes on the dock were empty. The vendors told us to come back after 3 p.m., when boats would return one after another and restock.

Beside the market is a rocky shore. It was a weekend. Local girls had brought fishing rods to catch crabs, very practiced, one every few moments. My daughter picked up a bamboo stick, no line, no bait, and pretended to fish too.

The theme of the trip was sand and seafood, so we decided to buy catch at the market and have a nearby restaurant cook it.

The fishing boats started coming back. In the distance you could see fishermen moving crate after crate of seafood onto the sampans.

The little sampans carried the catch toward the market.

These small boats work inshore, so the fish are not large. There were several crates of small bigeye and sole.

Then the market got crowded, shoulder to shoulder, hard even to walk. There were swimming crabs larger than the ones in the photo; a little later they had been bought. Sea cucumbers this size are also rare inland.

We bought six or seven kinds of seafood. When we left, every sampan in the harbor had come in, and fishing boats filled the spots they had left.

Half Moon Bay

While waiting for the boats, we walked to the nearby Half Moon Bay beach to play in the sand.

Half Moon Bay is not a large beach, and we did not go in for a swim. This was only the appetizer. The main beach act came later.

Day 3: International Bathing Beach

A taxi took us to Weihai International Bathing Beach, the largest beach in the city. We were stunned on arrival by the orderly rolls of cirrus.

The sand is extremely coarse, but it does not blow easily, and the water does not churn it into murk. The sea was very clear, with a jelly-like look.

In the afternoon my daughter and I went in and played in the water for nearly two hours. We also fished back a strand that looked like a jellyfish tentacle, using a stick.

My wife rested on a beach chair. Two Russian-speaking visitors under the next umbrella may have come to escape the cold. We had come to escape the heat.

We stayed from morning until night. My daughter could not get enough. The two adults just watched the high sky, the open water, and the weather changing, from noon into the evening.

While swimming, my daughter found a slightly older girl to play with. They went from the water to the shore and only said goodbye after dark.

There was also a singer at night. Most of the visitors still on the beach by then were staying nearby. We were staying in downtown Weihai, so we left before the show ended.

Day 4: The Coastal Highway

The original plan was Liugong Island, but a typhoon came in and the island boats stopped running. The coast was too windy for the water as well. We hired a car on the spot and worked through the photo stops along the city’s coastal highway one by one.

First was Siyanlou, the Four-Eyed Building. Weihai was once a British leased territory, and with hot springs besides, a great many British merchants built Western houses here for summer holidays.

Then we passed the WWI Chinese Labour Corps Memorial. During the First World War, the Beiyang government sent laborers in lieu of soldiers, training and dispatching 140,000 Chinese workers from Weihai to the European theater.

Sanlian Island is a small peninsula between Haiyuan Park and Half Moon Bay beach, with a view of three uninhabited islets in a row. The place is very niche: a scrap of green on a cliff, almost no tourists, a few locals camping in tents.

We had already been to Half Moon Bay, so we did not stop again. Straight on to Jiangguzui, which styles itself as Jeju Island.

Jiangguzui is in fact a small pier with a tiny beach nearby. The beach is piled with pink scallop shells. Years of wave-wear have turned the whole beach pink with shell fragments.

Not far from Jiangguzui was the core of the day, Cat Head Mountain, which from a distance looks like a cat crouched on the sea.

This site is the high point of the coastal highway, split into two separate sections. Each has a string of viewing platforms, and inside you can only walk or take one of two sightseeing shuttles. The heart of the south section is Platform 3, with a long view of Cat Head Mountain. The heart of the north section is Platform 10, the high ground behind the cat’s rear.

The adults looked at the scenery. My daughter was not interested. She found that the rivets and holes in the coastal-highway guardrail looked like faces: some with wide eyes, some with mouths open in surprise, and some with a fallen leaf stuck in the hole, turning into a tongue-out grimace. She performed the faces for me one by one: this is an mm, this is an oh, this is a bleh… When the guardrail ran out, she picked a stem of foxtail grass and improvised a long caterpillar adventure for us, talking all the way back to the car.

Northern seas, because strong winds and waves bring nutrients from the depths to the surface, feed large amounts of chlorophyll-bearing phytoplankton, so the water is greener than in the south. Blue-green water and coastal pine woods make a completely different picture from southern shores.

Platform 3 has a long stairway down to the cliff edge.

At the bottom of the steps you can get this close to the rocks.

Because the hired driver was waiting, we only went in to Platforms 1, 2, and 3, then returned the way we came.

Leaving Cat Head Mountain, we rounded a mountain bend of almost 180 degrees and passed Jingzi Beach. Little developed, it looked wild.

Then we went on past Putao Beach. Cat Head Mountain plus Putao Beach had originally been the Day 5 plan, brought forward because the boats were cancelled. We got out at Putao Beach, saw waves far too big to play in, and drove on west.

Next was Yuanyao Wharf. Thanks to the heavy weather and cancelled sailings, we got to see the fishing fleet clustered in the harbor.

Golden Beach is another resort beach. The long, narrow ridge in the photo is the longest peninsula in urban Weihai, with a golf resort at the tip. It is already not far from the largest International Bathing Beach, and the sand was almost empty.

Golden Coast Pier is an internal attraction of a five-star hotel at the east end of the International Bathing Beach, open to the public.

Across the whole International Bathing Beach, the last stop for the hired car was Huoju 8th Street. It is a sloping road that points straight at the sea. Photo tourists were thick on the ground, and a few shooting spots even had queues.

The street is not long. It has every trait of a viral spot: easy photos, a small footprint, milk tea, and no walking to speak of.

Day 5: A Warship and a Beach

Unfortunately, Liugong Island stayed closed. The day’s itinerary was mostly improvised.

Destroyer Dalian

We went first to the Liugong Island pier. We could not get to the island, and could not see the Dingyuan replica, but the pier has a modern destroyer to look at.

This is destroyer Dalian, a well-rounded ship: a 130 mm main gun with an anti-surface range of more than 30 kilometers, almost the limit of what the naked eye can see at sea. The secondary gun behind the main gun can handle anti-ship missiles, firing up to 800 rounds a minute, with an elevation of up to 45 degrees. On both sides ahead of the main gun are anti-submarine rockets, the kind often filmed launching in navy exercise footage.

Shells for the main gun.

This is the captain’s cabin, right behind the bridge. Next door is a political commissar’s cabin. A group of older visitors walked up, and one of them pointed at the commissar’s cabin, quite excited, and said, look, that was my room.

Anti-ship missiles, eight on one side, the same fit on both beams.

Surface-to-air missiles.

Infrared decoy flares at the stern, to draw off enemy fire.

The dense radar and antennas on top of the bridge.

A propeller sitting on shore, this large.

Naxianghai

A taxi toward Rongcheng took us to Naxianghai.

Wind turbines line this stretch of coast, a sign of rich, stable wind. In the distance is Jiming Island, Rongcheng’s signature holiday island.

Some turbines even stand on the sidewalk. It was the first time I had looked at a wind turbine this close.

The weather was still terrible, with huge wind and waves. The beach kept broadcasting that the site was closed, that visitors on shore should watch their safety, and that no one should go in the water.

The scene was very much like Penguins of Madagascar: a few little ones go to enormous trouble to reach Antarctica, stand there in the blizzard, and after ten-odd seconds squeeze out a line: Well, this sucks.

The wind had nearly blown us silly too. We built sandcastles with our daughter for an hour, then got out fast, retreating to Naxianghai Town across the coastal road.

Plenty of cities have a tourism town like this: a developer takes a large tract near a sight and builds a district that mixes tourism with local life. Hot springs, amusement, a commercial center, resort hotels, and local apartment blocks sit together.

By the roadside you can rent electric sidecar trikes like this, a novelty for the whole family. Driving one for the first time felt very strange. I had a hard time forming a correct sense of where the center of gravity was, or of the turning radius left and right.

A local residential compound is enough for my daughter. She spent an hour and a half in this pirate-ship-themed indoor playground.

In the taxi back to downtown Weihai, a sunset showed up in the far sky.

Day 6: Huancui Tower

Return day, an afternoon flight, so we could only wander near the hotel.

Huancui Tower Park happened to be nearby, a free local park. From the tower you can see a panorama of downtown Weihai. We did not have time to go in.

There was singing and dancing in the park. Listening closely, the square dancing was Xinjiang music. There really were a few uncles and aunties in Xinjiang caps, spinning through folk dance. Some Han-looking residents had joined in, looking clumsy, but just as happy, easy to tell apart. A Xinjiang uncle taught them, showing how to clap and lift a leg.

A short way up the steps, halfway we heard a professional older choir rehearsing revolutionary songs. The part-splitting and the way they produced sound told you at once they knew their craft.

Coming back down, at the center of the square at the foot of Huancui Tower, a bronze of Deng Shichang leans on a long sword. His gaze runs down a straight modern road toward Liugong Island and the former Beiyang Fleet harbor. The stone plinth under his feet is in fact shaped like a bow. It is not obvious from this angle. It must be his Zhiyuan.

Thinking back over these days of beaches, seafood, the fishing harbor, the warship, and the military zones you keep running into around Weihai, tucked among civilian buildings, waiting around an ordinary corner. Few cities let you feel how good daily life is and, at the same time, remember the force that guards it.

Geography and History

Weihai is the easternmost prefecture-level city on the Jiaodong Peninsula, sea on three sides, a gateway to the Bohai Gulf. That geography gave Weihai a special fate.

Most cities grow outward from a settlement as the population rises. Weihai was born a military fortress. In the Ming, to meet wokou raids, a great many coastal garrisons were set along the shore, called wei. Weihaiwei is the predecessor of modern Weihai, the name meaning to awe the maritime frontier. The destruction of the Beiyang Fleet in the First Sino-Japanese War laid a tragic color over the city. For the First Sino-Japanese War and how modern naval warfare changed, see this piece of mine if you are interested. I will not unfold it in a travelogue.

After that war, the powers took leased ports along the Qing coast one after another. To the south then was German-leased Qingdao; to the north, Russian-leased Dalian. The British were in a hurry, and forced a lease of Weihai from the Qing government to counter Russian influence in the Far East. Germany and Tsarist Russia built industry on the spot. The British turned Weihai into a naval convalescent resort.

In some of Weihai’s houses and malls today, you can still see traces of British Renaissance architecture.

After long effort by the Republican government and civic movements, Britain returned Weihaiwei peacefully in 1930. Weihai became the first leased territory in China to revert in peace.

Shed the heavy history, and modern Weihai shows a vivid side that goes well beyond tourism. Its stronger industries include medicine and medical devices, composite materials, special-purpose ships, and fishing tackle. And a very important one: fisheries. Rongcheng and Rushan are the core of Weihai’s distant-water fishing and large-scale inshore aquaculture.

Weihai also has a little-known hard-power card, Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant, the world’s first Generation IV reactor unit to enter service. Each piece of nuclear fuel is wrapped in graphite particles 0.5 mm across. At that sparsity, even if every external cooling measure failed, a free-running core still could not reach 1,600°C and melt the graphite shell, a physical safety guarantee. The Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents both involved a core that ran too hot and burned through outer containment. Another Generation IV breakthrough is the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, using helium instead of water as the coolant. Helium can raise the core outlet temperature by a large margin and lift generating efficiency by more than 30%.

Besides the British influence, you feel a stronger cultural force in Weihai: Korean culture.

This is no longer a folk-level influence. Street signs all over Weihai carry Korean.

Even on lanes only locals use, Korean food is everywhere.

The International Bathing Beach puts up signs like this too. I would love to split hairs: looking at the map, the land across this water is actually Dalian.

Why? Weihai is the Chinese city with the shortest straight-line distance to Korea. Before China and South Korea established formal relations, people were already crossing. The Weihai–Incheon passenger route made Weihai an outpost of trade with Korea. Heavy two-way traffic of people also supported Weihai’s local Korea-facing services.

On this trip we ran into three Korean visitors in the hotel elevator. I picked up a scrap of Korean in university and could tell they were saying my daughter was pretty.

Local Life

Climate

Weihai is cool in summer and autumn. It is coastal, but the air is not particularly humid. In early September, temperatures sit around 22-27°C, very comfortable. The sea feels cool at first touch, then warms around noon and in the afternoon, and swimming is no problem. That is, when there is no typhoon.

Winter in Weihai is very cold, harder than the dry cold of the Northeast. North of the city is the Bohai Sea, with nothing in the way, so Siberian air hits you full in the face. A local driver told us that in winter, if you are not fully bundled, you simply cannot take it.

Most houses in Weihai have these red peaked roofs. Locals told us they are for shedding snow. Midwinter snow can pile to calf height. Northerners may find that ordinary; in the south you never see it. Picture this: after a snowfall, the roads and sidewalks are cleared, and the snow on the lawn beside them is still stacked to mid-calf.

Hotels

For a Weihai trip, lodging falls mainly in four areas, from upper left to lower right:

• Along the International Bathing Beach: first choice if you will spend several days on the beach. Dining and shops around it are mature, a world of its own.
• Downtown Weihai: the richest old-town and local-life experience, and a base for sights around the city.
• Weihai Station area: closest to the train station and the airport, with Hanlefang and several seaside parks nearby, and mature commerce as well.
• Toward Rongcheng: even the nearest Rongcheng-direction sights are more than 40 minutes by car. Stay here only if Rongcheng is the main play.

Transport

Weihai has no metro or light rail, and the terrain is hilly, with many steep grades, so you almost never see bicycles or bike-share. The transport options are few: taxis, a hired car, a rental car, or rented e-bikes.

Taxis are the first choice, because the city’s visitor facilities are fairly concentrated and none of the distances are long. Ride-hail prices in Weihai are genuinely low. From the center, under 20 yuan will get you almost anywhere in the old town. Per kilometer, that is about half the unit price in Hangzhou.

Food

Weihai opens the fishing season on September 1. Inshore small boats can be back with a catch in two or three days, so coming in early September you can eat the first wave of fresh seafood.

This was a food-and-holiday trip, so meals were the main event. We found two restaurants of very high quality, and ate at each twice. That says more than anything else, does it not?

Near Happiness Gate, beside Huanhai Road, is Yingxiang Weihai · Weihai Banquet, a local family-banquet restaurant, many private rooms, a small hall.

A kind of rice sheet eaten with chili sauce.

Spanish mackerel dumplings, Weihai’s headline dish, because they show up on the storefronts of restaurants large and small.

A seafood platter. The oysters and scallops were worth praising, and the shrimp and abalone were very fresh too. The base of the dish is clams. We rarely eat starfish. The flavor is fresh, but the texture is very dry.

This was just ordinary steamed sea bass. When the ingredient is good, it cannot go far wrong.

Along Yugang Road is Longcheng Restaurant. There are no sights nearby. The shop looks like a long-standing local place, and locals outnumber tourists inside.

Stir-fried baby squid, sweet-spicy, the fishiness well handled.

A local specialty, sea intestine over rice. Sea intestine has a crisp bite. At another restaurant I also had it stir-fried with garlic chives, also excellent. Alive, the animal looks like a large fleshy worm, and it does resemble an intestine. No photo. Search it if you are curious.

A slender shellfish like a razor clam. We tried it once in soup and once braised in sauce.

Fried needlefish, the timing just right.

Steamed egg with sea urchin.

The oysters were not as large as at Yingxiang Weihai.

From the dining room at Longcheng Restaurant you can see into the kitchen. It looked orderly, clean, and tidy.

We also ate at another remarkable place, Zhudao Restaurant. The shop has a dated air from inside out. It is the courtyard of the Weihai Supply and Marketing Workers’ School, converted in place into a restaurant without moving a brick.

This is what the gate looks like, viewed from inside out. The gatehouses on both sides are still there.

Classrooms or offices have become private rooms, and this space that looks like a work-unit canteen has become the hall.

The food is very homestyle too. Not bad, but truly homestyle. Eating it, I wondered whether this is everyday Weihai family dinner. The restaurant’s real focus may be barbecue, not these dishes. Either way, coming for the strange work-unit courtyard dining room is interesting enough.

Then there was the night at Haiyuan Park, buying seafood ourselves and having a restaurant cook it. That went badly. The ingredients were fine. The steamed dishes came out well. Anything the kitchen actually cooked was a wreck. The sea cucumber was overdone, like a rubber band; the baby squid was not deodorized at all, and I did not see a single slice of ginger on the plate; the octopus somehow tasted bitter; and so on. I will not list the rest.

Contract cooking, after all, will not get anyone’s full care.

The other meals, because we were busy going out, were all casual. On the International Bathing Beach day, dinner was packed from a shop across the road and eaten in the sea wind. The food and the setting were both good, but I forgot the name. Shops around the bathing beach are hit-or-miss. Another place we had at noon was very ordinary.

A few small findings too, for instance that they call hairtail knife fish here, and that stir-fried vegetables like a starch slurry.

Odds and Ends

The first night in Weihai, after dinner, we crossed a pedestrian overpass to Happiness Gate. People were stalling on the bridge. I had not seen that overpass culture in a long time. I bought my daughter a little Blue Ways souvenir. She treated it as a phone and took photos the whole way.

After several days of taxis in Weihai, we noticed that intersections all have names, with signs reading XX Gang. A driver said that is what intersections are called here: old traffic posts that stayed on as place names.

Travel Costs

Finally, a breakdown of the trip costs. The total came to nearly 10,000 yuan, mostly flights and seafood:

And a category breakdown:

I am also sharing the pre-trip planning document. Tweak it and it is usable:

https://travel.victor42.work/trip/weihai/

Travel planning actually has a fixed logic. String the factors together in a particular order and an itinerary comes out quickly.

The thinking is in this piece: A Hands-on Guide to Making a Travel Plan.