The capital of Shandong, China and a busy industrial city with three million inhabitants, JI'NAN is the province's major transit point and communication centre, which anyone travelling in the area is bound to visit at some point. It's possible to kill a day here, but as the tourist sights are unspectacular and the hotel situation is poor, the city is best thought of as a stop off on the way to or from Qufu and Tai'an, a few hours south.

Though you'd never guess it, the city has an illustrious past. It stands on the site of one of China's oldest settlements , and pottery unearthed nearby has been dated to over four thousand years ago. The present town dates from the fourth century AD when Ji'nan was a military outpost and trading centre. The town expanded during the Ming dynasty, when the city walls were built - they're no longer standing but you can see where they were on any map by the moats that once surrounded them. Present development dates back to 1898, when the Germans obtained the right to build the Shandong rail lines. Track was laid from Qingdao, another German concession town, and the line completed in 1904. The city was opened up to foreign trade in 1906, and industrialized rapidly under the Germans, English and Japanese.

Ji'nan is famous in China for its natural springs , which are actually rather dull. Once impressive sights - the poet Li Fenggao wrote of the Qing city, "Waterlilies on four sides, willows on three, half the city is a mountain, half is a lake" - and earning the town a reputation for cleanliness and health, these days the springs resemble little more than muddy pools. Some of the nineteenth-century German and Japanese architecture remains, but Ji'nan's buildings aren't pretty. The fashion for facing buildings with white bathroom-style tiling seems to have reached its zenith here, and to Western eyes the city looks like an enormous complex of public conveniences. The most interesting places are all outside the centre, and the most rewarding way to spend any time in the city is to stroll through the parks with their attractive lakes, or slog your way up Thousand Buddha Mountain in the south.