In the Trenches

Perched on top of the lookout

with the grands

Peeking out from the lookout

The gunners

Climbing up the the lookout

Golden Germans

On Father's Day we made a pilgrimage to another manly place. (Do you like the Top Gun soundtrack? I thought it helped meld the masculine/military theme of these two most recent posts.) Three years in, and we had never visited Qingdao Shan (Hill/Mountain) Fort the site of a military command post/fort created by the Germans at the turn of last century. And it wasn't an easy task to find it. Unlike so many other tourists traps in our city that are over publicized, and over priced (like the Navy Museum, in my mind) the Qingdao Hill Fort remains reclusive, and even our driver, who seems to know most parts of our huge city needed to ask for directions!

The fort rests within the hill... a carved out bunker of more than 50 halls and rooms. Like everything else the done by the Germans, the trenches they carved into the seaside hills over 100 years ago, when Qingdao was Tsingtao (or the more German "Tsingtau") are meticulous. Long corridors at the end of which are lavatories (long corridors to help with smell prevention), radiant heat, escape routes, look-outs and sleeping spaces, officers quarters. The pictures we took really don't do it justice, because long, cool, damp tunnels underground really don't photograph well.

But we did learn a few interesting things:

• After the Boxer Rebellion (when Chinese revolted against the white imperialists they felt were polluting their land.) the land of present day Qingdao was ceded to Germany for 99 years. The German's seized upon the fact that two German missionaries were slain in the rebellion, and took up a tip of the Shandong peninsula in exchange for lost lives. Qingdao was little more than a fishing village, but it became a far East post for Germany, who was growing restless, and would become a major player in the impending world wars.
• According to documentation in the Fort, Qingdao was the only Asian battlefield in World War I. The Germans were overtaken in Qingdao by the Japanese in 1915, and the city then fell into Japanese hands. As one sign read, "The Japanese-German Qingdao war lasted two and half months.This is a war that is caused by two imperialist countries for their colonial interests in China. It brought bad disaster to Qingdao people."
• Needless to say, the German hold on Qingdao did NOT last 99 years. Their influence, however did, evidenced in beer and a penchant for building Bavarian styled buildings!