Qingdao's liyuan courtyards, the lived-in old town behind the beer street

The courtyard at Guangxing Li fills with sound before it fills with light: a bicycle bell, a kettle, someone sweeping granite. Three storeys of timber gallery run around the square, and the doors on the ground floor open one by one — a bookbinder, a coffee counter, a woman setting out stools. This is the old town of Qingdao (青岛, Qīngdǎo), the part that lives behind the beer street, and it is built almost entirely out of a single stubborn idea: the liyuan.

What a liyuan is

The liyuan (里院, lǐyuàn) is Qingdao's own invention, and you will not find it in quite this form anywhere else. A European-style facade faces the street, two or three storeys of grey brick and stucco; step through the arched gateway and the building turns Chinese, wrapping a central courtyard with a timber gallery walkway (外廊, wàiláng) that once held dozens of families. Shops took the ground floor, homes the floors above, and the courtyard did the work a corridor could not — light, air, laundry, gossip.

里院是青岛老城独有的院落式民居，临街是欧式立面，院内是中国式的合院与木质外廊。

Guangxing Li (广兴里, Guǎngxīng Lǐ) is the one to start with, the largest of them, a full block bounded by four streets — Haibo Road (海泊路), Gaomi Road (高密路), Yizhou Road (易州路) and Boshan Road (博山路). It was restored a few years ago and reopened as a design and craft yard; entry is free, and the courtyard is open to anyone who wants to sit. The gallery timbers have been replaced but kept the same width, so the proportions stay honest even where the paint is new.

The old town, block by block

Zhongshan Road (中山路, Zhōngshān Lù) is the spine, the commercial street the German and Republican-era town grew along, and it is the loud part. The quiet is one block east and uphill, on the lanes most tour groups skip. Sifang Road (四方路) and the streets around it still carry small trades — a seal carver, a mahjong parlour, a shop selling nothing but buttons and zippers.

Huangdao Road (黄岛路, Huángdǎo Lù) is the one to walk slowly. Halfway along, the street gives up on being flat and becomes a staircase of worn granite, and the morning market runs right up the steps: plastic tubs of clams and razor shells, buckets of live crab, greens weighed on hand scales. Clams go for eight to ten yuan a jin, and the sellers pack down by late morning, so this is a thing you see before eleven or not at all. For food with a roof, Pichaiyuan (劈柴院, Pīcháiyuàn), the J-shaped alley off Jiangning Road (江宁路), has fed the old town since the early 1900s; it is touristy now, thick with grilled squid skewers, but the bones of it are real.

Draft beer in a bag

The most Qingdao thing you can buy here costs about ten yuan and comes in a plastic bag. Draft beer (散啤, sǎn pí) is sold by weight straight from the barrel at small shops all over the old town; they ladle it into a clear bag, knot the top, hand you a straw, and you drink it walking or standing at a folding table. A jin — roughly a pint — runs eight to twelve yuan depending on the shop and the strength.

Between beers there is tea and there is breakfast. Family teahouses have opened inside a few of the restored courtyards, six or eight tables, a pot of green or chrysanthemum for thirty to fifty yuan that no one hurries you to finish. For the morning, look for pan-fried pork-and-cabbage guotie (锅贴, guōtiē) and a bowl of soy milk or seafood broth; the counters locals queue at are the ones with no English on the wall and a hand-written price list taped to the till.

Where to look up

The old town reads best from above, because the thing that makes it whole is the roofs — a tide of red tile broken by two church spires. Signal Hill Park (信号山公园, Xìnhàoshān Gōngyuán) on Longshan Road has a rotating viewing room near the summit, and the platform costs about fifteen yuan and turns slowly enough that you can pick out the courtyards you walked.

Down at street level, St Michael's Cathedral (圣弥厄尔大教堂, Shèng Mí'è'ěr Dàjiàotáng) anchors the top of Zhejiang Road (浙江路), its twin towers visible from half the lanes below. Entry to the nave is around ten yuan; the square in front fills with wedding-photo couples on clear weekends, which tells you something about how the city itself feels about this quarter.

From Signal Hill the roofs run unbroken to the water, and only then do the liyuan make sense — not as buildings but as one long grain, laid down block by block.

Getting there, and when

Take Metro Line 3 to Qingdao Railway Station (青岛站, Qīngdǎo Zhàn), where it meets Line 1, and walk in from the south end of Zhongshan Road; the whole old town is small enough to cross on foot in a morning, though the hills will make you feel otherwise. Come in late spring or early autumn — May and June, or September and October — when the sea keeps the air mild and the light is long. The mistake to avoid is arriving in August for the international beer festival and expecting these lanes to be calm, or worse, staying out at the Badaguan (八大关) villas and the beaches and never coming into the old town at all. The courtyards are where the city actually kept living, and they close for no season.