About Qingdao Beer Museum

Qingdao Beer Museum

The Qingdao Beer Museum, also known as the Tsingtao Beer Museum, is a commercial museum operated by Tsingtao Brewery in Qingdao, Shandong Province, on China's northern coast. It stands at No. 56 Dengzhou Road in Shibei District, inside the original brewery founded in 1903 — a two-storey, red, Gothic-style German building that is a national key cultural relic protection unit. Opened on 15 August 2003, the centenary day of Tsingtao Beer, it was China's first professional beer museum, created by summing up the merits of comparable museums in developed countries and designed by an outstanding international team drawing on both Chinese and Western culture. Its official parent company's website is tsingtaobeer.com. Few industrial museums anywhere occupy the very factory, still less the very first factory, of the product they interpret.

The brewery it interprets: founded in 1903

The museum's subject begins a century before the museum itself. Qingdao had been leased to Germany in 1897 as the Kiautschou Bay concession, and German and British merchants set out to brew European-style beer there. The brewery was founded on 15 August 1903 as the Germania-Brauerei Tsingtao Co., Ltd., by the Anglo-German Brewery Co. Ltd., an English-German joint-stock company based in Hong Kong, with paid-in capital of 400,000 Mexican silver dollars. It was China's first brewing factory built with European technology, staffed under the supervision of master brewers from Germany, and at first it sold beer mainly to Europeans in China and for export to other Asian settlements, since its founders doubted local Chinese consumers would take to the drink.

The first beer was served on 22 December 1904. The brewery made pilsner — and a dark beer — following the German Reinheitsgebot purity law of 1516, using imported grain, hops planted nearby, German equipment supplied by Siemens and, crucially, spring water from nearby Laoshan, the celebrated mountain east of Qingdao. The combination worked quickly: the Germania pilsner won a gold medal at the Munich International Exhibition in 1906, an early international honour the museum's history displays still celebrate.

Japanese ownership, Chinese ownership, nationalisation

The brewery's ownership tracks Qingdao's turbulent twentieth century. During the First World War, Japanese forces took Qingdao, and on 16 August 1916 an extraordinary general meeting in Shanghai appointed liquidators and decided to sell the company to Japan's Dai-Nippon Brewery; the Japanese military administration approved the liquidation on 9 September 1916. Under Dai-Nippon, the brewery sold products under brands including Asahi and Sapporo. Although Japan returned Qingdao to China in 1922, the brewery continued under Japanese operation, and Japan occupied the city again from 1938 until its surrender in 1945.

After 1945 the brewery passed into Chinese ownership under the Tsui family, supervised by the Nationalist government in Nanjing. That period lasted only until 1949, when, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the family's private shares were confiscated and the brewery became a state-owned enterprise, renamed as the Tsingtao Brewery. It continued brewing through the decades that followed. With China's economic opening, the company was privatised in the early 1990s: in 1993 it merged with three other Qingdao breweries, was renamed Tsingtao Brewery Company Limited and was listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange — among the first mainland Chinese companies to list there. Tsingtao, introduced to the United States in 1972 and long the top-selling Chinese beer there, is now sold in dozens of countries, produced in breweries across China, and accounts for more than half of China's beer exports by some historical accounts. The museum tells this whole arc in the rooms where its first chapter happened.

Creating the museum, 2002 to 2003

The museum project began in 2002 — some accounts date the building work from 2001, in preparation for the centenary — and was completed in 2003 as a gift presented to the brewery on its 100th anniversary. Official statistics cited at the time put the investment at 28 million yuan. The museum opened on 15 August 2003, exactly one hundred years after the brewery's founding date. In the square before it stands the “Centennial Ode,” a sculpture in the form of the Arabic figure “100,” erected on the museum's opening day. In 2004 the museum was listed among the first industrial tourism demonstration units, in 2005 it was designated a national AAAA tourist attraction, and in 2006 the old brewery was designated a key national protected unit of cultural relics — recognition that the site matters as heritage, not only as a visitor attraction.

The building and the exhibition zones

The museum occupies more than 6,000 square metres in the century-old German architecture of the original brewery, one of a few typical Gothic constructions surviving in Qingdao: a two-storey red building whose steep, European profile is unlike anything else in the modern city around it. The exhibition is divided into three zones. The first is the History and Culture zone, the core of the museum. The second is the Production Process zone, preserving the old buildings, old equipment and workshops of the historic brewery. The third is a multimedia, entertainment and tasting zone, where the visit ends with beer itself. Through all three, the museum integrates the history and development of Tsingtao Beer with brewing technology, tasting, entertainment and shopping.

History and Culture: a century in objects

In the History and Culture zone, visitors follow the brewery from the German occupation of Qingdao, through purchase by Japan, to its return to China and its development after 1949. Displays include the brewery's origins and early German-era machinery, its honours and awards, historic labels and advertising, and the marks by which generations of drinkers knew the beer. Among the stories told here are the 1948 lighthouse trademark — the lighthouse image that became one of China's most recognisable brand marks — and advertising from 1947, preserved from the brief period of Chinese private ownership between Japanese rule and nationalisation. Video displays in each section present timelines of the history and development of beer production, and the route passes the places where numerous visiting dignitaries have preceded today's visitors.

Production Process: the century-old line

The Production Process zone shows the complete brewing process of a century ago alongside the modern production line. Its centrepieces are the four huge copper brewing vessels manufactured in Germany, which remained in use in the brewery until their decommissioning in 1995 — kettles that brewed Tsingtao through almost the whole of the twentieth century. Around them, antiquated machines from the early years overlook the modern filter plant and packaging departments, so visitors can compare traditional brewing techniques with present-day operations in a single view.

The treasure of the museum, by its own account, is here: an 1896 Siemens generator, said to be the world's oldest still-operable Siemens generator. Made before the brewery itself existed, it embodies the German industrial technology — Siemens equipment supplied the original plant — on which Qingdao's brewing was founded. The mock-up of the brewing laboratory and the preserved storage cellar complete a zone that explains malting, brewing, fermentation and packaging as physical processes, not abstractions.

Tasting, entertainment and Beer Street

The third zone gives the museum its festive character. In the multimedia and tasting area, visitors sample fresh draft Tsingtao — a brief tasting in the museum bar after the production tour is the ritual conclusion of the visit — and the museum offers beer entertainment and shopping built around the brand. Unlike a quick talk followed by drinking, as one visiting journalist put it, the museum first earns the tasting: by the time visitors reach the bar, they have walked through a hundred years of history and the full brewing line.

Outside, the museum anchors Dengzhou Road Beer Street, the string of beer parlours and restaurants in front of the brewery that makes the surrounding blocks Qingdao's beer quarter. The museum is also inseparable from the story of the Qingdao International Beer Festival, the city's famous summer celebration: the festival celebrates the beer, and the museum explains it. Together, brewery, museum, street and festival have made Qingdao known across China as its beer capital.

Visitors and significance

The museum draws over one million visitors a year in the operator's and destination accounts, and it has become both a source of pride for local people and a spectacular showcase for Qingdao beer to overseas visitors. It is a National AAAA attraction, a model of industrial tourism in China, and — as the first professional beer museum in China, described in some accounts as the first of its kind in the world — a pioneer in presenting industrial heritage as culture. Its deeper significance is preservation: because the museum was made inside the 1903 brewery, the German building, the copper vessels retired only in 1995 and the 1896 generator survive in place, interpreted where they worked. At No. 56 Dengzhou Road, the Qingdao Beer Museum lets a visitor drink a glass of beer inside the first chapter of Chinese brewing — and understand, from the objects around them, exactly how it got there.