Once you can say the name of the place out loud, the questions start arriving.
They come from friends, from strangers in the comments under a video, from people who are quietly thinking of doing the same thing and want to know, before they commit anything, whether it could work for them. There are about a dozen of them and they are always the same dozen. In the years before I moved, I was asking versions of these questions myself, and most of what I found was written either by people who had never been here or by people who had come for one weekend in August. So this chapter is the answers I wanted then. I have put the questions in groups rather than in a list, because in a list they look like twelve separate worries and in fact they are four or five.
The cold
The first question is nearly always about the cold, and it is nearly always asked by someone from the south of China, who has been told that the north is a frozen country. Will the pipes burst?
I have lived through four winters here. One of them I spent away, in the south, and even then I checked the temperature in this town most mornings, out of habit, so I know what each of the four did. The coldest nights ran around minus thirteen, minus twelve and minus ten Celsius, in different years. In all of that, the pipes in my kitchen and my bathroom have never frozen, let alone split, and I have never heard of it happening to a neighbour. Four winters, a building full of flats, no burst pipe.
That is not because the winters are mild. It is because a pipe that runs through a flat somebody lives in does not freeze. Water freezes when it stops moving and then sits below zero for hours on end. A pipe behind a kitchen cabinet, inside a wall, in a room where a person cooks and washes and sleeps, is not sitting below zero. The room around it is cold. The room around it is not outside.
For a pipe to actually split you would need sustained cold well below minus fifteen, for days on end. That is a northeast China winter, not a Shandong one. Shandong is a peninsula; there is sea on both sides of it, and the water keeps the coast from dropping as low as the interior does. Here, minus thirteen is about as bad as a winter gets, and it does not stay there. The genuinely cold days in a whole winter can be counted on one hand. Most of December and January are clear, dry and sunny, and — this is the comparison that matters — mild next to Beijing or Harbin.
There is a real exception, and it is worth stating, because it is the reason some people do lose a pipe. If a flat is empty for the whole winter — nobody in it, no heat on at all — then the indoor temperature falls to whatever it is outside, and a pipe somewhere between the wall and the meter will eventually freeze and split. That happens here every year, and it happens to flats whose owners are in Jinan or Zhengzhou and have not been back since September. It happens to houses. It does not happen to homes.
The second half of the cold question is heating, and here the popular version is closer to true than most of the rest. Is it really true that there is no heating?
The accurate sentence is: very few of the compounds have central heating. This is not a northern town that lost its heating. It is a town built south of the line where the government supplies it, and that line has been drawn the same way for decades. A handful of the older, larger compounds — Weiliya, Shanshui Renjia, the north part of Bihai Huating — have central heating, because they were built with it. Most do not. There has been a retrofit programme running for the last couple of years and I have seen a list of fourteen compounds that are supposed to be connected within a few years, but I would not plan a move around a schedule that nobody has published.
So what is a winter actually like, in a flat with no central heating?
I can give you my own numbers. In the winter of 2022 the thermometer in my bedroom read six to eight degrees Celsius when I woke up. There was a rim of ice in the channel of the window frame that did not melt until the middle of the day. By afternoon, if the sun was out, the room came back up to about thirteen. When the sun went in, it went down again.
You do not have to be cold in that, but you do have to have a plan, and almost everyone here has the same one. An electric blanket, on all night, with two quilts on top of it: that is the minimum, and for a lot of people it is also the whole of it. A hot water bottle, or a small electric heater, for the hours when you sit still and your hands go cold. If the electricity bill does not worry you, an air conditioner in heating mode is the fastest way to warm a room and also the most expensive. Some owners, the ones who are good with their hands, fit a wall-hung gas boiler and give themselves their own central heating, one flat at a time.
Four winters of doing this have left me with one conclusion, and it is not a dramatic one. The cold is real and the lack of heating is a genuine inconvenience, and neither of those is the same thing as being unable to live here. It is a problem with solutions, and the solutions cost a few hundred yuan and one change of habit — getting up and putting the kettle on instead of staying under the quilt arguing with the thermometer.
The water and the wires
Two questions get bundled under the heading of infrastructure. The first is about water, and it is the one that makes me laugh.
Do people here drink spring water? Is there no tap water?
Rushan Silver Beach is a national AAAA-rated tourist resort. It is not a mountain village. Piped water comes out of the tap, it has been treated at a plant, it meets the national standard, and it has been coming out of these taps for decades. I cook with it, boil it for tea, wash in it. It is the same arrangement as in any other town in the country. There are old wells in some of the villages further inland, the way there are old wells in villages anywhere, but nobody drinks from them; they are still standing for the same reason the stone walls are still standing, which is that nobody has got round to taking them down.
The second question is about interruptions, and this one is fair, because interruptions do happen. Do the water, the electricity and the internet go off often?
They go off, and they do not go off often. The time to expect trouble is July and August, when the summer population arrives and the load on the grid reaches its yearly peak; that is when you occasionally lose water or power for a few hours. Planned work — a line being serviced, a pipe being repaired — is announced in advance, in the compound’s group chat or on the notice board by the gate, which is how it ought to be. I have kept a rough count for my own compound, and it is under five interruptions a year for water or electricity, most of them measured in hours, none of them longer than half a day. The internet is about the same: a few times a year, either a fault or a fibre being spliced, and a phone call to the provider gets you a time and an explanation.
The rates are worth writing down, because they are part of why the arithmetic of this life works at all: water at 3.05 yuan per ton, electricity at 0.555 yuan per unit, gas at 3.28 yuan per cubic metre. Energy is the one part of a household budget here that behaves itself.
The post
Then there is the question that everyone under fifty asks first, and it is about parcels.
Can you get deliveries out there? Is there no courier?
There are couriers. Every compound that has people living in it, which is most of them, has a pickup point — a counter or a shelf in a shop by the gate, run by one of the residents. ZTO, YTO, Yunda, STO, the main companies, all deliver to it. When your parcel arrives you get a message with a code; you walk over, you give the code or the last four digits of your phone number, and you take your parcel home. If you leave it there for a few days nobody minds and nobody charges you for it. JD and SF, the two that sell service rather than price, will bring it to your door, which is the same as anywhere else in the country.
The one exception is the compounds so far out that almost nobody lives in them. Those share a pickup point with the next compound along, so you walk a little further. That is the whole of the difficulty. It is worth knowing before you order a desk.
So the internet economy reaches here, and it reaches here the same way it reaches everywhere. I order from Pinduoduo and Taobao the way I did in Beijing, and the parcel arrives.
The food
Food questions come in three parts, and the answers are not all the same, so I will take them one at a time.
Can you order takeaway?
Some. Meituan and Ele.me both have merchants here, but the number is a fraction of what a city has, the menus are short, and the delivery fee is higher, because there is not enough density for a delivery business to be efficient. I should be honest about my own position in this: in three years here I have never once ordered takeaway. I do not have either app on my phone. That is not because it is impossible; it is because after a few months of cooking for myself I stopped wanting it. Almost everyone who lives here long-term cooks. The cost of living is low enough that eating out counts as a small luxury and takeaway counts as a large one.
Which brings me to the thing I would say to anyone seriously considering this life. If you cannot cook and have no intention of learning, think about that harder than you think about the rent. The convenience of a city is, in the end, mostly the convenience of food. Here, food is something you make.
I would add that cooking is not difficult, and I say that as somebody who arrived as a beginner. You start with three things: a pot of rice, two fried eggs, a plate of cabbage with vinegar. Anyone can do those. And then you notice that the twenty minutes you spend waiting for the rice to steam is twenty minutes you could spend standing on the balcony looking at the sea, and that the smell of something frying in a pan does more for the end of a day than any delivery app ever did.
Do the restaurants all close in winter?
Half true. Most of them do close. The restaurants here live on the summer, and when the summer population leaves, most of them shut and pull the shutter down and go home, because keeping a kitchen open for a few hundred people in January is not a business, it is a donation. The food street that in August is tables and noise is in January a row of rolling shutters with a phone number taped to the door.
But not all of them. The ones that stay are the old ones — the family places that have been here ten years, the dumpling shop, a couple of northeast-Chinese restaurants. They stay open all year because they have customers who are here all year, and the customers who are here all year are the people who winter here, which means people like the ones reading this. So the choice is smaller and you walk further, and it is worth finding out which places are open before you are hungry.
Do the supermarket and the market close?
No. This one is simply wrong, and it is wrong because of the order of human needs: whatever else is missing in winter, food was never going to be one of them.
Jiajiayue, the Shandong supermarket chain, has a branch here and it does not close. In winter it shortens its hours and shuts earlier than in summer, which is a detail, not a problem. It is open on the morning of Lunar New Year’s Eve. It closes for the first two days of the new year, and it reopens on the third.
The market is the more interesting of the two. The one by my gate opens on the lunar calendar days that end in five and in ten — the fifth, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth, the thirtieth. On New Year’s Eve morning there were still stalls out in the cold, selling the last of the year’s stock. The market takes five days off for the holiday, and by the fifth and sixth days of the new year the stalls are drifting back. You can buy vegetables that were picked the day before and seafood that was landed the same morning, and you can argue about the price, which is half of what a market is for.
The wind
Then there is the sentence that every Weihai person says and every visitor repeats: Weihai has two winds a year, and each one lasts six months.
It is a joke, and a good one. It is also, taken literally, the source of a real misunderstanding, because Weihai city and Rushan do not have the same weather, and the difference is geographical.
Weihai city sits at the northern tip of the peninsula, facing the Bohai Sea, and takes the north wind head-on. It is genuinely windy there, and in winter it snows heavily — Weihai and Yantai are known together, locally, as the snow nests of Shandong. Rushan Silver Beach is on the opposite side, the south coast, facing the Yellow Sea. And behind it, to the north, the Kunyu mountains run across the peninsula and take most of the cold air before it arrives.
The result is that the wind here is much gentler than the wind in Weihai city, the snow is much lighter, and the winter is warmer. There is wind. There are days when it comes off the water and you do not want to be walking into it. But it is not what the sentence promises, and if you choose where to live on the strength of that one line, you are choosing on the wrong information.
The people
Is it true that there are no young people here?
Mostly, yes, and the reason is not mysterious. The permanent residents are for the most part over sixty: here for the air, the calm, the low cost, the sea. The working economy is tourism and property, and neither of them pays a young person enough to stay. People go where the work is, and the work is not here. In the strip where I live, in my first winter, the people under forty could have been counted on one hand.
But Silver Beach is long, and the strip I live in is not the whole of it. A few kilometres east there is a campus of Shandong Vocational University of Foreign Affairs, with thousands of students on it. They are young, there are a lot of them, and they are behind a campus wall. You do not see them in the old resort strip in the middle, and you certainly do not see them in winter, when they have gone home for the holiday.
Around the edges there are others: a few young people who came here on purpose to lie flat and are doing, more or less, what I do; the couriers and delivery riders who move the parcels; the estate agents who will show you a flat; the people who run a stall for two months each summer. And the young women, as anyone who lives here will tell you, are rare enough that you notice every one.
So the honest version is not that there are no young people. It is that there are no young people where you will be standing — unless you go looking, and unless you accept that most of the ones you find are only passing through.
And is it a ghost town in winter?
Yes. I will not argue with this one, because I live in it. Winter empties the place: the people who came for the summer leave, the residents who can afford to go south go south, and even the compounds with central heating run at twenty or thirty per cent occupancy, which here passes for lively. In the ones without heating you get blocks with three or four households left in them, and blocks with one person in them, which is not a figure of speech.
At night it is quiet in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not stood in it. The population is old and goes to bed early; there is no nightlife to speak of and no reason to be outside. A light comes on in one window of a building and goes off at nine. The street is yours and the beach is yours and the streetlights are the only other lit thing.
If you need company, do not come here in winter. I mean that. Somebody who needs noise and people around them will not be happy in this, and pretending otherwise would be unkind. But if what you are short of is quiet — if you want to hear the wind come off the sea at night with nothing between you and it, and to walk a long empty beach with the whole of it to yourself — then winter here is not a punishment. It is the reason to come.
The shops
Last, the question that used to have one answer and now has two: is there no shopping mall?
For years the answer was no. The retail here was the supermarket chain and a scatter of small shops. If you wanted a cinema, or a chain restaurant, or a building with escalators in it, you went to Weihai or to Yantai and made a day of it.
That has changed, and it changed recently. In the east, behind the university campus, a mall has opened — Yinxiu Mall — and it brought with it brands that had never been on this coast before: KFC, Pizza Hut, and, more to the point, the first modern cinema the resort has had. In the west, a second and larger one, Liqun Plaza, is under construction and is supposed to open within a year.
So the correct answer now is: there was not one, there is one, and another is coming. It is not Beijing and it is not going to be Beijing. But the sentence “there are no shops here” has stopped being true, and the people who still say it are repeating something they read a few years ago.
What the rumours have in common
If you read back through those questions, a pattern shows up.
Not one of the false ones is false in a direction that flatters the place. Almost all of them make it sound worse than it is — more remote, more primitive, more cut off, colder, more abandoned. That is the shape of the misinformation about this coast, and I think I know why it takes that shape. The people who write about Rushan Silver Beach mostly do not live here. They pass through, or they read the price of a flat and imagine the rest. “Ghost town” is a good headline. “A resort with working infrastructure, mild winters, a supermarket, a market and now a mall, where the problem is that there is no work and nobody your age” is not a headline at all.
Which is the real point, and the reason this chapter belongs in a guide rather than in a complaint. The place is neither the paradise the summer brochures promised nor the wasteland the internet describes. It is an ordinary small town on the coast with one very unusual feature: it was built for many more people than came, and the distance between those two numbers is what makes the rent what it is. Everything good about it and everything difficult about it comes out of that one fact.
So the questions worth asking are not whether your pipes will freeze or whether there is a mall. The questions worth asking are these. Can you cook. Can you be alone. Can you live without work that pays you. And do you like the sound of the sea at night more than you like the sound of other people. If the answer to those is yes, the rest of this book is the practical part, and you will be fine.