Jinan Culture

As a place than ancient people who left lots of precious historical treasures of ancient culture were found quite early, Jinan experienced diverse eras and grew with special and unique culture. The following is some information about Jinan culture.

Dialect

Dialect of one place is a significant element in its culture, especially nowadays people are exposed to more and more foreign languages and the tendency of second language studying attracts many young people.

Local residents in Jinan have traditionally spoken the Jinan dialect of Mandarin that is not readily understood even by native speakers of standard Mandarin. The younger people of Jinan may be more likely to speak standard Mandarin, whereas many older residents retain strong local dialect elements in their speech. Nevertheless, even the younger residents of Jinan tend to retain a strong local accent and mix local vocabulary into the standardized Mandarin vocabulary. Due to the influx of migrant workers during the past decade of China's economic boom, many of the current population that are of working age are not natives of Jinan but have learned to understand the Jinan dialect.

Cuisine

Jinan has its own cuisine, the Jinan style of the Shandong cuisine, one of the Eight Culinary Traditions of China. One of its features is the use of soup in its dishes. Modern cuisines in northern China —Beijing, Tianjin and the northeastern regions including Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning— are all branches of Shandong cuisine. Lu cuisine is regarded as the one that has longest history, contains the richest cooking skills, appear to be the most difficult to cook and fully demonstrates the devoted efforts.

Symbol of Jinan

City tree: Willow
City flower: Lotus
City bird: Egret
The city’s mascot: Golden bull

Prehistoric Culture

Human’s activities traces were found here about 8, 000 to 9,000 years ago, and about 7 to 8 relic sites of this period were found in Jinan. 8 ruins of Beixin culture in 6,100 to 7,300 years ago were found in Jinan, which is the densest area that the ruins lie in.

Dawenkou culture period (4,600--6,100 years ago), ancient people activated in Jinane， so relics of this period were scattered widely with fairly more ones.

Longshan culture (4,000--4，600 years ago) comes down in one continuous line with Dawenkou culture. It was first to find in Chengziya, of Longshan Town, and got the name. Based on further exploitation of the relics of Chengziya, researchers found that there was a 200,000- square -kilometer site of old city, and it is the largest one in the found 8 ancient city sites. In 1961， Chengziya ruin was claimed as China's key cultural relics protection units.

Yueshi culture (3,500--3,900 years ago) is the culture of the yi people which was inherited and developed from Longshan culture. The relic sites of this period have been found over 10 ones in Jinan, with the most sites in Zhangqiu. Chengziya ruin is still the most important sites in this period. Within the Longshan culture sites, there is a 170,000-square-kilometer city sites of Yueshi culture, and the site is the first one to be found as the ancient city ruin of Xia Dynasty domestically.