Discover Qingdao
Badaguan Scenic Area
八大关
Eight streets named after Chinese passes, laid out as a German and then international villa quarter, each street planted with a different flowering tree. Over 200 early 20th-century villas in a dozen national styles, all walkable and all free.
The story
What makes this place special
Badaguan — 'the eight great passes' — is a villa quarter laid out on the wooded headland east of the old city and developed chiefly in the 1920s and 1930s, after the German and Japanese periods, as a resort district. Its streets are named after historic frontier passes: Shanhaiguan, Juyongguan, Zhengyangguan, Jiayuguan, Ningwuguan, Zijingguan, Hanguguan, Wushengguan, Shaoguan and others. There were eight roads originally, hence the name, and there are now ten. The quarter holds close to 400 villas in the styles of more than twenty countries and was listed as a nationally protected site in 2001. The Huashilou, the granite 'flower stone villa' on the point with its battlemented tower, was built around 1930–31 for a Russian resident; Chiang Kai-shek stayed in it before 1949. The Princess Villa on Juyongguan Road was built as the Danish consul's residence and is popularly explained by a story about a Danish prince's visit in 1929.
What you’ll discover
Quiet, steep, tree-shaded streets with no commercial frontage, each planted with a different species so that the roads flower in sequence through the year, and villas set back behind walls — some open to visitors, most not. The best of them are Huashilou, out on the rocks with sea on three sides, the Princess Villa, and the Butterfly Building. Between the villas the headland drops to Number Two Bathing Beach and a rocky coastal path. The whole quarter is walkable in two hours and there is no single sight; it is the walking that is the attraction.
A little local insight
Good to know before you go
- This is the best thing in Qingdao and it costs nothing to walk. Only the individual villa interiors are ticketed, so you can do the whole quarter on foot and pay for one house.
- Each street is planted with one species — the peach road, the crab-apple road, the maple road — so the quarter changes completely between April and November. Ask which road is in flower when you arrive.
- Go to Huashilou for the position rather than the interior: it sits on the rocks with the sea around it, and the coastal path below it is the best piece of shoreline in the city.
- Weekend mornings are full of wedding photographers, who occupy the best doorways for twenty minutes at a time. Weekday mornings, you have the streets.
- Walk here from Number One Bathing Beach along the shore and leave via the Second Bathing Beach, rather than taxiing to a single villa and back. The sequence is the point.
When to come
Late April to May for the flowering streets, and October to early November for the colour and the clearest sea air. Summer is the busiest and the most humid; winter is bleak but completely empty.
Getting around
Mixed, and the gradients are the issue. The quarter is on a headland, so almost every street slopes, some steeply, though the surfaces are good tarmac and pavements with few steps. A wheelchair user with a strong pusher can do a good deal of it, and a taxi can drop you high up so the walk is downhill. Villa interiors generally have steps at the door and stairs inside. The coastal path below Huashilou is rocky and stepped and not accessible.
Worth knowing before you go
Huashi Lou (the Chiang Kai-shek Villa) on the headland is the one interior worth paying for, and the rocks below it are where locals photograph the bay.
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