Shandong

How apples came

Shandong had apples of its own long before the Western ones. Under the Qing it and Hebei grew most of the north’s soft native apples, and a Kangxi-era writer says that, picked half-ripe and carried south wrapped in paper, “once across the Yangtze, a single one would fetch a hundred cash” (translated)¹. Yantai’s filing for geographical-indication protection says apples were recorded in the region from 1619².

Western apples came with John Livingston Nevius, who grew up on a farm in Seneca County, New York, with his father’s taste for horticulture. He reached Shandong in June 1861, making for Tung-chow on the peninsula’s north coast, and found that its fruits, “with few exceptions, all were very poor”. He “early conceived the idea of changing the fruitage of Shantung” and sent to the United States and Europe for trees, many of which died³.

In the autumn of 1871 Nevius, an American Presbyterian missionary⁴, moved to Chefoo, now Yantai, and built a house, the Nan-lou, below the Taoist temple of the Pearly Emperor. Its garden proving too small, he bought land five minutes’ walk away, the South Garden, known in the foreign settlement as the “foreign fruit garden”, put it in the hands of Chinese friends, and ruled that grafts and scions be kept ready and given free to any Chinese grower who asked³. Chinese historians call it the Guangxing orchard, on the south-east slope of Yuhuangding⁴. By 1887 country people as far as 160 km away, and farther, were growing a foreign tree or two and getting nearly ten times the price of their own fruit³.

A 1928 USDA report dated Chefoo’s foreign fruit industry to 1861 but said the garden led to commercial growing only “some twenty or thirty years later”. By then orchards ran nearly 50 km along the coast on hillsides once planted with firs for fuel, foreign varieties were grafted onto a hardy native crab-apple, and Chefoo shipped about 4,500 tonnes of fresh fruit a year, 60% of it apples⁵. In 1932 Yantai’s apple crop reached 104,300 dan, and its first exports that year were 90% of China’s⁴.

More varieties arrived around 1913⁶, the year Wang Jinzheng and colleagues give for the start of large-fruited apple growing in Yantai⁷. The orchards grew from 216,000 mu (about 14,400 ha) in 1957 to 1.3 million mu (about 86,700 ha) in the 1980s², and red Fuji was tried successfully early in that decade⁶. In 1986 the Japanese grower Sugai Isao came to Zangjiazhuang in Qixia, the first town to take up red Fuji, called its crowded orchard “not an orchard but a forest” (translated) and pruned it hard; he visited Qixia twenty times between 1986 and 2004⁸. From the 1990s Yantai selected its own bud mutations, the Yanfu and Yanga series².

How they’re grown

Yantai, between 36°16′ and 38°23′ N, faces both the Yellow Sea and the Bohai, and 76.3% of its 13,700 km² is hills and mountains. The sea softens a warm-temperate monsoon climate: a mean of 11.1–12.6 °C, 215 frost-free days, 2,658 hours of sunshine and 735 mm of rain a year, mostly in summer, on brown soils weathered from mica schist². In 1928 the USDA thought that north-west winds, gathering moisture over the gulf, spared Chefoo the drought and dust storms that killed American varieties elsewhere in north China⁵.

Each young fruit goes into a double paper bag 30 to 40 days after the petals fall; the bags come off 20 to 25 days before picking, and reflective film under the trees helps the fruit colour. Picking is in two or three passes about a week apart². Japanese mason bees, tried in Yantai and Weihai from 1987, raised fruit set by more than 30%⁷. Bagging takes about 10,000 bags a mu at 0.2 yuan each⁶; one Qixia grower bagged 270,000 apples on his 20 mu in 2024⁹. Yantai drew up China’s first industry standard for bag-free apples¹⁰, and bag-free trials at Laizhou saved about 6,000 yuan a mu⁶.

Shandong’s orchards are shrinking. As industry drew workers off the land, the Bohai Bay region’s share of China’s apples fell from 75.57% in 1978 to 36.76% in 2016, and Shandong, first among the provinces in 1978, was second by 2016¹¹. Labour shortages and a ban on replanting fruit trees on basic farmland are still cutting its apple area¹². Yantai has renewed 1.32 million mu (about 88,000 ha) of old orchards since 2020⁶.

What’s picked

Shandong grew 10,739,008 tonnes of apples in 2024 on 239,340 ha of apple orchards, and Yantai 6,811,644 tonnes on 133,734 ha, 63% of the province’s crop from 56% of its apple land¹³. Yantai’s crop rose to 7.024 million tonnes in 2025¹⁴. The orchards lie mainly in the middle of the Jiaodong peninsula, at Qixia, Zhaoyuan, Penglai, Muping and Haiyang¹⁷; Qixia, the core of the belt, has about 1 million mu (some 66,700 ha) and picks about 2.1 million tonnes a year¹⁵. Yantai exported about 560,000 tonnes of fresh apples in 2024, about half of China’s apple exports¹⁰.

The season runs from July to November. Mato 1 ripens in mid- to late July, Sansa, Senshu and the Yanga series in August, Tsugaru in mid-September, and the Yanfu series, Jonagold, Ralls Janet and Granny Smith in October². Qixia’s Sikou market opened on 10 August in 2024; Fuji came in from 8 October, and trading was expected to last to about 20 November⁹.

Red Fuji strains make up 70% of Yantai’s apples, and new orchards take newer varieties such as Ruixue and the city academy’s Yanjinmi¹⁰. The varieties that made Yantai’s name were White Winter Pearmain, Hongxiang, Ralls Janet and Golden Delicious, replaced from the 1980s by Fuji, Gala and Jonagold².

On the table

Chefoo’s foreign apples soon fetched high prices: in 1887 summer visitors from Shanghai paid “twenty-five or thirty cents a pound” for foreign apples and pears³. A Qing compendium quoted by Zhang Fan said Chefoo’s apples were “the best in the country, and in fact an American kind” (translated), red-skinned, firm and long-keeping, and called them Gold Mountain apples because the stock came from San Francisco¹.

Most of China’s apples are still eaten fresh, and juice takes more than 95% of those processed¹²; Yantai’s factories can take more than 5 million tonnes of fruit a year for juice, pectin and fruit wine¹⁰. Each autumn Qixia holds an apple art festival, and it has devised a banquet of a hundred apple dishes¹⁵. In the 1990s its growers learned to raise apples bearing auspicious characters⁸.

The word 苹果 (píngguǒ) fully replaced older Chinese names for the apple only in the late Qing, as Western apples spread^1,16.

Notes

• Nevius ruled that grafts be given free to any Chinese grower who asked³.
• Yantai raises two-thirds of China’s apple saplings¹⁰.
• Yantai’s apples have been a protected geographical indication in China since 28 August 2002 and in the European Union since 1 March 2021².

Where the sources disagree

• 1861, 1871 or 1913. The 1928 USDA report dates Chefoo’s foreign fruit industry to 1861⁵, the year Nevius came to Shandong; his widow says he began at once³. Chinese accounts date the garden to 1871, when he moved to Chefoo^4,6, and Wang and colleagues date large-fruited apple growing from 1913⁷.
• The garden. Helen Nevius calls it the South Garden, in 1887 a “new fruit-garden” of “about three English acres” (about 1.2 ha)³; Chinese historians call it the Guangxing orchard⁴.
• When Fuji came. Xinhua puts the first successful trial in the early 1980s⁶; Sugai Isao chose Yantai in 1985⁸.
• Yantai’s 2024 crop. The statistical yearbook gives 6,811,644 tonnes on 133,734 ha¹³; the city’s agriculture bureau gives 6.6 million tonnes on 2.19 million mu (about 146,000 ha)¹⁰. The 63% and 56% shares are calculated here from the yearbook.
• The calendar. July rests on one early variety², November on one market’s expected closing date⁹.
• Elevation. No altitude for the orchards was found, so none is given.