Zibo, Wade-Giles romanization Tzu-po, also called Zhangdian, industrial city and municipality (shi), central Shandong sheng (province), eastern China. The municipality is a regional city complex made up of five major towns: Zhangdian (Zibo), Linzi, Zhoucun, Zichuan, and Boshan. Each is now a district of the municipality. Zhangdian, in the north-central part of the municipality, is its administrative seat. Linzi constitutes the eastern district and Zhoucun the western. Stretching to the south are Zichuan and Boshan; the name Zibo was coined by combining the first character of each of these names. Pop. (2002 est.) city, 1,519,276; (2007 est.) urban agglom., 3,061,000.
Of the five towns, Linzi was the first to begin developing. Rich with farm produce and other resources, it was on the earliest east-west trunk road constructed at the foot of the northern slopes of the mountains in central Shandong. It served as the capital of the Qi state during the Spring and Autumn (Chunqiu; 770–476 bce) and the Warring States (Zhanguo; 475–221 bce) periods. Zhoucun, west of Zhangdian, developed into a trading centre famous for its silks and silk products.
Zichuan was an old and established city and administrative centre. A Banyang county was established there in the 2nd century bce; it subsequently fell into abeyance in the 3rd century ce but was revived in the 5th century under the name Beiqiu county. In 598 it became the seat of a county named Zichuan, by which it was long known. It remained an important administrative centre and was also a focus of routes, being situated on the route skirting the northern edge of the Mount Tai complex, at the mouth of the valley leading up to Boshan and to a pass over the mountains. Boshan itself was a later development. The centre of an important ceramics and glass industry, in the 16th century it was wealthy enough to warrant having its own tax bureau. In 1734 the city had developed to the point that it could become an independent county.
Zibo’s development into a major industrial complex began with the completion in 1904 of the railway linking the port city of Qingdao (east) to the provincial capital of Jinan (west), which passed to the north of Zichuan through the important market towns of Zhangdian and Zhoucun. A branch line was built by the Germans from Zhangdian southward to Boshan, however, after they acquired coal-mining rights in a zone along the railway and began mining in the area around Zichuan. During World War I the Japanese controlled both the railway and the mines; in 1921 the mines came under the control of a Sino-Japanese company, the Luda Colliery Company. The Boshan mines, which were developed later, in 1924, also passed into the control of a Sino-Japanese firm, the Botong Company.
By the time of the Japanese invasion in 1937, Boshan had surpassed Zichuan in coal output, producing 1,000,000 tons annually to Zichuan’s 600,000 tons. The local iron industry was also established before World War II. In 1919 the Japanese had founded the Jinlingzhen Ironworks on the main railway just east of Zhangdian, using supplies of local iron ore and coking coal from Zichuan.
The contemporary city
After the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949, it was decided that the whole area would be merged into a single municipality, which occurred in 1955; it was then developed into a major industrial base. During the 1950s and ’60s, when Boshan was the seat of the municipality, that district took the administrative name of the municipality, Zibo; subsequently, when the seat was transferred to Zhangdian, that district took the name of Zibo, and Boshan resumed its former name. By 1963 the municipality of Zibo had outstripped Qingdao as Shandong’s greatest industrial city. Between 1953 and 1958 the municipality’s population increased more than threefold, from 259,000 to 875,000. Within the enlarged municipality, growth was concentrated at Boshan and Zibo (the former Zhangdian); the population of each in the early 1970s was considerably larger than that of Zichuan. By then the municipality had a total population of more than 1,200,000.
Mining and heavy industry, machine building, and the manufacture of electrical equipment and batteries are all major enterprises established in the early stages of Zibo’s growth. In addition to the traditional ceramics and glass industries, firebrick, refractory materials, and industrial ceramics are also manufactured. The discovery of several nearby oil fields in northern Shandong since the late 1960s spurred Zibo to become one of China’s major petrochemical industrial bases; a large plant was established in Linzi district in the 1980s. Power-generating, pharmaceutical, textile, and electronics industries have been developed as well. The city is a communications hub in the area, with rail lines and highways fanning out in all directions.
The excavated ruins of the ancient Qi capital city are located in the northern portion of Linzi district, and a museum displaying artifacts from the ancient city is also located in northern Linzi, in the town of Qidu. Pu Songling, a renowned Chinese fiction writer of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, was a native of Zichuan, and his former residence in Zichuan district is now a museum. Boshan, located in a mountainous valley, is known for the beauty of the forested slopes surrounding it, and its popularity has grown as a tourist destination.