Jinan's Famed Baotu Springs

While in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, we went to one of the three most famous tourist attractions in the town: a 3,500 year storied natural spring, called Baotu Spring. I wasn’t really sure why my assistant Mia was so excited about what she referred to as a “fountain.” I was imagining a concrete fountain with lots of fiberoptic lights (see: this), but instead the “fountain” happened to be a natural spring that is mentioned in most primary school textbooks because a famous writer, Lao She (老舍）wrote about it. His writings are known for teaching children all throughout China about sentence structure and parallelism. One of the most famous lines Lao She wrote was, “If we didn’t have this spring, Jinan will lose half of its beauty” (假如没有这泉，济南定会丢失一半的美). Apparently, these Chinese men wanted to soak up some of Jinan’s beauty and decided to all swim in the canals outside of Baotu’s park.