Parts of Qingdao today are little changed since the writer Putnam Weale in 1905 described it as "a piece of old-fashioned Germany planted in the middle of a Chinese wilderness".
The main thoroughfare, Prinz Heinrich Strasse, retains the character of a street in Berlin, though it is now called Guangxi Lu, and the most spectacular building is still the 15-room former governor's mansion, built in the finest Germanic style with granite base and tall chimneys. The German navy seized the Yellow Sea port in 1895 and constructed a thoroughly German town, as well as the brewery which makes the famous Tsingtao beer.
Strolling along avenues lined with flowering crab-apple trees and red-roofed villas topped with miniature medieval towers, one can imagine being in Riga or Danzig at the turn of the century. The Germans excluded the Chinese from the resort section and installed a strict social order which, as another traveller, Harry Franck, noted "made it impossible for the wife of an officer to meet the wife of a merchant".
Such class and race distinctions were eliminated when Qingdao passed under Chinese control in 1949 and many of the gemutlich residences were carved up into apartments for multiple Chinese families and fell into disrepair.
Today however the municipal government is trying to preserve Qingdao's old European quarter as a major tourist attraction, and has begun restoring and leasing solid German villas to wealthy Chinese and foreigners. Modern Qingdao has expanded into an industrial port city of seven million people (and 59 skyscrapers) and at this end of the century is eager to cultivate new connections with Europe, based on trade rather than colonisation.
Which is what brought me to the city the other day. Two Qingdao students, Rolland Zhang and Alex Yang, were among the 3,000 or so mainland Chinese who studied English in Ireland last year. In Dublin they got talking with local people about the enormous gap in knowledge of each other's countries, and the lack of opportunities for Irish-Chinese business ventures. With this in mind they founded with three Irish friends - Edward and Dermot Coonan and Ann Marie Phelan - Azure Holdings Ltd, the first Irish company of its kind designed to help enterprises from both countries to do business effectively together.
"Every year 1,600 business groups go abroad from Qingdao but none ever go to Ireland," said Rolland as we selected live prawns and crabs from a huge fish tank at a Qingdao restaurant. "Trade between Ireland and China is weak. It is very difficult for an Irish company to come to China and for a Chinese company to go to Ireland. Our strength is our knowledge and personal relationships."
As a start, the company has signed a contract with Shandong province to find Chinese students for higher education in Ireland, and a contract with the Dublin Business School to seek out suitable undergraduates. Education offers great potential. Last year 139,000 foreign students studied in the Republic of Ireland, generating £150 million and 11,500 jobs.
But almost all came to learn English rather than study for degrees. There are a quarter of a million Chinese students at higher level education in the UK, underlining the potential for attracting undergraduates from China to Ireland - where for the first time there could be more places than students in existing universities. In China parents are eager to send their children abroad to study, if possible to an English-speaking country, as higher education here is expensive and Chinese degrees less highly rated than foreign qualifications.
"Education is the main thing in China now," said Rolland. "Parents concentrate everything on one child. Some have no other way to invest. It is hard to buy a car or a house. But the child's future is most important." Michael Garvey, Commercial Secretary at the Irish embassy in Beijing, who is accompanying a 19-member Chinese trade delegation to Ireland later this week, agrees that there is potential for expansion in the field of education. "This is the future for Ireland in trade with China," he said. Part of the problem in doing business is lack of knowledge of each other, but Chinese students coming to Ireland could change that as "they will get to know Irish people and may one day trade with them".
Qingdao municipality is also interested in making formal contacts with Ireland to promote information exchanges and trade. The lord mayor of Galway, Cllr Declan McDonnell, recently led a delegation to the city and signed a statement of intent with Qingdao mayor Wang Jia Rei to twin Galway and Qingdao, though the union has yet to be consummated.
While general knowledge of Ireland in Qingdao may be patchy, it can be quite specialised. "You're from Ireland?" a local official asked me with interest. "Maybe you can tell me. Is Roy Keane really going to leave Manchester United?"