Jìlǔ

The Jìlǔ are the plain-dwellers of southern Hebei and central and northern Shandong who speak Jilu Mandarin, the northern dialect closest to Beijing speech. Their country is the old Qilu land of the North China Plain, crossed by the lower Yellow River and the Grand Canal and watched over by Mount Tai. Its earliest inhabitants were Dongyi peoples, absorbed when Qi conquered the Lai in 567 BC; alongside Qi stood the state of Lu at Qufu, where Confucius was born in the sixth century BC, making it the cradle of Confucian teaching.

Under the Han it was organized into the Qingzhou and Yanzhou inspectorates, and in 412 the monk Faxian landed at Laoshan bearing Buddhist scriptures from India. The Ming formed modern Shandong Province and in 1376 moved its capital from Qingzhou to Jinan.

The seventeenth century brought unrest. In 1633 the Dengzhou generals defected to the Manchus with their troops, and White Lotus uprisings spread through the province by 1640.