Jímò

Jimo is the county town on the south coast of the Shandong Peninsula, below Mount Lao and facing the Yellow Sea. It is not the Jimo of the Warring States, where Tian Dan saved Qi in 279 BC by driving oxen with burning tails into the besieging Yan army; that Qi city lay farther northwest. The Ming county was also a coastal front. To guard against the Japanese raiders, the Ming built a walled garrison town at Aoshan in 1388 and set up the Aoshan Guard there in 1402, with three battalions under the Shandong military command.

The county town was a centre of schooling. Its Confucian temple was repaired in 1376 and 1445, enlarged in 1487, and given a stone gateway by Lan Tian in 1536; the lane before it had been bought by Lan Zhang in 1492. Lan Zhang, a native of Jimo, later rose to become governor of Shaanxi. In 1714 Guo Xiu added two further stone archways, and in 1734 the Qing merged the Aoshan Guard into Jimo County.