Heze 菏泽市

Heze (simplified Chinese:菏泽; traditional Chinese:菏泽; pinyin:Hézé) is a prefecture-level city in southwestern Shandong, China. It is home to 8,287,693 inhabitants, of whom 1,346,717 live in the built-up (or metro) area comprising Mudan District. The westernmost prefecture-level city in Shandong, it borders Jining to the east and the provinces of Henan and Anhui to the west and south respectively. The old name of Heze was Caozhou (曹州; Cáozhōu) and now a part of the city bears this name. The first character in the city's name is sometimes incorrectly written as "荷" instead.