Juye, China

With a population of just 58,107, Juye is a sleepy backwater in China's Shandong province. The town's history is marked by religious violence - in 1897, two German missionaries were brutally murdered in a local mission compound, sparking a cascade of imperial land grabs by foreign powers. Today, bureaucracy remains a persistent headache, and the locals' wariness of outsiders is palpable. Juye is hardly the stuff of tourist brochures.