Metal-free photocatalysts have attracted great attention in hydrogen production under visible light due to their low cost and abundance. Inspired by the structure of chloroplast-granum, here we prepare a new porous nanorod composed of F-doped g-C3N4 ultrathin nanosheet for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. The obtained g-C3N4 (FCN-PNRs) show layer-by-layer stacked structure for highly efficient light hasting, exhibit F-doping for highly charge separation efficiency, and display porous structure for exposing a large amount of photocatalytic activity sites. These findings have been studied by various characterizations, such as Brunauer-Emmett-Teller, and Photoluminescence. As a result, the hydrogen production performance for the optimized FCN-PNRs photocatalyst reaches 2600 mu mol h(-1) g(-1) under visible light, which is almost 16 times higher than bulk g-C3N4. This study not only reports a new chloroplast-granum-inspired g-C3N4 photocatalyst, but also provides new views to the fabrication and design of nature-inspired metal-free structures for catalysis applications. (C) 2019 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.