Under the mountains of Fuling, remnants of a top-secret nuclear project have come to light
The Wu River, the largest southern tributary of the Yangtze, meanders through the magnificent green peaks of the Wuling Mountains in west-central China as in a traditional landscape painting. At the confluence of the two rivers, the city of Fuling, now a district of Chongqing municipality, lies shrouded in mist and rain for most of the year.
This scenery was thus described by poet Lu You (陆游) who sailed here in the Southern Song dynasty (1127 – 1279). Likewise, the Qing dynasty (1616 – 1911) poet Weng Ruomei (翁若梅) eulogized the Wu River corridor as “unique and unrivaled.” A famous boulder in the area was where the scholar Cheng Yi (程颐) gave lectures that led to the rise of the “Fuling School” of Neo-Confucianism during the Song dynasty (960 – 1279), and more recently, in the late 1990s, US Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler spent two years teaching English at the local teacher’s college, chronicling the experience in his best-selling memoir River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze.
It’s hard to tell that this picturesque landscape was once the site of one of the most secretive and ambitious military projects in Chinese history, known only to top leaders such as former premier Zhou Enlai, as well as a few core personnel from the Ministry of Military Nuclear Industry. Inside the hollowed-out Jinzi Mountain of Baitao town in Fuling’s suburbs lie the remnants of the 816 nuclear plant designed to produce weapons-grade plutonium—a base so secret, it has only ever been known by this code name.
“Even as a local, I knew nothing about this nuclear plant before the government revealed it in 2002,” Mr. Yi, my driver, tells me as our car winds between the dense forests and along clear streams that run for miles. I had come to Fuling intent on following Hessler’s footsteps and revisiting some of the places he described in his book, but Yi insisted I make a stop at this military megaproject, which had been revived as a tourist attraction in 2010, though foreign tourists were not allowed to visit until 2016.
The Nuclear Secret Under Chongqing’s Mountains is a story from our issue, “Access Wanted.” To read the entire issue, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine.
Zheng Yiwen is a contributing writer at The World of Chinese. She was a political journalist at The Paper and Phoenix Media, now she writes mainly about society and culture, for sharing fresh voices from China.
