alt Hacker NewsGrowing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
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Amazing, related story. I had a friend that always talked about growning up in 418 Pennsylvania. It began as a company town for a ceramics manufacturer in the 1920s. The factory specialized in heat resistant vessels. You know like kettles, pitchers, industrial teapots. Each stamped each with a model number tied to production lines.
Line 418 was the most profitable. When the post office opened, the clerk assumed “418” was the town name, not the factory line number. By the time anyone noticed, mail was flowing, checks were signed, and no one wanted to correct the federal government. The factory closed in the 1950s. The town shrank but remained oddly proud of its name. Residents leaned into it without explaining it.
The most shocking thing in this article is learning about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine I didn't know about it, what an unnecessary loss of life in a modern era.
My grandfather, who is a nuclear scientist, and my mom also come from a small closed-off city in Siberia (Russia).
Visiting my grandparents I remember we had to go through a sort of border control to get there.
My mom told stories of how the government would change the asphalt every year in that city to cover the nuclear dust.
I’m curious how HN’s general warmth toward self promotion is going to be affected by the steady proliferation of AI-assisted content.
What are the coordinates? Been looking for it around 100km west of jiayuguan but I can't seem to get it right
My father-in-law worked there as a programmer during the Cultural Revolution. There were always guards on the other side of the (locked) office door. Sometimes they’d shoot at random things to remind the nerds just who was in charge.
When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.
404 does sound a bit like a nightmare posting, and God knows what the adults felt like. They probably couldn't say much. But children see things very differently. I forwarded this on to several people.
On my trip back from china this week I watched a Chinese movie about their nuclear bomb project. Basically the equivalent of Oppenheimer. Quite interesting movie and now I am reading this
More info about similar places:
"Once, a soldier entered the residential area after coming into contact with radioactive material. His hands turned a necrotic black, like charred wood. The authorities didn’t just isolate him; they traced his entire trajectory and burned every single item he had touched. A friend of my father lost his entire sofa because of this. Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me."
Cool post!
Always interesting to read about people's lived realities that are completely different
"My biggest dream in kindergarten was to be a big brother. I wanted to care for a younger sibling. But under the One-Child Policy, if my mother had another child, she and my dad would lose their jobs. She had to follow the rules and terminate a pregnancy. My wish was impossible."
You are a great writer. Would love to hear what came next and eventually how you found your way to HN. :)
nice read. interesting experience and great writing. looking forward to the next part.
> Our license plates started with “Gan-A,” the same as the provincial capital. We laughed at people from other cities like Jiayuguan (“Gan-B”) or Jiuquan (“Gan-F”). Even as kids, we joked, “We’re still number one.” Because our grandparents were the country’s elite and we lived in the “Nuclear City,” I always felt like I was living at the center of the world.
Am I reading too much into this or does China have a culture of competition which involves mocking those you deem below you even for the most shallow reasons?
Nice read!
It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code.
>> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me.
It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.
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> I was born in 1991, thirty years after China’s first atomic bomb explosion, and right around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
I smell cooked
Hi HN, OP here.
I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there.
It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code.
This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any questions about life in a Chinese nuclear base!