The former base at Jinyintan was built in the late 1950s. The National Ethnic Affairs Commission describes researchers, cadres, workers and military personnel arriving from different parts of China. It also records Tibetan and Mongolian herding communities living on the grassland, whose lives intersected with the needs of national-defense construction. The base’s history includes people who researched, built, maintained and inhabited this highland setting. The gathering of occupations and communities forms the human setting of the research base.
From the journal
The People Behind the Atomic City
The official history of the former base includes scientists, workers, military personnel and local herding communities. Together, their labor formed the human setting of a research landscape on Jinyintan Grassland.
A collective arrived on the grassland
Work remembered as a shared effort
The same government account says research teams worked together to develop the atomic and hydrogen bombs over a ten-year period. A later description of the Qinghai Atomic City Memorial Hall says its exhibitions introduce the creation and development of China’s atomic-energy science and nuclear industry. Around that institutional history are the science building, library, cinema and other facilities that supported the base. Read together, these records connect technical research to construction, logistics and the community already living on Jinyintan. The people behind the base were part of a much larger social landscape than the handful of scientists whose names are most familiar today.
