Large-scale nonferrous-metal development began in Baiyin in 1956. The city profile traces a changing administrative history: Baiyin became a prefecture-level city in 1958, was withdrawn in 1963 and was re-established in 1985. The local name “Copper City” reflects the mining and smelting industries that drew workers and built an urban center. Baiyin’s wider municipality also includes counties with very different landscapes, among them Jingtai on the Yellow River.
From the journal
Baiyin and its mining landscape
Copper mining shaped Baiyin’s modern urban history. The Flame Mountain Mining Park preserves open-pit remains and exhibits, while the Yellow River Stone Forest lies farther away in Jingtai County.
In the same city · Baiyin ↗A city shaped by copper
Inside Flame Mountain Mining Park
The Flame Mountain National Mining Park lies northeast of the urban center and interprets the city’s industrial heritage through former mining areas, a mining-history corridor and a themed park. Municipal materials describe preserved open pits and sites connected with copper mining, alongside a museum and other exhibition spaces. The park makes the scale of extraction visible while recording the labor and technology behind it. Its industrial landscape belongs to Baiyin city’s modern history.
Copper city and river county
Baiyin’s urban mining story and Jingtai’s Yellow River Stone Forest belong to the same municipality but different local landscapes. The stone forest is a canyon of river-cut pillars in Jingtai; Flame Mountain presents open pits and mining history near the city. Keeping those places distinct helps visitors read Baiyin at more than one scale: industrial development in the urban center and a dramatic river corridor in the county. The river also links Baiyin to Lanzhou, where the iron bridge and waterwheels show other ways people have lived with the Yellow River.