A Base Becomes a Prefectural Seat

In May 1995, the Atomic City completed its mission and was transferred as a whole to the Haibei prefectural government. The State Council had approved the name Xihai Town on May 15. The change placed a former research installation within a new civic role: Xihai became the seat of an autonomous prefecture. The former base had been built in 1958 on Jinyintan Grassland, and its research and production facilities gave the new town a distinctive inherited landscape. The transfer date is a useful hinge in the town’s story because it marks a change in who administered the site and what its buildings would come to mean.

A 2021 account by China’s National Development and Reform Commission describes a network of places across the former site: a memorial hall, an explosion-test exhibition, a second-factory exhibition, an underground command-center exhibition and the station from which the first atomic bomb was loaded for transport. The same account names the original science building, library and cinema among eleven representative buildings that had been repaired. Xihai’s public identity therefore grew around both a prefectural center and a preserved research landscape. The buildings give that transition a physical scale, linking the work once carried out behind their walls to the civic town that followed.