Hegang: A Coal City at the Forest and Wetland Edge

Hegang's growth gathered around mining and transport. In 1918, Shen Songnian and partners formed the Xinghua Coal Mining Company. Early mining relied heavily on manual work, with coal cut by hand and carried out. The railway from the mining area to Lianjiangkou opened in 1926, connecting production with a wider transport network. As farming, mining and commerce attracted people, a worksite grew into a town. Coal supplied the industry; railway access helped give the settlement a new scale.

The municipal profile describes Hegang as a resource city with a century of coal development and records more than one billion tonnes of cumulative raw-coal production. Mining remains a defining part of the city’s contemporary story, but the public history also tracks a change in how the work is done. A 2026 museum visit report says guides traced the coal industry’s movement from manual methods toward intelligent production. The Mining History Museum presents this industrial timeline through its collections, while the City Memory Museum uses everyday objects and photographs to trace Hegang’s growth from reclamation and settlement. Together they offer different views: one follows an industry, the other a city built around it.

Hegang’s official overview places the city between the Sanjiang Plain and Xiaoxing’anling, with the Amur to the north and Songhua to the south. It reports 10.89 million mu of forest land—about 726,000 hectares—43.22 percent forest cover and 77,200 hectares of wetlands. The same overview describes the city’s river systems and nature reserves, including the wetland habitats of the northern counties. These figures describe Hegang’s wider administrative territory, not the urban centre alone. The contrast is striking but not contradictory: a mining city also belongs to a region of forest, river and wetland landscapes. The city profile also describes more than forty kinds of wild vegetables, over twenty wild berries and thirty medicinal plants harvested in its forest areas, illustrating the range of resources beyond coal.