In 1969, Wang Guangmin arrived at Lingao Cape Lighthouse from Changong Village in Lincheng Town. He was twenty-seven. At the top of the tower hung a kerosene lamp, and the first task was to open its heavy cover and light it with a match. The sea wind kept extinguishing the flame. The account makes the work visible at the scale of a hand: shielding a tiny fire long enough for it to catch, then trusting that one night’s effort would send light across the strait’s western approach.
From the journal
Every Three Hours, the Keeper Climbed Again
From a match blown out by sea wind to a six-hour trip to hospital and a return to the tower, Wang Guangmin’s account reveals the labor behind Lingao Cape’s light.
In the same city · Lingao County ↗A match had to survive the sea wind
The night was divided into three-hour climbs
The old mechanism was wound by hand. At dusk, Wang climbed to light the lamp; through the night, he returned every three hours to wind it so the lantern would keep turning. At dawn he climbed once more to extinguish it. His sleep came in fragments between alarms. The lighthouse was a navigation instrument, but its continuity depended on a person repeating the same bodily route up and down the tower while ships crossed a dark channel beyond it.
A broken scaffold did not end the work
Wang maintained the tower himself, climbing whenever he found rust. During one repair he built bamboo scaffolding around it and worked upward, removing rust and repainting the structure. The scaffold broke at the second level; he fell from more than five metres. With no road to the lighthouse, soldiers carried him by stretcher along eleven kilometres of muddy red earth before he could reach a road. The journey to a Haikou hospital took more than six hours. The account records injury as part of the infrastructure’s hidden cost: before roads reached the cape, even rescue required a long passage over land.
After the fall, he packed and returned
When Wang came home from hospital, his wife asked whether he would still go back to the lighthouse. He did not answer; he packed his things and walked toward the tower. The report says he resumed cleaning rust. In the 1990s, electrical equipment replaced the old mechanism, ending the three-hour winding routine. Wang retired in 2001 and completed a year of re-employment before leaving in 2002. That same year his son Wang Jian returned from work in Yangpu with his wife and child. The lamp’s technology changed; the family’s tie to the station continued in another generation.