A Wage Ticket and a Mine-Office History in Liaoyuan

Official accounts trace the miners’ tomb site through separate milestones. A 2016 government notice says excavation began in September 1963 and the site went on public display in 1964. A 2017 profile from Jilin’s culture authority describes an early exhibition facility in 1966 and gallery renovation and reopening in 2015. The later profile organizes the exhibition into six themes: the coal city, occupation of the mine, miners’ lives, mining activity, liberation and remembrance. Read as a sequence, those themes move from the industrial setting into miners’ lives, then from mine work to the site’s later remembrance. Each milestone describes a different stage: excavation, a first public display and later changes to the gallery. The six themes invite visitors to follow the history across the mine and its workers, rather than through a single object alone.

The National Museum of China identifies a wage ticket attributed to Niu Shiqing, a worker at Liaoyuan Mine. Its account says the ticket was found among the remains of a dead miner at the miners’ mass grave. It describes the ticket as recording work, pay and deductions, bringing one worker’s name and an accounting document into view within the wider history of the coalfield. A wage ticket reduces a month of labour to the categories used by the mine’s bookkeeping. It preserves that record, while leaving the rest of the person’s life beyond what the paper can tell us. The ticket turns work into entries the mine could count; the named worker anchors that bookkeeping in an individual without making the ticket a complete account of his life.

CiNii catalogs the Japanese-language volume 西安礦業所十年史, issued by the Xi’an Mining Office of Manchuria Coal Company in September 1942. The catalog lists its pagination as 595, 6 and 16 pages, with 36 plates. These details identify a company publication from the period of Liaoyuan’s occupation-era coal history. CiNii’s entry establishes the title, issuing office, date and physical description. The title identifies it as a ten-year history; the catalog record does not reveal the book’s contents. The contrast is useful: a ticket records one worker’s pay, while the mine office’s volume was published as a ten-year history of the enterprise. These are different documentary scales—one individual record and one institutional publication.