Shinao Mountain and the Coal City of Yangquan

Shinao Mountain stands above Yangquan, and Yangquan is a city built on what lies under it. The material read for this article describes the city rather than the hill, and that is the honest starting point: it records the coal, not the slope. The territory holds geological coal reserves given as 10.4 billion tonnes, with anthracite, bauxite and pyrite among its minerals, the three colours, black, white and yellow, that the city is proud of. The 1906 Zhengtai railway, now the Shitai line, gave Yangquan its station, and the city grew from there into the coal base and industrial centre of eastern Shanxi.

The Monument to the Hundred-Regiment Campaign appears in the record as one of Yangquan's attractions, listed beside Niangziguan and Zangshan. The sources do not place it on Shinao Mountain, and this article does not either. What they do give is the campaign: in August 1940, on the night of the 20th, the main force of the Eighth Route Army forced its way into Niangziguan, in the same city, in the offensive the monument commemorates. A visitor reading the two entries together can see how a city remembers a war in more than one place, a monument on one site and the fought-over ground on another.

Yangquan was set up on 4 May 1947, inside the original Pingding County, and was later renamed an industrial and mining zone; in September 1983 Pingding and Yu counties passed to it, and it became a city directly under the province. It governs three districts, Chengqu, Kuangqu and Jiaoqu, and two counties, Pingding and Yu, and had 1,318,505 residents in 2020. The ground is mountain, hill and a little plain, with the Hutuo running through the north and the Mian through the built-up area. Liu Cixin, who wrote The Three-Body Problem, was born and raised here, which is another kind of fact about a coal city.