Tangshan sits on the eastern side of the Hebei plain, where the Yan mountains come down towards the Bohai coast. Coal was worked here before the twentieth century, and the city that grew around the Kailuan mines became one of north China's industrial centres. The 1976 earthquake destroyed most of it; the grid you walk today is a reconstruction. South of the city the Qing emperors buried five of their number at Zunhua, and Pingju opera, a form born in these counties, still has its state company here.
At Zunhua in Tangshan, a valley of 80 square kilometres holds the tombs of five Qing emperors, fifteen empresses and 136 imperial concubines, laid out along paved spirit ways and enclosed by mountains. The complex was inscribed with the Western Qing tombs in 2000, and its underground palaces are why it is studied.
Before dawn on 28 July 1976 an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 broke directly under Tangshan. In minutes most of the city's buildings were unusable, the mines and railways were damaged, and 242,000 people were dead by the official count. The city was rebuilt, and coal, steel and a port are the result.
ReadPingju began in Tangshan in the 1910s, when Cheng Zhaocai joined a narrative ballad to a local opera and borrowed from Hebei clapper opera, Peking opera and shadow play. Its speech-like delivery made it the most famous regional opera of the Republican period, and it kept writing plays about its own time.
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