Word count: ~9100 | Est. read time: 46 mins
Main text:
Chapter One
The year I graduated I went to work as a technician at the Chongqing steel mills, a long way from home.
On the road leading from the office block to the works, there was an old factory building made of red brick, about three or four storeys high. The front gate had never been opened, foxtail grass grew from the roof, and sparrows flew in to make their nests.
“That’s the Steelworks Relocation Committee warehouse—it’ll be pulled down in a couple of years and everything moved to Changshou County,” said my mentor.
“Steelworks Relocation Committee?” The archaic name took me by surprise.
“Yes. When the Japanese army invaded, the Republican government set up the Steelworks Relocation Committee to transport equipment from Hanyang Iron Plant to here.”
As he spoke, my mentor pointed to a gap in the brickwork on the roof where the wild grass swayed. “That’s a hole left by the Japanese air raids. There were frequent airstrikes during installation, and all the damaged parts were stored there and never disposed of.”
The Steelworks Relocation Committee, I learnt, was the forerunner of the Chongqing steel mills. It was founded in 1938, and started production at Dadukou in 1939, supplying steel products to China’s military. But now, the glory days of steel were over. Because of industrial advances and environmental issues, everything would move to Changshou. Not long after, the red-brick warehouse would also have to undergo an equipment inventory as well.
“If there are things judged to be of value, perhaps they could go into a museum,” my mentor said.
The warehouse had a musty smell. Shafts of sunlight fell through the skylight, illuminating piles of discarded paraphernalia. None of this could be shifted manually—the inventory would first be made of the things at the outermost edges, then a forklift brought in.
I moved around in protective shoes, identifying, numbering and noting down the names of objects. Older converter fittings were easier to distinguish from newer ones; while stuff that was truly unidentifiable was marked as scrap iron.
Iron ore would first be smelted into pig iron in a blast furnace. Then, the pig iron would go into an open-hearth furnace, converter or electric furnace to be turned into steel. In the Republican period, the Bessemer conversion process was commonly used for steelmaking, so there were more converters parts than anything else.
I had just written and stuck a label on an object, and was about to move on when I tripped on something that caught the metal of my steel-toe boots. It was a metal box with sharp edges, its paint peeling from its surface. The iron lock at the front had already rusted away, and I broke it in two with a forceful knock.
I crouched down and opened the box. Inside, a leather-bound notebook and a rectangular sample block lay next to each other.
They looked very new, especially the block. It lacked the shine of stainless steel but was not at all rusty, in sharp contrast to the corroded metal around it. A perforated plate supported these items, and through the holes I could see that the bottom layer of the box was filled with quicklime, probably to protect the block against moisture.
I picked up the block. It was very heavy, and a code was stamped on one corner: HYLn-103.
Chapter Two
Autumn 1920, ninth year of the Republic.
The European-style Hankou Railway Station stood prominently above the uneven ordinary low houses clustered around it. The air was humid and smelled of coal and soot. Pedestrians milled around the forecourt, and on the buildings opposite were signs advertising grocery stores, drapers for machine-woven cloth, and restaurants.
A few rickshaws had stopped at the side of the road. Chen Wenxiu came out of the station, carrying a leather suitcase. From the shade, a young man suddenly jumped up, his expression one of startled delight.
“Mr Chen!” he called out, while noting the time as he looked down at his watch. “Graduate in Machine Science at Peiyang University, correct?”
“That’s me.” Chen Wenxiu turned around—the man was of similar age to himself, a still fresh-faced.
“I’m He Yongnian, majoring in Mining and Metallurgy at Shanxi University. Shifu asked me to come fetch you.” He rushed over, took the suitcase, and waved his hand at the rickshaw driver.
At the time, Hanyang Iron Plant, along with the Daye iron mines and Pingxiang coal mines, constituted the Han–Ye–Ping Iron and Coal Company. The plant was not far from the station, sitting near the confluence of the Han and Yangtze rivers.
Although it was already late in the year, as they crossed the bridge, they could see a group of bare-chested men bobbing up and down in the river, with one or two occasionally diving under the surface.
Chen Wenxiu gazed at the scene, itching to join them, and unthinkingly loosening a button at his cuff.
“Can you swim, Brother Wenxiu?” He Yongnian seemed to read his mind as he turned to face him.
“Yes. I grew up next to a river—we often caught fish with our hands there. This is the best weather for swimming—if we’re allowed to.”
“Of course we’re allowed—you will have to teach me.” Excitedly, He Yongnian gestured in the direction of the swimmers disappearing under the surface. “Look there. The locals say there’s a cave filled with gold at the bottom of the river. When the water is clear, you can see it when you dive under, but no one has managed to reach there yet.”
As they were talking, the rickshaw driver had slowed down and now stopped at the gate to the Iron Plant.
Here, where the road petered out, a branch of the internal plant railway ran west–east. At one end was the tall chimney of the blast furnace; at the other the Bessemer converter works. A steam engine pulling torpedo cars of molten iron crawled by, trailing heat and smoke.
“Given my field of study, I should have gone to the Daye mines,” He Yongnian said, leading the way as he passed the suitcase to the gatekeeper, who would send it on to the dormitory. “But I thought iron-smelting needed more recruits, so I applied here. How about you, Brother Wenxiu?”
“Iron-smelting machinery falls under Machine Science, and we learnt about the structure of the Bessemer furnace in class. If China couldn’t produce domestic steel, machine design would be controlled by foreign powers. Supposing they ever sanctioned imports, we’d be left helpless. So, in my view, the construction of China’s industry should start with steel production.”
As he spoke, Chen Wenxiu caught up with He Yongnian. Not far off, workers in lined cotton heat resistant suits were watching over the mouth of the furnace. Ironically, in the face of molten iron at over a thousand degrees, it is better to be more clothed. Light material does not offer insulation; only heavy, lined clothing can protect the human body.
“Engineer Shen!” Someone who looked like a clerk ran over to the workers, panting and holding a sheaf of documents.
A man walked out from the group, loosening his cotton clothes. He looked about forty, and wore a pair of gold wire-rimmed glasses. His skin was flushed from the heat and smeared with ash.
“Mr Shen, the British inspection report says that the phosphorus content is too high, and the strength is below standard. Look.” The clerk held up the papers.
Shen Zhaolin briefly leafed through the documents, then took a pen from his shirt pocket and signed on the final section of the process report.
“Send it back to the furnace as scrap steel,” he pronounced.
“Shifu!” He Yongnian called out.
Shen Zhaolin lifted his head, standing against the sun, his lips slowly creased into a smile.
That evening, they ate dinner together at Shen Zhaolin’s home for the first time. The housekeeper prepared freshwater perch and warmed a jar of Huangjiu.
“Shifu, there is something I don’t quite understand,” said Chen Wenxiu. “We are all part of the Han–Ye–Ping Iron and Coal Company, so why do the Daye iron mines sell first to the Japanese, leaving us with only the second-grade ore high in phosphorus?”
“It’s not quite like that. The Japanese Yahata Steelworks signed a purchase agreement with us. The ore has to reach Japanese standards or they won’t buy it. But their purchasing power is inevitably limited, so some of the ore that remains is still high quality.” Shen Zhaolin pondered for a moment and picked up a piece of fish. “That was already the case when we first constructed the rails. Our quality is by no means compromised.”
“But I’ve heard that rail samples were often found to be too high in phosphorus to meet British standards. That’s why the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway didn’t use domestic rails.”
“The chief engineers of the Shanghai–Nanjing Railway were English, and the purchase of materials was done by the British, so they must have favoured imports. I suspect that test results have been fabricated since that time. If the reports had been accurate, then the Sichuan–Hankou line, which does use our rails, would not have been operating for twenty years without accident. Ultimately, it is because we don’t have our own inspectorate. If we want to break free from this subservience, we need to establish an independent iron and steel infrastructure that is not subject to the West.”
“China’s territory is broad, like the proverbial begonia leaf1. Surely, we have many undiscovered minerals,” said He Yongnian with a smile. “Perhaps we can find top-grade chromium or molybdenum ore to improve the properties of steel.”
Chen Wenxiu echoed these sentiments. But Shen Zhaolin looked up and furrowed his eyebrows slightly, clearly considering something.
“You know, I originally studied physics. I always think of that subject as investigating the truth, the universal standard. But metallurgy is not the same—the object of research is methodology, which must adapt to local conditions. China’s mineral resources are inherently different from Western ones. The West has developed the electric furnace to enable precise temperature control and make molten steel solidify evenly, as if the only acceptable approach is for iron from the blast furnace to be refined into steel. But what if we focused only on blast furnace methods, and abandoned refinement? Could we develop another way of doing things that would be cheaper and easier to roll out?”
Chapter Three
Mentor had the sample block sent to the lab for analysis of its elemental composition.
During the Republic, steel designations followed the CNS standard. Still used in Taiwan, this is similar to the Japanese JIS standard. The HYLn code did not conform to the CNS standard, however, and was evidently a mode of annotation specific to the plant.
I took the notebook back to my office and occasionally perused it. On the first page was a sketch in dark-blue ink: behind a gate screened by trees, a road led straight to a brick factory building. The faint outlines of a blast furnace and chimneys were visible in the distance. The rest of the notebook was a mix of study notes and diary entries. The handwritten traditional Chinese characters in vertical alignment were a little difficult to read at first, but it became easier after a few pages.
Apparently, the notebook belonged to someone called Chen Wenxiu, a graduate of Beiyang University, who started working at Hanyang Iron Plant in the ninth year of the Republic. His mentor, Shen Zhaolin, had studied physics in England in the late Qing era. Another colleague, He Yongnian, who joined the plant the same year as Chen Wenxiu and shared a dormitory with him, was also featured frequently, suggesting they were close.
Chen Wenxiu was surprised when Shen Zhaolin proposed establishing a new kind of infrastructure based on iron rather than steel. According to Chen Wenxiu’s education in Western machine science, steel was superior to iron in its properties, and represented the ultimate objective in smelting—an assumption no one questioned. What would a system based on iron rather than steel look like? It was something Chen Wenxiu had never thought about—and, in fact, neither had I.
What is the difference between iron and steel?
Chen Wenxiu had written this sentence at the end of the narrative section, followed by a few pages of calculations relating to elemental levels.
From the perspective of modern materials science, both iron and steel are iron-carbon alloys. If the carbon content is less than 2.11%, the alloy is steel; if it exceeds 2.11%, it is iron. Iron produced in blast furnaces can be further refined in converters, open-hearth furnaces or electric furnaces to obtain steel.
Steel, with its lower carbon level, is stronger and more resilient, and can be forged and rolled to achieve higher mechanical performance. In contrast, iron is typically cast and is more prone to rust. Overall, the properties of steel are superior, but it is more expensive.
I took photographs of the notebook pages and uploaded them to the company intranet. My mentor occasionally looked at them and sent screenshots of some paragraphs through the intranet chat.
“I understand Shen Zhaolin’s idea: focusing on iron rather than steel and favouring casting over forging. This was also done in China in the 1950s. It suited national conditions and helped advance the industrial development of New China. But as refining technologies improved, the idea quickly fell out of favour. That’s why many young people today aren’t aware of it,” he wrote.
“Rare-earth ductile cast iron? I just found it—it has properties like steel.” As I searched, I was simultaneously taking screenshots and typing.
“Adding the rare-earth element cerium to ductile cast iron increases its strength and wear resistance. This makes it suitable for components that require a greater ability to withstand complex stresses, strength and resilience.”
“Exactly. They probably wanted to develop rare-earth ductile cast iron. China has large reserves of rare earths and indeed, a global advantage, so it could in theory outdo the West. However, Chen Wenxiu joined the Hanyang plant in 1920, when China had not yet started large-scale rare-earth mining. Still, we should not rule out the possibility of them obtaining small samples.”
If that were the case, the code stamped on the sample block became easy to interpret. “HY” was an abbreviation for Hanyang, while “Ln” stood for the lanthanide series of rare-earth elements. The code was an independent system, like the names of alloys produced by the American company Haynes International, which do not follow ASME standards but instead all start with “HASTELLOY”.
“So you’re saying the code means ‘Hanyang lanthanide cast iron, specimen no. 103’?” I said. “But how did they source rare-earth minerals?”
My mentor did not reply. He was probably looking through the images of the notebook.
I continued to search up on rare-earth ductile cast iron. After the trend to replace steel with iron and forging with casting had passed, rare-earth cast iron didn’t disappear. Instead, owing to its excellent resistance to corrosion and wear, it found widespread use in acid-resistant pumps, valves and containers. Building on this, rare-earth steels were later developed for aerospace applications.
After a while, the chat blinked—it was a screenshot from my mentor. “I’ve got it. They found monazite,” he said.
Monazite … I knew it as a rare-earth mineral, whose mining had recently been prohibited in many places because of its radioactive thorium content.
Chapter Four
Spring 1911, University of Manchester.
Shen Zhaolin sat in the back row and opened his notebook. The large lecture hall was packed. On the podium at the front was a blackboard. Professor Ernest Rutherford sat off to one side, while his assistant drew diagrams of experiments on the board.
“When we place radioactive uranium in a lead box with only a small hole as an opening, a beam of radiation is formed. If we place a magnet nearby, the beam splits into three rays: one unaffected, one slightly deflected, and one deflected sharply. This shows that they carry different charges. We call them, respectively, gamma, alpha, and beta rays,” explained the assistant.
He drew three rays on the board and put ellipses around them.
“If we use gold foil to record where the rays fall, we observe that approximately one in eight thousand alpha particles deviates by more than ninety degrees. Thus, we hypothesise that atomic structure is similar to the solar system: most of the mass and positive charge are concentrated in a very small central area, similar to the sun, while electrons orbit around it, like planets. This is Professor Rutherford’s planetary model of the atom.”
The students began to murmur. Until that point, the most popular theory of atomic structure had been the “plum pudding” model, which suggested the atom was a positively charged sphere with embedded negative charges, like dried fruit in a round pudding.
“The atomic nucleus is like a star, and the electrons like planets; they are held in balance by strong magnetic and nuclear forces2. If this balance was disrupted, it could release an unimaginable amount of energy—like that of the sun,” added the assistant.
A few students asked questions, which Professor Rutherford answered in turn. He then concluded with a summary of his theory.
After the lecture, Shen Zhaolin left the hall—the person he was to meet was already waiting for him.
Xu Hang stood on the grass, leaning against the railings. Her delicate features contrasted the gentleman’s suit she wore, giving her a boyish air. A distant cousin of his, Xu Hang came from a wealthy merchant family. She had a taste for adventure and opposed traditional marriage. In the decade or so he had spent studying, Xu Hang had travelled the world and developed the manner of an explorer.
“Brother Shen,” Xu Hang greeted him, with a wave and a smile. “I didn’t expect you to still be so interested in physics after all these years. If you’d stayed in the field, you would be the one standing on the podium now.”
Shen Zhaolin walked up to her, shaking his head.
“Everyone has to compromise—it was my choice. If a country has no industrial infrastructure, what’s the point of deriving models from physics? How could we test or use them for manufacturing? That’s why I switched to metallurgy, and I don’t regret it.”
“What about parting with Miss Lin? She’s moved to London now.”
“Let’s not bring that up. I’m just here for work and leaving tomorrow. Next time you’re in China, you must visit me.”
“Fine. Let’s eat first,” Xu Hang shrugged, putting her hands into her pockets. Suddenly she raised an eyebrow.
“Before I forget—here, this is for you. Guess where I got it from.” She pulled out a glass specimen bottle.
It contained a mineral sample: reddish-brown crystals with a waxy, glass-like surface.
“Monazite?”
Shen Zhaolin raised the bottle to look at it in the sunlight. The refracted red light was beautiful, like flowing molten iron.
“Yes, you’re doing metallurgy, so I thought it might be useful. What do you think of the quality?”
“Very few impurities. Is it from Norway or Sweden?”
“Neither. The Mongolian steppe—Baiyun-Obo.” Xu Hang raised her eyebrow again, anticipating Shen Zhaolin’s astonishment.
“I was surprised too at first,” she said. “I was there hunting wolves and we were looking for firewood when I found this. The locals said there was plenty more of it, so I hired people to collect it. When you return to China, I’ll have it sent to Hanyang for you.”
Shen Zhaolin felt excited. The international view had long been that rare-earth reserves were small, and therefore only suited for high-end aluminium research and development, and even so, this was often abandoned owing to cost. If China had abundant untapped rare-earth resources, then perhaps it could overtake Western countries and establish a different kind of iron-and-steel industry.
Upon returning to China, Shen Zhaolin used experimental methods to extract small amounts of the rare-earth elements from the monazite sample. Soon after, he submitted a proposal on rare-earth cast iron to the Iron Plant. Political turmoil and the subsequent outbreak of the First World War, however, meant that the plant was focusing on military-grade steel at the time. The proposal failed to gain approval. It was not until Chen Wenxiu arrived years later after the war ended that the rare-earth project was initiated.
It was logical for Chen Wenxiu and He Yongnian to participate in the project. They learnt to extract elements using alkaline solutions, separating various rare earths from the monazite. But since China lacked testing facilities, they could not identify specifically which elements they were. Instead, they referred to them collectively as the lanthanide series, and the iron as “Hanyang lanthanide cast iron”.
Although the minerals Xu Hang supplied were not enough to support production, they were sufficient for creating samples.
Three years flew by. The team produced several sample pieces using different lanthanide elements and prepared to take them to England for testing. Throughout the process, Shen Zhaolin was getting thinner—his face looked pale, and he’d coughed occasionally.
One autumn afternoon, Chen Wenxiu climbed the vertical ladder to the mouth of the furnace as usual, to observe the molten iron. Because of his poor health, Shen Zhaolin rarely visited the site anymore. Apart from a few workers, only Chen Wenxiu or He Yongnian would be there, taking turns to be on duty.
Near the furnace were some iron ingots that had been poured into moulds that morning. After filling in his data, Chen Wenxiu checked his watch to record the time. It wasn’t even five o’clock, yet it was already getting dark. It must have been because of the equinox, and the days had been getting shorter more quickly, though it still seemed to him abrupt. He was reflecting on this when he noticed the workers were removing their fireproof suits, packing their lunchboxes, and heading towards the gate.
Workers did sometimes shirk and slip away early, but normally not quite so blatantly in front of him.
“Where are you going?” Chen Wenxiu called out, with an air of displeasure.
“Shift’s over, Engineer Chen. Aren’t you leaving too?” replied one of them.
“There’s still more than an hour to go.” Chen Wenxiu checked his watch again. He began to have a vague feeling that something was not quite right, though he could not pinpoint what exactly.
“It’s six o’clock. Be reasonable.”
The workers looked perplexed and gestured towards the gate to the yard.
Chen Wenxiu looked up. A standing clock was visible through the window of the office outside the gate. Its hands now pointed a little past six o’clock. Because he had to ensure strict control over the smelting schedule, he adjusted his watch every evening—so how could it now be wrong? If he had marked down the time incorrectly, the entire day’s records would be invalid, something that had never happened before.
A chill ran down Chen Wenxiu’s spine. He scurried to the window and bent over his watch. He immediately saw what the problem was: the second hand was not moving evenly. Instead, it paused for a moment or two and then jumped forward several notches on the dial at once.
On the windowsill were several pieces of scrap cast iron. As Chen Wenxiu unconsciously moved his wrist closer to the cast iron, he noticed the second hand froze. When he moved his wrist away again, the second hand skipped ahead. This meant the hand of the watch had become magnetised—the result of prolonged exposure to a strong magnetic field. But Chen Wenxiu had been by the furnace the entire day. Molten iron could not produce a magnetic field, he reasoned, so the source had to be the cooling cast iron.
The workers had already left, and the yard was now empty. As Chen Wenxiu considered all this, some strange noises suddenly came from behind him.
He turned around just in time to see a screw on the ground spinning, then fly up and hit the castings with a ding.
Metal objects nearby started to vibrate faintly. As the temperature dropped, the iron atoms and rare-earth atoms were crystallising. They were forming a completely new magnetic structure of a strength previously unknown.
Chapter Five
The crystal phase analysis report from the lab was quickly uploaded to the intranet, and I received a notification from the lab technician. It seemed to be a typical rare-earth ductile iron analysis report. The rare-earth cerium content and the nodular structure were no different from modern standards.
It was just after nine o’clock, and the main room was unusually quiet. My mentor got himself a cup of water at the cooler, then walked over to stand behind me. Seeing the report on my screen, he let out a gasp of admiration.
“I guess this is from one of the last batches of samples they made in 1923, the twelfth year of the Republic. The quality was at its peak then because they had gained experience,” he said.
“Why 1923? How do you know?”
“Because Hanyang Iron Plant stopped production in 1924. After that, the main role of the Han–Ye–Ping company was to export iron ore to Japan.”
“They were sold to Japan?” I was stunned and struggled to comprehend this. “Wouldn’t that have been used to make weapons for the war of aggression against China?”
My mentor shook his head slightly without replying, and indicated I should scroll up to examine the page showing the element composition.
“I’ve looked at it,” I said. “It’s on par with modern ductile iron. I think they absolutely could have mined for this directly and produced it commercially. Rare-earth cast iron is cheap and high-performing; it would have dominated the market.”
“It wasn’t that simple. Do you know about the ‘chicken on a ball’ incident in the Republican era?” mentor asked.
“Chicken on a ball”? Was that circus trick? I thought he was joking, but he scrolled his phone to find a photograph and then showed it to me.
The image showed a promotional brochure for Eagle and Globe, a British steel company, featuring its trademark of an eagle standing on a sphere.
“Eagle and Globe was a British brand of specialty steel. In 1943, the Chinese Zhongxing Steel Mill produced a batch of tool steel that was of high quality and low-cost, but no one dared to use it. Even government intervention failed to improve sales. Eventually, someone forged a British Chicken and Globe trademark, claiming it represented a subsidiary of Eagle and Globe. The price was set high—nonetheless, under the guise of imported goods, the steel sold out,” he said.
“At the time, trust in the government was low, and the market blindly worshipped foreign goods. Domestic brands were limited to more traditional areas: if someone had tried to promote a new type of cast iron, there would have been no market.”
These were things I had not considered before. It was too easy to think from a modern perspective, ignoring the differences in social structures of the past. What we take for granted would have seemed sheer fantasy in Chen Wenxiu’s time.
“Oh yes—the lab has informed me that the military projects team wants to hold on to the sample block. They plan to conduct additional tests, so we don’t need to go and get it,” mentor said, tapping my chair as he left.
The military projects team was a section within the company that handled classified projects. It was not appropriate for me to ask too many questions.
I closed the report, worked on routine tasks for a while, and then opened the photos of the notebook again. The notes were dense and skipping sections made them hard to follow: I had to read them in order. My mentor had been busy recently, so I probably got further reading the notebook than he did.
Strongly magnetic ductile iron made with rare-earth elements could only mean one thing: neodymium magnetism. If that were the case, the invention of the neodymium magnet would be brought forward earlier by 60 years. However, I clearly remembered that the sample block in the iron box was not magnetic.
If the box were indeed left by Chen Wenxiu himself, he must have intended for the notebook and the sample block to corroborate each other, revealing to us the truth of what happened back then. But if their greatest achievement were a neodymium magnet, why did he choose to put in a block of something else and not include a magnet? Even just a small magnet would have been more convincing, I mused.
In the notebook, Chen Wenxiu wrote about the fear he felt. That evening, he gazed fixedly at that piece of cast iron a long time—it felt like staring into the abyss. He was unsure of what they might find if they continued their investigations and shared his concerns with Shen Zhaolin. When Shen Zhaolin came to inspect the iron himself, he got excited, and immediately decided to change his upcoming boat reservation to leave for England earlier than originally intended.
“Yongnian will go with me,” he said. Then he patted Chen Wenxiu on the back: “You stay here and look after the equipment.”
“Really?” He Yongnian jumped up, ignoring the flicker of disappointment in Chen Wenxiu’s eyes.
In the three years of collaboration, there was no doubt He Yongnian had been the favourite. Feelings of dejection and loneliness welled up in Chen Wenxiu—unusual emotions for him.
He Yongnian’s father was in the Kuominchun army3. He and Shen Zhaolin were cut from the same cloth. Their privileged upbringing had given them broad horizons and a certain mental acuity. Chen Wenxiu sensed the gap that separated him from them, a gap that his mere efforts could not bridge.
Shen Zhaolin and He Yongnian set out early one morning. By now the workers had been reassigned elsewhere, leaving just Chen Wenxiu alone at the vast blast furnace. He did not realise, then, that it would be the last time they were all together.
Chapter Six
Winter 1923, twelfth year of the Republic.
Before dawn at a pier in Shanghai, the steamer from England had just docked, and the passengers were filing out.
Under the dim sky, there were very few passers-by on the street. Carrying a suitcase, He Yongnian followed closely behind Shen Zhaolin—the last to leave the boat. After the long journey, they both showed signs of fatigue and low spirits, especially Shen Zhaolin, whose face was even paler than before their departure.
“Do you remember? The atomic nucleus is like a star. Magnetic forces and nuclear forces … ” Shen Zhaolin said. The dull pain in his chest made him feel time was running out, and he urgently needed to get his thinking across.
“Shifu, let’s talk when we get back—I’ll go look for a rickshaw up ahead,” replied He Yongnian, wrapping his scarf closer as he looked around. However, there was no rickshaw in sight, so he put down the suitcase and walked into the alley in front of them.
Shen Zhaolin stood there by himself. All was quiet; a few sparrows settled on the intersecting tram wires overhead and then fluttered off again. He was unable to suppress a cough, and when he took his handkerchief away, there were spots of blood. Folding the handkerchief, he pushed it into his pocket. In the shadows, he thought he fleetingly saw a dark figure and he turned his head to look back at the dusky pier.
A flash of light broke the darkness. A bullet grazed his temple, and before he could react, a second gunshot rang out, piercing his chest from the side.
When He Yongnian returned with the rickshaw, Shen Zhaolin’s body was already cold.
The police claimed it was a robbery, but none of their belongings had been taken—not even the blood-spattered suitcase.
Chen Wenxiu heard the news several days later. Back in Hanyang, when He Yongnian returned from police headquarters, he seemed an empty shell, his responses slow.
Chen Wenxiu sprinted over and tugged at He Yongnian’s shoulder. He could see the dark stains on the case. Inside, the sample blocks looked the same as when they had set out, but there was a stack of lab reports in English. Chen Wenxiu looked through them. They contained only strength tests, no chemical analyses—even for the strong magnet. All the sample blocks, it seemed, had failed to meet the structural steel standard.
“What happened?Shifu cared so much about this magnet—why wasn’t its magnetism tested? And the chemical composition—weren’t you supposed to confirm the rare-earth elements? Why weren’t they analysed?” Chen Wenxiu stood up, and seeing He Yongnian still unresponsive, grabbed him by the collar.
“If it was just about failed tests, why would someone murder him? Why won’t you say anything?!”
Gritting his teeth, He Yongnian still did not utter a word. Chen Wenxiu became even more infuriated and punched him in the face.
“Engineer Chen!” A worker leapt in to pull Chen Wenxiu away.
He Yongnian did not fight back and just spat out the blood from his mouth.
“You want to know why?” he finally said. “Because the centre of the atom is a little star!”
Pushing Chen Wenxiu aside, he wiped his face with his sleeve and stormed out.
That night, He Yongnian did not return. He requested that the company transfer him to another dormitory and then applied for leave.
Shen Zhaolin’s funeral took place before Christmas. His parents had already passed away, and of the Shens, just one male cousin attended.
Among the friends and schoolmates present, Chen Wenxiu spotted Xu Hang. Now in her forties, she still wore a suit but had curled her hair. Her lightly made-up face showed some traces of time.
Removing her beret, Xu Hang walked across and placed a bouquet of white orchids on the gravestone. A moment later, she reached into her pocket, took out a ring and put it on top of the flowers.
“This is from Miss Lin,” she said, and paused. Then, as if catching herself, she smiled faintly: “Miss Lin is Mrs Terry now.”
Straightening up, she then signalled to the nearby attendants. A second pit had previously been dug beside Shen Zhaolin’s grave. In it, the attendants put a wooden box Xu Hang had brought, along with some of Shen Zhaolin’s personal items, and then covered them with earth.
It was Xu Hang’s last box of monazite. After Shen Zhaolin died, the rare-earth cast iron project was abandoned, making those items useless. Not much later, owing to ongoing losses, Hanyang Iron Plant ceased production. He Yongnian was transferred to the trade section of Han–Ye–Ping, where he managed export of iron ore to Japan’s Yahata Steelworks.
When production of steel at the plant stopped, all the workers were dismissed. Chen Wenxiu was reluctant to leave and applied to stay on as a security guard at the works. He kept to himself the emotions that motivated him: he had to figure out why Shen Zhaolin had died. By piecing together clues he might find at the works, he hoped to uncover facts that had been kept from him—and, from there, the full story of what had happened.
The centre of the atom is a star, and the electrons are planets; what holds them in balance are strong magnetic and nuclear forces.
Chen Wenxiu wrote this in the notebook, reflecting on He Yongnian’s final answer to him. Strong magnetic forces. Magnets…
His notes then stopped. There were later entries but written in a different ink and a more haphazard script. They must have been added years later.
Chapter Seven
There was a gap of over a decade in the notebook. When Chen Wenxiu started writing again, it was 1935, the twenty-fourth year of the Republic. The government was drawing up steel industry standards, and Chen Wenxiu submitted a proposal for a set of rare-earth cast-iron standards to the Han–Ye–Ping company. It was quickly rejected.
By then, He Yongnian had been promoted to deputy director of the Daye mines’ trade section, married, and started a family. Soon after Chen Wenxiu’s proposal was rejected, he unexpectedly came to find Chen Wenxiu and invite him to dinner.
This was their first meeting since their tussle so long ago. It seemed He Yongnian had changed: lack of physical labour had given him pale skin and a pot belly, and his way of speaking and behaving was different.
He ordered some dishes from a restaurant to be delivered to the dormitory, and then suggested he use his connections to transfer Chen Wenxiu to the Daye mines, where the pay was better. Chen Wenxiu did not respond: he knew why He Yongnian had suddenly appeared.
“What do you want from me?” Chen Wenxiu shoved a piece of fish into his mouth with his chopsticks, then took a gulp of wine. It tasted different from the wine they had drunk together at Shen Zhaolin’s home—there was a bitterness to it.
“No, I just wanted to catch up—we haven’t seen each other for years,” He Yongnian said, smilingly. “Brother Wenxiu, you haven’t changed a bit—not like me, bogged down by business and already feeling old.”
“You want to ask me how I compiled those standards, with the blast furnace inactive for ten years, no monazite, and no facilities for experimentation?”
“I’m just thinking of how close we were back then, spending every day together. But once Shifu was gone, it seemed as if everything fell apart,” He Yongnian said.
Chen Wenxiu lowered his head, grappling with a decision. Then, he quickly stood up, grabbed He Yongnian’s arm, and led him outside.
“Come with me,” he said.
The night was dark, and by the road the dim shapes of tree branches swayed. After entering a narrow path and turning several corners, they emerged in front of a remote factory building. Chen Wenxiu moved aside the wooden boards blocking the entrance and lit a gas lamp.
No one else had been in here in a long time. On either side, He Yongnian could see stacked sample blocks. Further ahead, the lamplight fell on a huge black tarp.
Chen Wenxiu put down the lamp and, in the gloom, pulled off the tarp.. It fell to the ground with a resounding thud, revealing a massive object, only dimly visible.
“Do you remember what you said back then?” he asked.
“When?” He Yongnian froze, a strange foreboding rising in him as he faced the object.
“The centre of the atom is a little star.”
Chen Wenxiu went over to a complex-looking circuit, and pulled a switch.
The factory lights above them came on and, simultaneously, an engine within the immense object started to vibrate. Now He Yongnian could see it was a ring-shaped apparatus two storeys high, its exterior covered in magnets. Inside, some kind of fluid began to flow with the electricity, emitting a dazzling glow.
The keys in He Yongnian’s pocket started to quiver and buzz. He realised the thing in front of him was what Shen Zhaolin had once drawn in his blueprints. The outer magnets were powerful rare-earth magnets.
“Where did you get the rare-earth minerals?” asked He Yongnian, extending his hand; then suddenly, as if he had seen a ghost, he retreated, sinking to the ground as his legs gave way.
“You dug up Shifu’s grave. The monazite, the blueprints… you dug up his grave!”
Chen Wenxiu walked over and stretched out a hand to him in turn, but He Yongnian saw the wildness in his eyes and shrank back.
“In England you saw Professor Rutherford, Ernest Rutherford, at the University of Manchester,” Chen Wenxiu said. “Shen Shifu had been one of his students. Based on Rutherford’s theory, he designed this machine. These drawings and documents were buried with the monazite. It took me five years to understand them.”
“A stellarator… ” muttered He Yongnian, turning his head to look at the enormous machine humming and glowing. It was a stellarator, a nuclear fusion device built with permanent magnets and coils, conceived in line with Rutherford’s planetary theory of atomic structure. The flashing magnetic fluids in their magnetic fields simulated the fusion occurring inside a star. In a sense, he had created a little star.
“This should’ve stayed buried! You don’t understand!” Suddenly jumping to his feet and without brushing off the dirt, He Yongnian grabbed Chen Wenxiu by the collar.
“What don’t I understand? Shifu may not have explicitly taught me, but I was there when he taught you. I found the blueprints and built it. Why wouldn’t I understand?”
“He was naive! Shen Zhaolin was naive!” When He Yongnian suddenly shouted their mentor’s name, Chen Wenxiu froze, his ears buzzing.
“‘An innocent man is made guilty by the jade he possesses4.’ Don’t you get it? The next step for the stellarator is weapons—devices that release nuclear energy with the power of ten thousand tons of TNT! You all called me a traitor for exporting iron ore to Japan to make weapons to be used against our compatriots. But ifShifu had come back then and gone on to supply permanent magnets to Britain, how many more Chinese people would have died?”
Chen Wenxiu had never thought of it that way. Like Shen Zhaolin, he had meticulously managed to avoid thinking about the destructive potential of the stellarator. But He Yongnian was different—he had an instinctive sharpness, suited to politics. Now, as he looked into He Yongnian’s eyes, the truth of Shen Zhaolin’s murder felt just within reach, yet Chen Wenxiu’s courage failed him and he did not ask.
Chapter Eight
“Have you got that far?” Mentor appeared as if from nowhere behind me, tapping the back of my chair. Taken off guard, I quickly saved the process sheet I was editing and turned around.
“What?”
“In the notebook. He created a stellarator, with permanent magnets!”
My mentor’s face betrayed his emotions, and the screen of his phone was lit, suggesting he had just finished making a call.
I had continued to read Chen Wenxiu’s notes the day before. During the decade the Iron Plant was closed, he had used permanent magnets and electricity to assemble the stellarator designed by Shen Zhaolin. I had never heard the term and not given it much thought. After all, I reasoned, it was something from a hundred years ago, so it must be outdated, no matter what.
“You know about controlled nuclear fusion, right?” Seeing my confusion, he gestured at the industry journals on the nearby bookshelf.
“China’s tokamak experimental reactor, the ‘artificial sun’, was put into operation just a few days ago. It’s been in the news.”
“I’m aware of the tokamak. Is that the same thing as a stellarator?”
“No. Primarily, there are two main designs for controlled nuclear fusion: the tokamak and the stellarator. Today, we don’t hear much about stellarator research because it was found to involve too much particle loss, and by the 1950s most countries had given up on it. The tokamak became the dominant design globally. But it has a glaring, seemingly insurmountable problem. You might have heard the expression, ‘The realisation of controlled nuclear fusion is always fifty years away.’ Research has been stuck, to some degree.”
“What’s the problem?” Owing to my lack of expertise in the field, I hadn’t considered this in depth before, but I was curious.
“Lack of a continuous, stable magnetic field,” my mentor said. “The tokamak’s magnetic field is unstable. The stellarator, on the other hand, has external coils and magnets that maintain continuous, stable magnetic confinement of the internal flowing plasma. In recent years, Japan and Germany have shifted towards stellarator research. The issue of particle loss can be resolved. It may be that, when considered next to the tokamak, the stellarator actually proves to be the more viable route to nuclear fusion. Remember the military projects team I mentioned? They’ve been studying the feasibility of stellarators. Their task is to develop strongly magnetic rare-earth magnets, which is why they took away the sample block. None of us imagined that they’d got it right back then! Their stellarator worked—it must have had a unique design.”
“But how can we prove what he wrote was true and not an invention? If it was true, why didn’t he put a neodymium magnet sample in the iron box, instead of a non-magnetic rare-earth cast-iron sample?”
I was voicing a question that had been on my mind for a while. My mentor shook his head, pulled the notebook from the shelf, turned to the last few pages, and opened it for me.
That night He Yongnian stayed over at the Iron Plant dormitory. They agreed he would take the plans for rare-earth cast iron and designs for the stellarator the next day. But Chen Wenxiu woke before daybreak with a feeling of unease that compelled him to open He Yongnian’s bag. Inside, he found a handgun and a letter written in Japanese.
This was not entirely irregular in itself, since He Yongnian was the point of contact for the Yahata Steelworks. But Chen Wenxiu could see it was a personal letter. Though he knew no Japanese, he could make out some of the interspersed English words and Chinese-character kanji: “magnetic”, “technology”, “without borders”.
The handwriting in the final lines of the notebook was scrawled, clearly written in a rush. It seemed He Yongnian had four bullets in his magazine. Chen Wenxiu removed them all, hid them in an inner pocket, and reloaded the empty magazine.
If this is the end, let’s go back to the beginning of the story, read the last entry. The following pages were torn out, leaving ragged edges.
“That day was the nineteenth of May, twenty-fourth year of the Republic. The military projects team just told me that they have obtained the Hanyang police incident report. Apparently, in the early morning, two gunshots were heard by the Han River near the Iron Plant. When officers arrived, they found signs of a struggle in the vegetation, but nothing else. A few weeks later, the plant manager reported Chen Wenxiu and He Yongnian missing. The case was never solved, and there are no further records about it.”
“Why are they investigating this…?” I felt confused, but then it dawned on me. “They’re looking for the stellarator—no, the designs for the stellarator!”
“Exactly. There’s a technology gap in stellarator research, and Shen Zhaolin’s designs are crucial. Three years later, in 1938, the Japanese invaded. The Nationalist government established the Steelworks Relocation Committee and moved Hanyang Iron Plant to Chongqing. The equipment that couldn’t be transported was deliberately blown up. Pressed for time and under Japanese bombardment, it was not possible to identify apparatus or judge its worth. The stellarator was probably destroyed or dumped in the Han River. But I believe Chen Wenxiu left this notebook and the sample block for a reason. What was it he wanted to communicate?”
“Yes, what was it? If he was afraid the Japanese would discover the box and so didn’t want to include a magnet sample and information about the stellarator, then what do the items he placed inside point to?”
My mentor and I could not work it out. Once I had finished my overtime, I took the bus to the place I rented in the suburbs. When I got out, the sky was already dark. The bright lights of the city centre obscured the stars, but when I looked up, I could dimly make out the constellations.
“The centre of the atom is a little star.” This sentence darted through my mind. From Hanyang to Manchester, standing by the molten iron in the blast furnace, or on a steamship in the pitch black and cold of the ocean, Shen Zhaolin must have gazed at the night sky countless times. He must have tried to replicate those stars with his permanent magnets and coils.
In the dim glow of the streetlights, I seemed to see Chen Wenxiu coming out of the shabby Iron Plant dormitory in a cream-coloured, machine-woven shirt.
Go back to the beginning of the story, he reminded me.
Where was the beginning of the story? Was it Chen Wenxiu stepping out of Hankou Railway Station, Shen Zhaolin in England switching to materials science, or Xu Hang delivering monazite for their first batch of rare-earth cast iron?
Frames rewound in my mind until they paused at the rickshaw crossing the Han River. He Yongnian had then only just graduated—clear-eyed and smiling, he turned his head.
“Can you swim, Brother Wenxiu?” he asked.
My heart was racing. I grabbed my phone, my fingers trembling as I pressed the numbers.
“Hello?” responded my mentor, but I was already shouting.
“The riverbed—the cave with gold at the bottom of the river! The notebook gives a clue. Chen Wenxiu hid the stellarator designs at the bottom of the river!”
Chapter Nine
Before the Chongqing steel mills moved to Changshou, I had already resigned to take a job at Tianjin Iron Plant back in the North.
The warehouse built by the Steel Relocation Committee was not demolished in the end. Instead, it was preserved to become part of the Chongqing Industrial Museum. In fact, the entire metallurgical works of the Chongqing steel mills now belong to the museum.
From construction, through prosperity, to decline, the whole trajectory of the mills spanned less than a hundred years.
My mentor has retired. Occasionally, he still gets in touch to chat about this and that.
On the night I called him, he notified the military projects team. Not long after, a well-equipped diving team dove into the Han River. As anticipated, they discovered a half-metre-wide rock cave deep on the riverbed.
They removed the stone at the entrance and found a bundle of documents sealed with wax, tightly wrapped in oilcloth. According to my mentor, the materials included not only the designs for the stellarator but also records on smelting for neodymium magnets, detailing element ratios and heat treatment durations—the specifics of the data of course inaccessible to me.
Last autumn, I had a work trip to Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation and visited Hanyang for the first time. Stepping off the plane, I was greeted once more by the familiar humid heat of the South.
The site of the old Iron Plant has been transformed into an art exhibition space. In the memorial park to the north of Turtle Mountain stands a 200-ton mass of solid iron—a remnant from when the blast furnace collapsed, just before production ceased.
I made a point of visiting the banks of the Han River and stood there for a while in the breeze.
No one swims here anymore. The river, turbid and slow, moves on. But beneath its surface still lies the place Chen Wenxiu chose as a refuge.
So, what of those two gunshots mentioned in the records of the Hanyang police? What actually happened?
People change. At twenty-seven, He Yongnian never imagined he would become the thing he then despised.
And, in the face of Japanese rapaciousness, there was no need for Chen Wenxiu to move several tons of permanent magnets—he simply had to eliminate He Yongnian. Without He Yongnian as their agent, the Japanese would not be able to locate the stellarator even if the Japanese entered the Iron Plant.
Snatching a gun from someone is easier than taking their bullets. Perhaps Chen Wenxiu fired two shots at He Yongnian in the river, and then dived down to the bottom with the documents. But how could someone make it back to the surface if they went underwater without any equipment?
Rewind a few hours—to just before sunrise.
Chen Wenxiu finishes writing his last words, finds the final sample block they had created together, HYLn-103, and locks it in the iron box with the notebook. He then seals up the blueprints and records, tucks them into his clothes, and returns to the dormitory.
“Brother Yongnian,” he says, touching He Yongnian’s shoulder.
Though still asleep, He Yongnian’s instinctive vigilance kicks in. He rolls over, his hand reaching for the bag by his bed, where the gun remains, its contours unmistakable.
“I’ve organised the materials. I’ll give them to you tomorrow. Shall we go for one more swim in the river?” Chen Wenxiu says.
In that moment—half-waking and half-dreaming—He Yongnian is in a trancelike state, as if he had returned to ten years before, to one of those countless early mornings in high summer. They would swim before starting work, sometimes swimming while it was still dark, returning just in time for breakfast at the plant.
The site of the old Iron Plant was not far now. Walking along beside the river, I put on my headphones and tapped the news app on my phone.
“In the last few days, China has achieved ground-breaking progress in stellarator research. By adopting innovative structures and rare-earth materials, the stellarator prototype is expected to achieve steady-state operation. This project takes China’s magnetic confinement fusion to a new level, shifting research away from a focus on the tokamak and opening an alternative technical route to energy from controlled fusion. In honour of the engineer who made outstanding contributions to its innovative design, the stellarator prototype has been named Hanyang 1…”
The sound of the report faded. My screen showed the enormous ring-like device wound with coils and magnets—as it was activated, the blue plasma inside emitted a brilliant glow.
I closed the app. In my line of sight the river stretched on, vanishing into the distance, as if it had no end.
- During the Republican period, the geographical shape of China was commonly compared to a begonia leaf. At that time, Mongolia and other territories were claimed as part of Greater China, making the outline of the country appear rounder and fuller than now. ↩︎
- Nuclear forces were first introduced by physicists in the 1930s, in order to explain the structure of the atomic nucleus. For the purposes of this plot, this concept is introduced 20 years earlier in the fictional world, and is included in the content of Rutherford’s class. ↩︎
- The Kuominchun (Guominjun) army was a Nationalist faction that controlled much of Northwest China. The army was active between 1924 and 1930, and for a period allied with the Kuomintang. ↩︎
- The quotation “An innocent man is made guilty by the jade he possesses” implies that precious objects can bring misfortune. In later times, it has been used to mean that talent and idealism can lead to victimisation. ↩︎
Guest Editor: Vanessa