Comments on: Chairman Mao's Underground City

Chairman Mao's Underground City

Kattullus — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:33:27 -0800

Chairman Mao's Underground City is a pictorial travelogue of a small part of the tunnels that Chairman Mao had built under Beijing to serve as a nuclear fallout shelter. The intrepid urban explorers come across some surprising things. The complex, which was built by hand, could house three hundred thousand people for up to four months and had amenities such as restaurants, cinemas and roller rinks. Here's a short Travel Channel feature on the Underground City.

By: Kattullus

Kattullus — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:34:29 -0800

I love this sentence from the Travel Channel featurette: "Take that, Brezhnev, you're not gonna interrupt roller derby night!"

By: fatbird

fatbird — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:38:58 -0800

I've always wondered how the various urban bomb shelters would have dealt with a real nuclear war. Eight to eighteen metres of dirt over your head doesn't actually seem like a lot when you've multiple nuclear warheads exploding directly over top. Anyone done any studies or projections?

By: Slack-a-gogo

Slack-a-gogo — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:39:08 -0800

I was thinking how much I'd like to see it in real life until I got to this sentence: "Soon we were up to our knees in freezing cold, shitty, disease-ridden slop." Now I'm thinking seeing the pictures and reading the copy is enough. Thanks for posting - this is something that's interested me for years (I think I first heard of it in a Cecil Adams and William Poundstone book, but never came accross pictures or more info).

By: mattdidthat

mattdidthat — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:46:05 -0800

[mao inside]

By: fleetmouse

fleetmouse — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:46:12 -0800

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

By: ixohoxi

ixohoxi — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:51:29 -0800

Awesome! (Needs the urbanexploration tag.)

By: ms.jones

ms.jones — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:55:41 -0800

nice post. thanks!

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:41:50 -0800

I was thinking how much I'd like to see it in real life until I got to this sentence: "Soon we were up to our knees in freezing cold, shitty, disease-ridden slop." Now I'm thinking seeing the pictures and reading the copy is enough. As much as I love this stuff, a buddy of mine had to have a sizeable chunk of his leg amputated due to the MRSA he got because he scraped his leg in an ordinary mud puddle on the surface of Beijing. I'd hate to think what lurks down there.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:46:48 -0800

fatbird, most of the fallout shelters were just that -- temporary protection from fallout, not from blast effects. Also, a lot of them were designed and built in the kiloton A-bomb era, not the megaton H-bomb era. (Cheyenne Mountain is probably the safest target zone ever built, and it is hundreds of feet below ground and the working areas are on shock absorbers.) Draw your own conclusions. Two of London's Second World War tragedies took place in Underground stations.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:52:51 -0800

Aftermath! RPG geek!

By: wuwei

wuwei — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:54:31 -0800

At Peking University, the foreign student dorms had a bomb shelter. Giant blast doors and everything. In the 1990s, there were also internet cafes in the bomb shelter tunnels next to campus. Fun times. Nice and warm in the winter.

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:57:25 -0800

Interesting post. Thanks, Kattullus.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:00:09 -0800

By: crapmatic

crapmatic — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:01:04 -0800

The guy should've stopped to take good, high-resolution pictures of that blueprint. That's a serious piece of Cold War history and there probably won't be any chance to get it out of state archives.

By: meech

meech — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:02:34 -0800

The Underground City used to be a proper tourist attraction as evidenced by the Travel Channel Documentary. I was in Beijing last month and was so excited to go explore the underground city but there was very bad news....

By: dunkadunc

dunkadunc — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:06:43 -0800

mad raves held by daring Chinese punks wearing miners' headlamps. Count me in!

By: Pope Guilty

Pope Guilty — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:17:35 -0800

Count me in! See you in the amputation surgery ward, then.

By: flippant

flippant — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:55:49 -0800

That looks interesting. There's a bit if a disparity in the way The Travel Channel and Vice Magazine present the tunnel. On one hand, it's a guided tourist attraction, and on the other hand, it seems to be a derelict, verboten place of great danger, accessible only to adventurous souls with the right hookups. I'm going with tourist attraction.

By: Zalzidrax

Zalzidrax — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 23:27:28 -0800

Nuclear weapons don't make big craters - they are air burst for max effect. There may be no crater at all. And it doesn't take much dirt to protect from the heat and radiation. The hard part is the blast, the air is displaced, it sort of, well, crushes you. So you need blast doors to absorb the shock. And the "aftermath" part, radiation fallout, air filters. Also you might want some way to deal with the fact that the giant fireball that has just been created is going to suck up all the oxygen for several miles. You don't just need to be underground, you need to be firmly sealed underground with at least a few hour oxygen supply.

By: Meatbomb

Meatbomb — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:27:22 -0800

I will hide and you will hide And we shall hide together here Underneath the bunkers in the row I have water, I have rum Wait for dawn and dawn shall come Underneath the bunkers in the row

By: meech

meech — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:28:18 -0800

On one hand, it's a guided tourist attraction, and on the other hand, it seems to be a derelict, verboten place of great danger, accessible only to adventurous souls with the right hookups. Well I think that's the thing - the tourist attraction is sadly gone.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:30:47 -0800

See you in the amputation surgery ward, then. Take a left at the Vagina Mirror Check Room, past the From Congeals The Knife Treatment Room, third door on the left, just across from the Short-Wave Treatment Room.

By: bwg

bwg — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:04:35 -0800

Let this be a lesson to you: always wear your hip-waders when exploring underground tunnels filled with disease-ridden groundwater.

By: fleacircus

fleacircus — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:14:59 -0800

Pollo's link is like the directory of Chinese Hell.

By: Abiezer

Abiezer — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:21:23 -0800

Top post! We tried to get in and see these as students in the 90s but couldn't get past the door. Now they're open I've never bothered. Always thought their existence sat uneasily with the notion that the Maoist regime was cavalier with the lives of the civilian population - in the UK the bunker network was exclusively for the government and military and the rest of us got the notorious Protect and Survive guide to building our own out of old doors and tea bags. That's a serious piece of Cold War history and there probably won't be any chance to get it out of state archives. A lot of those archives are actually opening up to scholarship now - e.g. those on the website of this research centre.

By: jimmythefish

jimmythefish — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:51:16 -0800

Nuclear weapons don't make big craters - they are air burst for max effect. I don't know what the tipping point in my head is, but the notion of malicious, counter-intuitive bombing tactics like air bursting really scrapes the bottom of the barrel of humanity. Maybe it's that smart, educated, industrious bastards went to great lengths to figure out how to harm the most people possible. It makes my stomach churn.

By: nestor_makhno

nestor_makhno — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:25:01 -0800

MetaFilter: up to our knees in freezing cold, shitty, disease-ridden slop.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:42:07 -0800

I don't know what the tipping point in my head is, but the notion of malicious, counter-intuitive bombing tactics like air bursting really scrapes the bottom of the barrel of humanity. How is an air burst counter intuitive? What do you think they should have done with the nukes? Just hit people over the head with it?

By: jimmythefish

jimmythefish — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:20:22 -0800

How is an air burst counter intuitive? Well, normally bombs hit the ground.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:21:12 -0800

I don't know what the tipping point in my head is, but the notion of malicious, counter-intuitive bombing tactics like air bursting really scrapes the bottom of the barrel of humanity. How is an air burst counter intuitive? What do you think they should have done with the nukes? Just hit people over the head with it? Also, it's a nuke, how exactly is there a pleasant, kind, humane way to use one? Oh, let's just blow one up in the desert and hope we don't hurt too many jack rabbits. The whole point of a nuke is that it is so horrifyingly evil that you never ever want one used on you. At least with an air burst, the survivors have something to rebuild from and far less lingering fallout to deal with for the next few millennia.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:45:47 -0800

Well, normally bombs hit the ground. It had been known for a long time that you actually wanted your bombs to burst in the air (there might even be a song or two incorporating such words), as this caused more harm to the targets than a ground burst.

By: JB71

JB71 — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:02:11 -0800

Kind of depends on the bomb, ROU_xenophobe. But you're right - for the BEST results (or worst, depending on your POV) for blast damage, you're going to want an air burst, with the altitude dependent on the tonnage. If you're looking for fallout, you want either a low air or ground burst so the fireball sucks up as much crap from the ground as possible. Either way, they're nothing you want to be anywhere near - like on the same continent. Oddly, I've often thought that Chernobyl was a good example of what would happen if someone popped off a nuke - and it frightened enough folks in the upper echelons of the USSR (What with city evac, poor FEMA response, high costs and such) that the idea they could survive (much less win) a nuclear war was pretty well shown to be a fool's dream.

By: Babblesort

Babblesort — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:14:23 -0800

Chinese have a lot of hells.

By: Pollomacho

Pollomacho — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:02:42 -0800

Chinese have a lot of hells. Previously

By: ersatz

ersatz — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:00:21 -0800

Viral advertising for the new Fallout game has begun. If only!

By: dhartung

dhartung — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:15:14 -0800

The best way to survive a nuclear blast is to be somewhere else. Temperatures within the fireball are high enough to vaporize just about anything, and the combination of blast, radiation, and heat near a nuclear blast is very lethal. I tend to think that basements might be decent shelters if you're away from a ground zero, but most ground zeros are going to look like the eponymous one. And of course, that epigram of the Cold War might also hold that the survivors would envy the dead. As Pollomacho says, the central idea of nuclear weapons -- at least as they have been deployed by extant powers -- has been as deterrent. To actually use them, as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is horrific. To contemplate nuclear war being survivable is a grim joke straight out of Kubrick. "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks. "

By: bokane

bokane — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:05:29 -0800

@Abiezer - There's apparently at least one entrance just around the corner from you, or at any rate there was one in one of the alleys off of Nan Luogu Xiang as of last summer. The guy from Plastered took Eric down there -- think the entrance was in either Hei Zhima Hutong or the one immediately south of there. Might still be open; apparently the old guy guarding the entrance was encouraging Eric to open a bar down there.

By: flapjax at midnite

flapjax at midnite — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 04:12:46 -0800

Well, normally bombs hit the ground. It had been known for a long time that you actually wanted your bombs to burst in the air (there might even be a song or two incorporating such words) ...gave prooooof to the night, that your ass was half there* *(repeat melody of line directly above, x times for the following lines) and your leg over there... and your hand there somewhere... plus some flames in your hair... cause the bomb burst in air...