Tangshan

Tangshan is an industrial city in Hebei province in northern China, on the coast of the Bohai Sea east of Beijing. Pingju, an opera of northern China sung in plain spoken language, was born in the villages around it.

Kaiping coal mines opened at the village of Tangshan in the late 1870s under the official Tang Tingshu, and in 1881 a railway linked the pits to a canal on the coast. The workshops of the line built the first locomotive of China, called Rocket of China. Cement kilns, potteries and steel mills followed, and Tangshan grew from a mining village into a factory city. After the earthquake of 1976 it was rebuilt on a new plan, with wide streets, parks and new housing.

Kailuan Group, the heir of the old mines, still digs coal under the city and runs a mining museum above its first shaft. CRRC Tangshan builds high-speed trains and metro cars at its works in the city. Jidong Cement, based in Tangshan, makes cement for building sites across the north of China. Ships from Australia and Brazil bring iron ore to the ports of Caofeidian and Jingtang on the coast of the prefecture.

The Eastern Qing Tombs, in Zunhua in the north of the prefecture, hold the tombs of the Qianlong Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi and are listed by UNESCO. The shadow puppet theater of the region uses figures cut from donkey hide and painted in bright colors. Its potteries make bone china and sanitary ware, and the city calls itself the porcelain capital of the north. Nanhu Park was laid out on land that sank above the old coal mines, with lakes where the ground gave way.