by James Palmer
The medical team were stunned. It was an extraordinary, out-of-the-blue attack, and it terrified the doctors. To begin with, it could be a set-up to accuse them later of failing to save Mao, or even deliberately poisoning him. They knew about the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ in the USSR just before Stalin’s death, where a group of prominent Jewish doctors had been accused of medically murdering Soviet leaders. But Hua stepped up to defend and praise the team. They’d been working very hard, all the Politburo had seen them doing so, and after all, what did politicians know about medicine? It was a typically affable Hua performance, and the medical team were deeply grateful.
Jiang’s attack may not have been as menacing as Li feared. Doctors everywhere are used to the occasional accusatory outburst from families of the dying. She was watching a man die who was not only her husband, but her principal political support and protector.
When they were on a shift together later, Wang Dongxing, Mao’s bodyguard and a friend of Li’s, took the doctor aside and bluntly asked: how alert was Mao? Was it possible to move against Jiang Qing now? Hua was as fed up with her as anyone else, he said, and the two of them had been talking about arresting her, but were afraid that if she escaped, they could be in serious trouble. Li was cautious:
[I told him] Mao was ill, but he was still alive and very alert. His mind was clear. He was blind in his left eye, but he saw well with the right one. Nothing of importance could be kept from him, and it would be impossible to get rid of Jiang Qing without his consent. He would never agree to the purge of his wife.
Li suggested that they wait until after the end, though it would be a difficult process. Wang seemed more optimistic, and told Li that Hua and he had sworn to go to the ends of the earth to get rid of Jiang. In the meantime, they had to wait for Mao’s death.
In Chinese folklore, omens attended the passing of an emperor. The same went for earthquakes. Nature, according to numerous accounts gathered afterwards, knew what was coming. Dogs bit their owners, or refused to go indoors. Chickens flapped their wings, trying to fly. Dragonflies flew in swarms a hundred metres long. Horses broke out of their halters. Cats clawed at mosquito netting, trying to wake their owners.
Some of the animal accounts stretch credibility. Did goldfish really jump from their tanks that afternoon, for instance, and scream when put back? Were rats found with their tails tangled together in the fields? (So-called ‘rat kings’ are a staple of disaster legends in Europe too.) Did a hundred weasels swarm into a village, with the old carrying the young on their backs? Probably not. Even the more plausible stories may have been the usual animal eccentricities, exaggerated in retrospect.
Still, there were signs, even though many of them remain mysterious, or may have had nothing to do with the upcoming quake at all. The Qinglong earthquake teams had seen them, after all, and made the right call. The first were in the sky. Earthquake lights are a well documented but almost completely unexplained phenomenon; the best theories involve magnetic disruptions, the release of gases from the earth or the creation of sudden intense electrical fields, but the possible mechanisms involved are little understood. Before the quake, farmers saw red lights and fireballs in the sky; when the earthquake hit, the flash over Tangshan was visible 110 km away. Near the port of Qinhuangdao, north-east of Tangshan, a swimmer saw a fantastic band of light under the water, ‘like a procession of torches’. It was gone in an instant.
Radio stations nearby detected strange magnetic waves. Disconnected lightbulbs flashed to life. A pale yellow fog drifted over the mining district. Village ponds dried up overnight in some spots, and overflowed in others, or shot up water spouts. The fish in the Douhe reservoir, 15 km north-east of Tangshan, were so thick on the surface that local fishermen filled their nets with ease.
Some people heeded the warnings. Zhang Wenzhong was a 39-year-old barber, and father of seven, living in the city’s eastern suburbs. He’d had a sudden urge for ice cream early in the morning, and went over to a neighbour’s shop to buy some. His neighbour urged him on to the roof. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing out red flashes to the east of the city. Neither of them had any idea what they could be, but it disturbed Zhang enough that he was still awake when the earthquake hit, giving him long enough to grab his kids and get out of the house.
But for most people, it was an ordinary day. At 3:40 in the morning, most were still asleep. The weather was stiflingly hot, and many Tangshanese had been sleeping outside, a common habit in the summer, when people would stretch out mats and hammocks by their homes. A burst of rain at about 11:00 the previous evening put paid to that, and families hurried indoors.
There were already people out that early in the morning. Long-distance truck drivers were loading up iron, steel and coal. In the bus station, the militia was patrolling to keep out countryside ‘vagabond criminals’, hukou-less wanderers looking for a chance in the city. The buses and trains ran all through the night, and so did the little stalls selling cigarettes, booze and sweets to travellers. The mines ran twenty-four hours a day, and so did some of the factories where restarting a heavy furnace or a boiling cauldron of steel every morning would be a waste of time and energy. Food workers were preparing breakfast for the first shifts at the factories, while old men practised tai chi in the park.
A few farmers had come in early, getting ready to sell their products to eager shoppers. This kind of private trade was still a very grey area, if not a black one, but common nonetheless – many street corners had a straw-hatted hawker standing on them with a basket of eggs or a cluster of fish. Others were working within the system, hauling wheelbarrows to the government purchasing stations. It could be a long walk, and it was best to set out early in order to get back for other work later.
In the countryside, a few unlucky – or so they thought at the time – farmers were still working in the fields. One farming brigade had a recently promoted leader, and he was so taken with his new role that he kept them up all night, even after the electricity failed and the mechanical thresher gave out at midnight. He forced his team to sit around waiting till the electricity came back on at 2:00, grumbling and complaining.
At 3 :42: 53 a.m., the earthquake struck. At 3:43:16, it was over. For millennia, the rocks beneath Tangshan had been straining against each other, pushed by the westward movement of the Pacific plate. Now, in one terrible instant, their built-up energy was released, a 150-kilometre-long faultline rupturing beneath the earth.
The 23 seconds of the earthquake were probably the most concentrated instant of destruction humanity has ever known. In Tangshan alone it did more damage than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, more damage than the firebombings of Dresden or Hamburg or Tokyo, more damage than the explosion at Krakatoa. It took more lives in one fraction of north-east China than the 2004 tsunami did across the whole of the Indian Ocean. The actual strength of the earthquake itself was not remarkable – 7.8 on the Richter scale, terrifying but not that rare. It was the speed, timing and placing of the quake that made it so devastating.
Jiang Dianwei, an older worker at the Kailuan printing plant, was practising tai chi with his master, a pensioner who insisted on getting up every day at 3:00. They were in the public park at 3:30, getting ready to begin when they heard a loud roar and Jiang heard his master shouting ‘Bad! Fire!’ He turned and saw that the whole of the north-east was red. Then the earth started to shake, and he and the old man grabbed each other and clung on for dear life. As they were shaken up and down, the park walls fell with a crash, and a second later, the building across the street collapsed, filling the whole sky with dirt.
Li Hongyi was a nurse working on the late shift at the No. 255 hospital, the biggest in Tangshan. At 3:30, she decided to get some fresh air, and went outside to sit at a stone table underneath a large oak. Everything was unnaturally still, and she felt nervous in the dark on her own. Suddenly, she heard a shrill sound, ‘like a knife cutting through the sky’.7 Scared, she ran back inside, sat down and bolted the door. Then the sky turne
d a bright red, and there was another noise ‘like hundreds of trucks all starting at once’. She’d heard the same sound before, because she’d been caught in the Xingtai earthquake ten years previously. As the building shook, she struggled to unbolt the door, but could only force it open a few inches. Squeezing out, she ran instinctively to the shelter of the tree as the hospital collapsed behind her, hugging on to the trunk with all her strength. The earth roared, and she and the tree both collapsed into an open pit.
For many unlucky people, the speed of the quake was overwhelming. Yang Zhikai, twenty-one, and Yuan Wuyi, twenty-seven in 1976, were both factory workers. Yang lived in a work dormitory, and was courting a young woman from another ceramics factory; they were about to announce their engagement. Yuan, like most young people, still lived with his family, walking every morning to the chemical plant where he worked.
Yang had come back late from a date with his fiancée, and fallen sound asleep in his workers’ dormitory. The first impact of the earthquake shook him awake to find the whole building trembling ‘like a birdcage suspended in the air’. He was about to run for the exit when the building came crashing down on him. ‘You wouldn’t believe how fast it was,’ he said later, ‘There wasn’t even enough time to get from your bed to the doorway.’
Yuan was woken up by the sudden redness of the sky, just ten seconds before the earthquake. ‘Like a fireball in the sky [but] by the time I opened my eyes properly, the house had disappeared. And then it was like somebody pushing me sharply from behind. Before I knew what was happening, the roof was on my back. I couldn’t breathe. My arms and my legs were all folded together.’
At her parents’ home, Zhang Daguang was working late, writing up her lab notes for the day. She was eighteen in 1976, and had been employed at a chemical plant for two years as an assistant technician. She was a bookish young woman who loved nothing more than reading and writing, and was even making attempts to learn English. If the university exams ever started up again, she badly wanted to enrol.
Both her parents were professionals, her father an engineer, and mother originally a teacher whose political canniness had ‘helicoptered’ her to the position of local Party leader by 1976. But her family was still dirt poor, and she and her little brother and sister skipped meals all too frequently. On 28 July, she’d just come back from a trip to Liaoning, another north-eastern industrial city, and was behind on her work as a result. She didn’t notice the flashes, or feel any shakes. Instead, she heard a sudden cracking sound above her, and blacked out a second later.
‘Little Red’, He Jianguo’s goldfish, proved singularly useless as an early warning device. Or perhaps he didn’t – he could have been splashing furiously for all He and her roommates knew, as all eight of them were fast asleep. He’s bed was nearest the window, and when the quake hit that gave her a few vital extra seconds to leap out. It took all the courage she had to jump, as she was a small, slight girl and they were on the first floor, but she did, landing well enough to get away with bruises and cuts. When she rolled over and looked back, the top of her dorm had caved in, bringing the whole building down. Of the eight girls, she was the only survivor
Earthquakes are the most unnatural of natural disasters. They turn the world upside down. The ground beneath your feet disappears. One Tangshan survivor described the sensation of running as the earth moved as ‘like being beaten repeatedly on the soles of your feet’. Another likened it to being ‘a pea on a drum, bounced around when the sticks hit’, while one young girl described it as ‘like being on a ship crashing into the rocks’.
The urban landscape was wildly distorted, as streets were torn apart, landmarks shifted willy-nilly and roads and rails twisted like noodles. Tangshan’s roads, built in the grid pattern of post-war planning, were ruined beyond recognition, covered with rubble, asphalt ripped asunder, once straight streets bending like rivers. At the heart of the earthquake zone, the earth moved with such speed that the sides of trees facing the fault were burnt by the friction. The panic was absolute, especially for those, like the vast majority of Tangshanese that day, who had never experienced even a small earthquake. There seemed to be no refuge; wherever they moved, the earth rejected them.
Paradoxically, the further away they were from shelter, the safer they were. The few who were lucky enough to be out in open fields at 3:00 a.m. were in far less danger, however terrifying the experience, than people indoors. The worst threat they faced was falling trees, torn up by the roots as the earth pushed upwards, or the tiny chance of being caught in one of the massive cracks that scarred the landscape. The danger zone outdoors was in the hills, where people were buried in tumults of dirt, or killed by rolling stones flung down the hillsides. Near the quarries to the north of the city the mountainous slagpiles slipped, burying houses as they tumbled down the slope.
In the Tangshan train station, nearly 200 people were about to catch the early morning trains, or had come in on night trains and were waiting for the bus into town. When the quake hit, the lights in the waiting room went out, and it became a madhouse of yelling, screaming, panicked people desperate to get out. The station chandeliers fell into the crowd, smashing in showers of glass, and then, with a great rumble, the whole frame of the station collapsed inward.
Ironically, the safest place to be by far was underground. Of the roughly 10,000 miners beneath the earth when the quake hit, seventeen died. Earthquakes are less intense deeper underground, and Tangshan’s eight major coal mines were dug deep.
The mines were professionally and thoroughly constructed, building on the experience and skills gained from the European investment and technical advice of the past and maintained by men and women proud of their work. (Today, older coal miners frequently talk of the safety standards of the 1970s highly favourably in comparison to the infamously deadly private mining industry in China today. Seventeen dead in a coal-mining accident nowadays barely makes the papers – at the nadir of the industry in 2002, nineteen coal miners were dying a day.) The solidly built home and office of the Belgian mine owners was among the fraction of buildings left standing after the quake.8 1975 had also seen substantial reinforcement of the mine’s anti-earthquake measures after the issuing of Document 69. Handrails were repaired, buttresses strengthened, and the safety of tunnels and shafts double-checked.
As a result, the damage done to the mines was far less than to the buildings above. But it was still terrifying. Tunnels shook, frames collapsed, lights went out. Water burst through fresh cracks, dark floods cutting off familiar exits. Workers scrabbled up ladders or were yanked up by rope as the waters rose behind them.
The mine staff did everything they could to guide the underground miners. With the air ventilation system gone, they opened every possible vent by hand, hoping to give the miners fresh air. Below, groups of miners converged on familiar roadways, vast processions following the bobbing helmets of the men in front through the dark. In the Tangshan Mine, 1,600 people gathered on a surviving route, forming a line over a kilometre long, and following the long, winding path back to the surface. Miners made epic climbs, pressed against freezing cliff faces on rickety ladders, or winched heavy steel ropes by hand to pull up platforms full of stranded colleagues.
But, for many, there was no comfort in their arrival into the light. Miner Zhai was in his forties, with six girls and two boys. His team had been guided back to the surface by the beating of drums and the scent of fresh air. When he emerged, he ran straight to his home, only to find the entire row of buildings obliterated. Of 400 people in his village, eighty had survived. None of his family were among them.
Above ground, houses were suddenly deep in liquid earth. The quake churned sandy soil and subterranean water together to create a kind of quicksand, swallowing building foundations. Some houses folded inwards, all four walls falling together to crush anyone left inside. Flaky, poor quality brick crumbled into fist-sized chunks. In large buildings, pillars deformed, then cracked under the weight.
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p; In the countryside, houses built of mud and adobe disintegrated in seconds, and their heavy roofs, built to weather the tough northern climate, slammed down like ‘a great hand slapping the earth’. Traditional village wooden houses were among the best places to be, not because they survived better but because, although heavy beams and roofs could be fatal, the impact was far less than that of stone, steel and cement, and rescuers had an easier time digging the survivors out. Across Tangshan and its suburbs, there were nearly 11 million square metres of living space; 10.5 million square metres of it collapsed. In the centre of the city, less than 3 per cent of the buildings survived.
Salvation was random. One Christian survivor turned to St Matthew’s description of the Second Coming when describing it:
It was so sudden. It just depended on where you were, or where your bed was. ‘For in the days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage . . . and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away . . . Then two will be in the field: one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together: one will be taken and one will be left.’ It was just like that.9
Mrs He was the chair of her neighbourhood committee, a matriarchal widow in her forties with three children. She’d just had one of the walls of her two-room house mended. When part of the roof fell on her, she couldn’t move, but was able to grab her daughter and pinch her thigh to wake her, shouting ‘Earthquake! Run!’ At the same time, her two sons, wearing nothing but their underwear, ran into the room. Her daughter stayed calm, and pushed the rubble off her mother’s legs so she could move. As the walls shook, Mrs He saw that the mended one was still standing, and pulled the children against it as the rest of their house collapsed. Another family’s roof was thrown clear off into the street, so that they were left standing between the four walls of their house.
