by James Palmer
Guan Wen, in his late forties, was a food station worker, distributing supplies from the countryside to the collective kitchens. It was a reliable job, especially for a man with eight children to feed, but it kept him busy, and he hadn’t taken any notice when his children had told him of seeing fish swimming along the top of the river the previous morning. The side wall of their house fell in on the bed first, and then the steel supports hit his back. In the darkness, underneath the rubble, he tried to breathe deeply, though his lung was damaged. At first he could hear his wife breathing nearby. After a little while, she stopped making any noise, and some time later he saw light, as two of his older children dug him out of the rubble. One of them supported him while the other tried to give mouth-to-mouth to Guan’s wife, until blood spurted out of her mouth and he knew it was too late.
Yao Cuiqin was a 23-year-old, formerly an actress in an army propaganda troupe, and now a bank clerk. She couldn’t remember the collapse of her dormitory, only how:
. . . when I came to, I was lying on top of a pile of rubble, groaning. I thought it was a dream, and really tried to wake from it, but I couldn’t; even when my mouth and nose were blocked with dust and earth and my body felt as though it was wedged on to the edge of a knife. I was sure it was going to crack open, still I thought it was a nightmare I was having.10
Many people weren’t capable of feeling anything – not even sorrow. Although there were howls and screams and wild weeping, many wandered about in a flat stupor. Ordinary feelings were blunted to nothing. On the outskirts, a female driver had been bringing a supply truck into the city when the earthquake hit, knocking the truck to the side of the road, where the engine caught fire. She was trapped in the cab, banging desperately against the window. Some other survivors watched her as she burnt to death, but they did nothing. This wasn’t callous indifference, but a stunned inability to act.
Elsewhere, survivors were frozen, caught between one world and another. A mother looked dumbly around, ignoring the dead child at her feet; a farmer clutched the chickens he was taking to sell in the city that morning. One survivor was running from the ruins of his house when he realised something was wrong, looked down, and found he was running along a rooftop, torn off and thrown to the ground. Almost as soon as the quake subsided, a freezing rainstorm began, drenching the survivors and covering the city in a wet mist, mixed with the dust of crumbled buildings.
The sensation of utter powerlessness is so overwhelming [wrote one Victorian student of earthquakes] that amid the crash of falling houses, the cries of entombed victims, the shrieks of fleeing multitudes, the rumblings of earth beneath, and the trembling of the soil like that of a steed in the presence of a lion, the boldest and bravest can but sit with bowed head, in silent, motionless despair, awaiting whatever fate a grim capricious chance can provide.
The journalist Qian Gang described the ruins:
There was an old woman whose life was spared on Xiaoshan Street [Tangshan’s main shopping area] in Lu’nan District. What she saw after she struggled up through the rubble left her dumbstruck and speechless. The old street, that ancient street, that street once so busy – where was it now? Where was the ‘Great World’ market? The theatre? Where were the playgrounds? The bathhouses, the drugstores? And what about the fabric shops, the seal-engraving shops, the consignment shops? And the little stands that sold sesame cakes and Kaiping crullers and Tangshan smoked chicken? And the women who used to go shopping together each day, baskets in hand? Where had they gone? Dead silence. The street gone.11
For the first hour after the earthquake, the city was still shrouded in darkness, lit only by quake-started fires among the rubble. People scavenged for candles and torches – fortunately, every household had some, electricity being unreliable even in those areas that had it. Some trapped survivors had been burnt to death, and the smoke mixed with the dust. ‘I was breathing in the ashes of the dead,’ one survivor, then a boy of twelve, commented to me, ‘But thank heaven I didn’t think about it at the time. On top of everything else, it would have been too much.’
Dawn brought no comfort, but rather made the scale of damage plain. Chang Qing, then forty-two years old, was a professional photographer, working for the Tangshan government. He had swapped apartments with a workmate nine months beforehand. ‘I was so lucky,’ he said, with a touch of survivor’s guilt, ‘Mine was one of the few buildings that survived intact. My whole family lived. His didn’t.’
When I talked to him, he was not only an exceedingly gracious host, but one of the most emotionally open and empathetic of survivors, perhaps because, unlike most, he hadn’t had to shut down to cope with his own losses. After making sure that his family and neighbours were safe, he went out into the streets with his camera, determined to record the damage done. Much later, looking through his photos with him, I asked him why there were no pictures of the dead. ‘They were everywhere,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t bear to look at them. So many . . .’ He began to cry softly.
The sight of the dead was inescapable. Bodies dangled out of windows, caught as they tried to escape. An old woman lay in the street, her head pulped by flying debris. In the train station, a concrete pillar had pinned a young girl to the wall, impaling her through the torso. At the bus depot, a cook had been scalded to death in a cauldron of boiling water. Looking at any collapsed building, you could make out fragments of corpses mixed in with the rubble. As the rain slanted down, blood oozed out of the ruins, forming hideous red puddles on the street.
The living looked half-dead, an army of dazed victims wandering the streets in shock. Many were still naked, covered only in dust and blood. Children howled for their parents, parents for their children. They wore whatever they could find – wrapped bedsheets, swimming costumes, kitchen aprons, European-style bathrobes and dressing gowns, made for export and plundered from the garment factories. One group of survivors turned to the theatre, coming away wearing opera costumes, from diaphanous dresses to Japanese Army uniforms intended for the villains.
The wounds inflicted on buildings were as varied as those on flesh. Many collapsed inwards, while in others, the top floors slid off, as though they’d been neatly sliced by a knife, or a whole face of the building was torn away. On some the damage looked oddly rounded, as if a scoop had been taken out of them with a spoon. Factory chimneys broke into multiple pieces, or had their top and bottom halves twisted in different directions. From others, surviving supports stuck out mockingly, or one stray corner remained standing, a bed or a bath hanging incongruously in the sky. Broken floor slabs hung down from half-crumbled floors, ‘crooked teeth in ruined mouths’. The Chinese use dofu, ‘bean curd’, to refer to anything weak that can’t bear stress, and from the sky the buildings looked like dofu smeared across a plate.
In the countryside in particular, many people died because the quality of the buildings had been fatally weakened by the Great Leap Forward and the village chaos six years beforehand. Buildings had been cannibalised to provide soil nutrients during a fertiliser campaign in 1958, and in 1959 – 60 people had been so starving that they had torn out bricks from the walls to sell, or in some cases literally eaten their own homes. (To the hunger-crazed, even thatch and mud looked like food.)
Between 30 and 40 per cent of all housing in China had been destroyed in 1959 – 61. And during 1959 – 61 and 1969 – 70, village militias had rampaged through houses, looking for signs of hidden grain or counter-revolutionary feeling; they often hammered through walls or tore down parts of buildings to punish political deviants.12
In urban Tangshan, new buildings had been put up to house workers at the vital coal mines and factories, but in the countryside, where there was a huge shortage of building materials, many families were still living in jerry-built homes that were even more vulnerable to earthquake. They were also cramped together, making escape harder as panicked roommates scrambled over each other to get to the door, since the number of people sleeping in a single room had often doubled as a r
esult of housing shortages.
The energy released by the seismic wave was equal, it was said afterwards, to 400 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Unsurprisingly, the first thought of many was that it was a nuclear war. Tensions with the Soviets had eased somewhat since the war panics and murderous border skirmishes of the late sixties, when a Russian first strike had, at one point, seemed a real possibility. Tangshan, with its heavy industry, was an obvious target. The fear lurked in people’s minds nonetheless, reinforced by air-raid drills and the building of fallout shelters – at least for the leaders – as well as by endless anti-Soviet propaganda.
Exactly what a nuclear war would entail was unclear, though, especially since a much-repeated slogan was that the imperialist powers, especially the Soviet revisionists, were mere ‘paper tigers’ over which China could easily triumph. The first question of one survivor, pulled out of the rubble in the early morning, was ‘Did we win the war?’
Even after it was clear what had happened, people’s thoughts kept turning back to Hiroshima. ‘In the first few days after arriving in Tangshan,’ one soldier later recalled,
I used to have a nightmare of Hiroshima every night. I’d seen a documentary on it in the army. It was a catastrophe – the whole city wiped out by an atom bomb, nothing but rubble everywhere, people burned so badly you couldn’t recognise them. But our Tangshan was much worse than Hiroshima. In one morning, several hundred thousand people gone, finished!13
Zhu Yinlai, the 26-year-old mining student, also mistook the earthquake for a nuclear explosion at first. Then, as he saw his college dormitory shaking, he realised what was happening. Still befuddled by sleep, he didn’t realise how strong and sudden the quake was. He was putting on his shoes when he saw the ceiling begin to buckle, and threw himself to the floor.
He curled up in a ball as the building fell, leaving him trapped in a space little more than a metre high, but with enough room for him to turn round. It took him a few moments to recover, but all he had were a few bruises. Remarkably, he didn’t panic. His rural years had taught him the value of improvisation. The boy above him on the bunk bed, already dead, had been a smoker, and Zhu dug into the desk drawer to find his lighter, which gave him just enough illumination to get to work. He drew on memories of mining engineering classes and built a support frame around himself, using the shattered remnants of his wooden desk and parts of the bed.
As Zhu waited in the darkness, he could hear the sounds of his roommates dying under the rubble nearby. One boy was badly wounded, his chest crushed. Zhu could hear him calling for help at first, then saying, to nobody in particular, ‘I can’t breathe . . . I can’t breathe.’ A few minutes later he spoke softly again ‘Dying, dying, dying.’ Another classmate, Lin, had been hit on the head and was delirious, mumbling about problems with his homework before fading off into nothingness.
Thirty-three years later, when I asked him how he had coped mentally, he sighed. ‘We were all very naïve then,’ he said. ‘You know, we believed in Mao, and we believed in the Party. And I had faith in the Chairman and the Party, that they would save me.’
As the earthquake hit, the Chairman needed saving himself. The tremors reached as far as Zhongnanhai, nearly 200 km away, where Mao’s bed was vigorously shaken and the whole building trembled. After pulling Mao through two heart attacks and maintaining a twenty-four-hour medical watch for months, Li Zhisui was utterly exhausted, and, despite the building shaking, he didn’t want to shift from his bed until his telephone rang and he heard Wang Dongxing shouting at him ‘Hurry! This is a huge earthquake! Why aren’t you here yet?’14
Mao was aware of what was going on, and after a brief discussion between Wang Dongxing and Wang Hongwen, he was wheeled through the pouring rain to Zhongnanhai’s Building 202, his medical team clustered around him. The building had been put up in 1974 and was considered quake-proof.
Other emperors were disturbed by the quake. At the Ming tombs, the 500-year-old burial chambers of China’s former rulers outside Beijing, roofs shook, ridges fell, shrines collapsed and the guardian statues at the entrance fell over. Closer to Tangshan, ancient pagodas and temples, too isolated, too old, or too treasured by the locals to have drawn the attention of the Red Guards, crumbled. Farmers in Wen Quan, a northern village, saw centuries-old sections of the Great Wall slide down the hillside.
The impact went far beyond Beijing. Seismographs across the world picked up the quake. At the Palmer Observatory in Alaska, the tremors from Tangshan triggered an alarm on the seismological warning system, forcing four scientists out of bed. Checking the results, they found that Alaska had moved an eighth of an inch.
The damage to Tianjin, 100 km away to the south-west of Beijing, was so bad that, in any other context, we would still speak of the ‘Great Tianjin Earthquake’. Tens of thousands died; 10 per cent of the buildings in the city collapsed, and another third were critically damaged.
Gough Whitlam, the former Australian Prime Minister, was staying with his wife in Tianjin at the time; they were woken sharply as great cracks appeared in the wall of their hotel. (A cartoon in The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, the next week depicted Whitlam asking his wife ‘Did the earth move for you too, darling?’ It’s hard to imagine the same joke being published so soon after the death of a quarter of a million Westerners.15)
The worst damage was in an area of around 47 square kilometres in downtown Tangshan, centred neatly on the Hebei Mining and Metallurgy Institute, underneath which Zhu Yinlai was now buried. On the Mercalli scale used to measure the intensity of earthquake damage, the shaking of the ground there reached an 11. At points it hit 12, the top of the scale, where the ground shakes so vigorously the course of rivers is distorted and people are thrown metres into the air. The great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 reached, in the very worst spots, intensity 9.
Beyond the epicentre was an area of around 320 square kilometres, swallowing up all of Tangshan and its neighbouring villages, where the quake measured at intensity 10. Within this zone, 46.9 per cent of houses collapsed, dropping to about 40 per cent in the intensity 9 area beyond, which covered another 1,430 square kilometres. Further on, an intensity 8 area covered another 5,470 square kilometres, with a quarter of all homes destroyed. Finally, serious shaking – though only enough to destroy a ‘mere’ 5 per cent of houses – extended across a rectangular area of 26,000 square kilometres. In British terms, it was as though an earthquake centred on Birmingham were to bring serious damage to London and Leeds.
But each zone contained pockets of miraculous salvation, and reaches of utter destruction. The Hebei countryside is crowded, with villages pressing up against each other, but the vagaries of the land left even close neighbours with wildly different fates. In one village, well within the intensity 10 zone, the only known casualty was a young woman killed by sliding tiles, and half the buildings survived intact. A kilometre or so away, their neighbouring commune was utterly annihilated, without a single room left standing, and a third of the villagers killed.
Yu Xuebing’s ‘black’ family was lucky in natural disasters, if not political ones. Her mother yelled ‘Earthquake’ as soon as she felt the first tremors. She, her parents and her cousins ran to the door, only to find it blocked, and so scrambled out the window. As she jumped, her mother pulled the washing line strung across the central room, out with her, rescuing their clothes. One wall of their house fell a minute after they were out, bringing the roof down and smashing everything else inside.
The strangest case of survival was the No. 40 train, which had set off from Qiqihar, a distant north-eastern city, the previous morning. It was ten minutes out of Tangshan station at 3:42, packed with 800 passengers. As the quake hit, sleepers were hurled from their berths, passengers thrown from side to side as the train rocked. The train derailed, smashing through concrete barriers and narrowly avoiding being overturned. As the passengers poured out in panic, the train crew assumed that it was a regular accident, cause
d by some unknown obstacle on the tracks, and began to run down the line to put warning lights out in order to stop any other train smashing into them. The lights were not needed; every rail line going into Tangshan was bent useless, and every train within 200 km derailed. The crew and passengers had no idea what had happened, but none of them were seriously injured, and the darkness hid the full extent of the damage.
As the engine car went up in flames, panic began to spread. The wind was blowing fiercely back from the engine towards the passengers. In a burst of activity, the passengers grabbed mattresses from the sleeper compartments, smearing them with churned up mud and sand from the nearby fields and using them to build a protective firebreak. It wasn’t until injured villagers arrived from nearby, drawn by the lights of the train, that the passengers realised what had happened. They found an iron cauldron along the track and began preparing breakfast, stirring together food scraps from the train with potatoes dug up from nearby fields.
Eight-year old Zhang Youlu’s village was not spared, though he was. He’d spent the day playing with his friends, and was sleeping so deeply that the first shakes didn’t stir him. Instead, he was woken by his older sister. ‘Hurry! Hurry! Go! Go!’ As she pulled him from his bed, objects were crashing around him – books, bowls, the ordinary mess of a cramped house. As they ran outside, the house fell. The two children huddled outside as it started to rain. They could hear their mother crying for them under the rubble, for a while. Like a vast number of the survivors, they were naked, and Zhang’s sister ventured back into the ruins to find something to cover them from the cold rain.
