[Kunming, China – 2:34PM, 27th of May, 1927]
I had read the reports from the surveyors, studied the maps, spoken to men who had travelled through Yunnan and listened to their descriptions of a provincial capital surrounded by mountains and separated from the great commercial centres of China by hundreds of miles of difficult country.
They had all been perfectly accurate, but none of them had managed to convey the peculiar impression the city made upon me when I first saw it. Kunming was beautiful. The mountains rose around the plateau, the fields were green and productive, and the climate was considerably kinder than I had expected.
Yet for an industrialist it was almost painfully undeveloped. It looked like a place straight out of the mediaeval period. There were workshops everywhere, but they were small workshops: blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, leather workers and weavers, all producing goods with an extraordinary degree of skill but almost entirely by hand.
There were no great factories, no foundries, no railway locomotives, no industrial electrical grid and no enormous warehouses filled with machinery.
And yet, standing there looking across it, I felt something that I had not expected to feel at all. I felt excited. The mountains meant water, the plateau provided land, there were minerals in the surrounding country, there was coal, there was agricultural production, there was labour, and, most importantly, there was space.
We did not have to dismantle an existing industrial city and rebuild it around our plans. We could simply build.
The first months were therefore almost entirely consumed by construction, though not initially the sort of construction that anybody would find particularly impressive. The railway contractors had already begun surveying the route and laying the line from Guangdong, while the western extension towards Dali was being considered at the same time. I had insisted from the beginning that the railway be built to the Indian broad gauge of five feet six inches.
Several of my engineers considered this unnecessarily ambitious, particularly when I explained that I wanted it eventually to continue through Burma and connect with the Indian railway system.
A railway constructed in 1928 might still be carrying trains fifty or a hundred years later, and I had no intention of allowing a future government to discover that its railway could not connect to another because somebody in my office had decided that changing the gauge would save a little money.
But the railway itself presented a more immediate problem. We needed cement to construct bridges, foundations and stations. We needed bricks for buildings, stone for roads and ballast, and electricity to power the machinery that would eventually make all of these things. We could import them, of course, and initially we did. But importing every tonne of cement from the coast and hauling it hundreds of miles inland made very little economic sense. I therefore gave the engineers what became a familiar instruction: if we could not make something here, we were to determine how quickly we could make it here.
The cement works became the first major industrial construction project. We imported the machinery because there was no alternative; there was little point in insisting that China manufacture machinery that China did not yet possess the industrial capacity to manufacture.
The first shipment contained crushers, kilns, pumps, electrical equipment and all manner of smaller machines, and getting the equipment to Kunming proved almost as difficult as building the factory itself. Crates travelled by ship, river, railway, cart and mule, acquiring new paperwork and new transport problems at almost every stage.
One crate arrived damaged, another was missing components, and a third contained bearings of the wrong size. I spent two days dealing with that particular disaster.
Eventually, however, the foundations were poured, the machinery was installed and the first kiln was fired. I remember walking through the works when the first batch of cement was produced. It was nothing remarkable to look at: a grey powder, warm from the process, sitting in a sack. I had seen enormous quantities of cement throughout my career and had always considered it while not exciting an essential material.
Yet I stood there for some time looking at it because I understood what it represented. This was cement made in Yunnan, from materials obtained in Yunnan, by workers employed in Yunnan. It meant that the next factory could be built more cheaply than the first, and the factory after that more cheaply still.
The same logic led us to establish brickworks, stone quarries and lime works almost immediately afterwards. They were not glamorous enterprises, but they were the foundations upon which everything else would rest.
While the railway advanced and the concrete works began production, I started travelling into the surrounding countryside with the geologists. I had no intention of building an industrial city without first understanding what resources existed beneath it.
One of our earliest journeys took us towards a prospective mining site where the surveys suggested deposits of iron and tungsten. The journey itself took most of the day, and when we finally arrived I remember being almost amused by the appearance of the place. There was no mine. There was no machinery, no great shaft, no railway siding and no great pile of ore. There was simply a hillside, some exposed rock, trees and several survey markers driven into the ground. One of the geologists handed me several samples and explained what they believed the deposits might contain. I listened carefully, then looked back at the hillside. "So this," I asked him, "is worth building a railway for?"
He hesitated for a moment before replying, "If the estimates are correct."
I laughed.
"And if they are wrong?" I asked.
"Then we shall have built a railway to a hill." It was a fair answer.
I remember placing my hand against the exposed rock before we left. It was an entirely ordinary gesture, but I remember it because that was the moment the project began to feel different to me. We were no longer merely constructing factories in Kunming. We were beginning to discover what Yunnan itself could provide for those factories.
Coal was more immediately important. Coal was not simply fuel; it was the beginning of the chain that led to steel. Railways needed steel, bridges needed steel, factories needed steel, machinery needed steel, and eventually the weapons and vehicles we intended to produce would need steel as well.
The first mine was primitive by British standards, but that hardly mattered. The men worked, the shaft was developed, and eventually the first proper shipment of Yunnan coal was ready to leave the mine. I went to see it myself. The train consisted of several waggons pulled by mules.
The coal was taken to the coke ovens, which we had constructed as part of the first stage of the steel project. I had seen Coke made countless times in Britain, and under ordinary circumstances I would have found nothing remarkable about it.
Yet when the first locally produced coke was ready, I found myself strangely proud. I picked up a piece and turned it over in my hand while the engineer explained that the ovens had performed almost exactly as expected. It was black, porous and surprisingly light, and it had begun as coal extracted from Yunnan before being transformed in Kunming into something that could feed a steel furnace. It was such a small thing, but I understood that it represented another step away from dependence upon the coast. We were still importing machinery, and we were still importing many of the materials required to construct that machinery, but the circle was beginning to close. Coal came out of the ground here, coke was produced here, and soon, if everything went according to plan, the steel itself would be produced here.
The steelworks took longer than I had hoped. There were problems with the furnaces, problems with the power supply, problems with the rolling equipment and problems with almost everything else. The British engineers argued with the Chinese engineers, the engineers argued with the contractors, and the contractors argued with me.
There were several occasions when I wondered whether I had been foolish to attempt so much at once, but I knew this was all necessary. In truth I wanted to go home, but my melancholy was abated by the fact that as soon as the railway was done and the basics had been built, it would begin snowballing from there.
Nevertheless, by that winter the works were ready for their first serious test. I remember the morning particularly clearly. The furnaces were already roaring when I arrived, and the heat was extraordinary. Men moved rapidly around the works, shouting instructions to one another as the first charge was processed. When the first usable steel finally emerged, there was an almost palpable change in the atmosphere. We had made steel before in Britain, of course, and far better steel than this.
But this particular piece was different. It had been made in Kunming from ore obtained from China and coke made from coal extracted in Yunnan. I watched the first beam pass through the rolling equipment, glowing orange beneath the morning light, and when the men finally brought it out, I realised that I was smiling. It was not particularly large, and it was certainly not perfect, but it was the first structural steel beam produced in Kunming. I had spent my career around steelworks and had never felt quite so proud of a single beam. It was the sort of achievement that would eventually become completely ordinary, which was precisely why it mattered.
By then the railway was beginning to transform the project in ways that had not been possible during the first months. The construction lines allowed coal to move into Kunming in quantities that would have been impossible by cart, while stone, cement, machinery and other materials could be moved towards the expanding industrial sites. The railway was no longer simply a project consuming resources; it was beginning to become the mechanism by which the resources required for the next stage of development could be moved.
Every additional mile made the following mile slightly easier. Every bridge reduced the amount of material that had to be carried by animals. Every siding created the possibility of another factory being built beside it. The city began acquiring an industrial rhythm that had not existed when I arrived.
There were construction crews everywhere, workshops operating throughout the day, power lines spreading across the new industrial districts and trains moving materials between sites. Yet the old Kunming remained almost untouched in the centre. The markets were still crowded, mule trains still passed through the streets and farmers still brought their produce into the city. The new industrial city was simply growing around it.
By the end of my time in Kunming, I had begun to understand that I had made a fundamental mistake when I first described the project to myself. I had thought I was going to industrialise a city. In reality, I was attempting to create the ability for a city to industrialise itself.
The distinction was enormous. The first cement works had allowed us to construct the machine works; the machine works could repair the equipment in the cement works and eventually manufacture replacement parts; the power station allowed both to operate; the railway allowed coal, ore and machinery to move between them; the technical schools I had founded and helped staff were producing men capable of operating the machinery; and the mines were beginning to provide the raw materials upon which the entire system depended. Each new industry created the conditions for another. We were building a chain, and every month another link was being added.
I returned to the hill overlooking Kunming on the evening before I took the now completed railway to Gunagdong. I had stood there when I first arrived, when the city below me had seemed almost entirely untouched by modern industry. Now, as the sun disappeared behind the mountains, I could see the lights beginning to appear across the new industrial districts. They were not numerous by the standards of London or Manchester, but they were ours. Electric lamps illuminated workshops.
The power station continued working. Somewhere beyond the city, miners were extracting coal, while in the steelworks the furnaces were still hot. Along the railway, a locomotive was moving waggons loaded with materials that would be used to build yet another factory. I thought about the first sack of cement, the first waggon of coal, the first batch of coke, the first steel beam and the first tyre. None of them were impressive by themselves.
A historian looking back decades later might not even bother to mention them. But I knew what they meant. A year earlier, Kunming had been a place where almost everything required for modern industry had to be brought from somewhere else. Now it was beginning to produce the things required to produce the next generation of things.
That, ultimately, was the whole purpose of the project. We were not trying to make Kunming independent of the world. That would have been both impossible and undesirable.
It currently looks like the civil war will be kicking off soon, so it's probably best I skedaddle back to britain anyway.