Mawei shipyard

Mawei shipyard, also known as Fuzhou shipyard, was built under the leadership of Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang during the Westernization Movement. It was also one of the main shipyards in China in the middle and late 19th century. Today, there are still workshops and bell towers in the style of the industrial revolution, and even the world's rare airplane slideway.

Mawei shipyard

Mawei shipyard (Fujian romanization: Ma mu'oi tz'ow sung c'eung) is located in Mawei Port in Fuzhou, near the Minjiang River. It was one of the main shipyards in China in the middle and late 19th century. It was built under the westernization movement led by Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang.

Traffic information

Take line 37, 58, 139, 140, 178 and sightseeing line 1 to Mawei shipyard station and walk about 120 meters.

Reincarnation and evolution

On August 19, 1866, when Zuo Zongtang, governor of Fujian and Zhejiang Province, who was obsessed with westernization and wanted to build his own warships to strengthen coastal defense, set out from Fuzhou City and went to Mawei town 40 miles away to explore the site of the shipyard under planning, he saw a natural harbor with dangerous terrain.

The Minjiang River section in front of Mawei town is called Majiang river. The water is clear and the soil is solid. It can be as deep as 12 Zhang, twice as deep as the tide. position

Mawei, located on the North Bank of Majiang River, is more than 100 miles away from the Minjiang River Estuary. There are many small islands along the river, and the mountain peaks rise up the Jiajiang river. "For decades, foreign ships, plywood boats, often moored at Haikou, and foreigners who were not natives and had been living at the port for a long time, were unable to reach the provincial capital."

The distance of 40 Li is not far away. For the governor of Fujian and Zhejiang, who works in Fuzhou, it is not hard for him to work as an inspector of the Shipping Bureau. In this way, it seems that Fujian Shipping Administration Bureau, the most famous far east shipyard in Chinese history, is located in Mawei.

A few months later, Zuo Zongtang was selected by the imperial court to be transferred to Shanxi Gansu to suppress the civil commotion. In the modern history, the Westernization minister chose Lin Zexu's son-in-law Shen Baozhen to replace him in handling the shipping business. A few months later, when Shen Baozhen came to Mawei town alone to discuss land compensation with the villagers, he did not expect that the plan of the imperial court was fiercely opposed by the villagers. Even though the imperial court offered generous compensation, the villagers were not willing to sell nearly 600 mu of land within the scope of the shipyard.

Driven out of the village by rocks and debris, Shen Baozhen was angry and sent several gunboats to stop in Majiang. He threatened the villagers to hand over the perpetrators, otherwise he would attack the village. Finally, after cutting and killing two villagers who took the lead in causing the accident, the farmers accepted the conditions offered by the imperial court and expropriated all the construction land.

In addition to Shen Baozhen, Zuo Zongtang also chose a French officer, RI Yige. After the two sides signed the labor contract, RI Yige took a group of carpenters, blacksmiths, locksmiths and others he had found in his own country across the sea to the strange horsetail. For them, it was more like a paradise. These young skilled workers, who lived in poverty in Europe, were given preferential treatment by the Qing Dynasty. The monthly salary of riyige was as high as 1000 Liang, which was dozens of times that of the top class members of the Qing Dynasty. The average worker also had more than 200 Liang per month. Decades later, when these workers returned to France after their contracts expired, they had become upstarts from penniless at the beginning and bought land and stocks in France.

On December 23, 1866, Shen Baozhen officially took office. According to the records of riyige, "what the first workers of the factory saw was a river without foreign machines or tools The only cottage in Tano became a forging workshop. The two iron stoves in the cottage immediately started to make fire and began to work with Chinese hammers. The first nail was made here. " In the 1860s, when the Qing Dynasty was bent on economic reform, the prime minister's Yamen was set up, and Yi Xi was appointed as Minister of affairs. He was in charge of foreign affairs, trade, customs, training new army, tongwenguan, as well as road construction, mining, manufacturing and other affairs, which set off an upsurge centered on economic construction. From 1866 to 1869, the gross domestic product maintained a high growth rate of about 10% every year. Under this background, Mawei shipyard, with a scale of 2000-3000 people, quickly rose on the Bank of Majiang River, covering an area of 600 mu, with complete equipment and large scale, ranking second to none in the far east.

Over the next 30 years, Mawei shipyard built 40 ships for the Qing Dynasty, accounting for 70% of the total domestic fleet at that time. It established the first naval fleet, Fujian Navy, and equipped a large number of ships and generals for the Beiyang and Nanyang Navy. During this period, the three naval divisions of the Qing Dynasty went through the Sino French Majiang naval battle and Sino Japanese Jiawu naval battle respectively. It is understandable that they were defeated by the French teacher who taught them how to build their own ships and build their own army. However, the defeat to the Japanese Navy, which was also just starting, made the Chinese feel ashamed. In 1907, the Qing government ordered the shipyard to stop shipbuilding.

In 1911, the revolution of 1911 was turbulent. Under the turbulent situation, no one cares about the shipbuilding industry. Mawei shipyard was once reduced to selling scrap iron for a living, "three or five craftsmen, disheveled and dishevelled, and the dishes were desolate". Until 1949, with the change of political power, Mawei shipyard had been in the circle of smashing, repairing and smashing again for more than 30 years. During this period, nearly 20 leaders were replaced, warships were repaired, merchant ships were built, and even China's first aircraft was built.

In 1950, when the PLA moved into Mawei, the shipyard was desolate and overgrown with weeds. There was only a broken engine room and a muddy dock, which reminded people that there had been the glory of "the first shipyard in the Far East". After four years of labor, millions of bricks and dozens of tons of scrap iron and steel were dug out from the ground by workers' hands, and several unexploded shells were removed from the wasteland of the original dock. Zhou Decheng, a veteran worker, said: "just the bricks we picked up, we built four 70 worker's dormitories and three rows of 36 offices."

After liberation, because of the Taiwan issue, Fujian became the front line to Taiwan, which was not suitable for large military enterprises. Since then, the river silt accumulated, and the Mawei shipyard had no hope of revival.

These bricks and scrap steel are the few valuable things left behind by the shipyard. Some of the huge buildings in Mawei shipyard were destroyed by war and gunfire, while others collapsed in the wind and rain. Today, only the engine room built by the French can be seen. Those skilled workers, those shipbuilding drawings and experience accumulated by generations, all disappeared.

Far away shipyard

For more than 50 years after liberation, the old people in the shipyard are not willing to talk more about it. "We've gone from a national team to a local team in shipbuilding." Lin yingyao said that it is not easy to get to today after the merger, cultural revolution and restructuring. Many people attribute the reason why shipyards did not rise again after liberation to the preparation for war in the Taiwan Strait and the state's unwillingness to invest in major projects in Fujian. But the more realistic reason is the natural conditions. According to Lin Xing, a scholar specializing in the modernization of Fuzhou City, in the early years of the Republic of China, because the Minjiang River had not been renovated for a long time, sediment deposition was already very serious. Due to years of neglect of management, Mawei Port was silted up for a long time, and no bigger ships could be built, so the shipbuilding industry moved to Shanghai, Dalian and other places on a large scale.

Now, the shipyard has put up the sign of "industrial tourism" at the gate. Every time a visitor comes to visit the factory, Lin yingyao always takes them to see the engine room. "Going through this workshop is going through 140 years of Chinese industry." He often talks about it. However, 140 years of inheritance only left this empty factory building, which is hard to say.

Those senior engineers who once studied in Europe and America once stood at the pinnacle of the world's industrial technology, but in the frequent changes of political power, their personal destiny seemed insignificant: either they started from scratch on the other side of the Strait to run China's shipbuilding industry; or they scattered all over the world, performing their own stories, and no one came back to Mawei.

When taking reporters to visit the Museum of history of the factory, Lin yingyao said: "there are too many things that we have not inherited. Even these histories, when I retire, I don't know if anyone will manage them."

140 years of history seems to be in circulation, not inheritance. The old regime was overthrown, and all his culture and institutional essence were cast aside as he was to be smashed, including talent and technology.

Missing details

During our in-depth visit to Mawei shipyard, we are constantly lost in his 140 year history. The ten thousand ton wheel, the towering crane, and the mountain of steel plates and screws all remind us that this is an ordinary shipyard, but the artillery beside the scrap heap and the monuments of cultural relics add some confusion to this dilapidated shipyard.

The dark workshop doesn't look very different from a hundred years ago. The workers are playing cards around the greasy desks to pass the boring time before going to work. When history goes on, they are hard not to be forgotten, just like those ordinary people who have been here for 140 years, playing iron, building ships, reading books and studying navigation. People are only good at remembering the magnificent history, but the details are always ignored.

On January 15, General Secretary Hu Jintao came to the shipping culture museum next to the shipyard. The horse is clearly recorded here

Chinese PinYin : Ma Wei Zao Chuan Chang