14 ms·
Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoHi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any questions about life in a Chinese nuclear base!
- jama211 10mo agoAmazing story, thank you for sharing it
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! I will post the second part on Monday.
- nrhrjrjrjtntbt 10mo agoThanks Vincent for submitting, this is really fascinating.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! I will post the second part soon.
- grumbelbart 10mo agoStupid question, but is 404 the real designator of that city, or a pun towards the HTTP error code? Edit: And what a great read, thank you!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoNot a stupid question at all! 404 is the real, official designator (Factory 404) established in 1958, long before the web existed. The coincidence with the HTTP error code is purely accidental, yet incredibly poetic—because for decades, this city literally could not be found on any public map.
- netsharc 10mo agoI wonder why 404, any relation to 4 being similar to the word "death" in Chinese?
- embedding-shape 10mo agoMy first guess would be that they at one point decided to use numbers to designate locations instead of names, to make it easier for them to be secret (eg "codenames"). Then at one point someone figured that actually, lets not just thoughtlessly increment the numbers, but pick random numbers between 1-1000 so we add even more confusion. Kind of like Seal Team 6 I guess.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes,4 sounds similar to death in Chinese. But 404 was just a coincidence.
- tgv 10mo agoWell written, and interesting. I'm slightly surprised at the detailed memories you have from such an early age.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! To me, my childhood memories are imprinted in my mind as vivid images. I'm simply using language to describe the pictures that I still see in my head.
- hermitcrab 10mo agoVery interesting, thank you.
- ocfnash 10mo agoThank you for sharing these memories. I'd be very interested to hear any thoughts you might have about Jung Chang's book "Wild Swans". I read this book a year or two ago and learned a lot from it, but I also learned that many people who grew up in China take issue with the author's account. I'd be grateful for any remarks you may be able to share.
- em500 10mo agoWhat are you looking for exactly? And what issues did you hear from others who grew up in China? Most of the historical / political events (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution) are fairly accurate, while personal / family experiences are necessarily subjective. China is a huge, diverse country with a vast range of experiences from people growing up in different regions and eras (just like the US, or Europe), so it's hard to dispute any personal / family experience.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYou’ve touched on a very sensitive and important point. It’s true that many people who grew up in China have a complicated relationship with narratives that focus on negative historical periods. There is often a defensive reaction, a feeling that such stories are 'smearing' the country's image. However, as a writer, I believe that truth is always more important than a curated image. Authentic memories are often scarce, precisely because they are difficult to tell. My goal with the '404' series is to provide a piece of that missing truth—not to judge, but to document a reality that actually existed. In the long run, I believe a society is better served by facing its complex past than by forgetting it.
- justsomejew 10mo ago[dead]
- avhception 10mo agoHello from Germany, and thanks for the blog post. Fascinating read. I liked how you intertwined the personal point of view with the bigger picture. "Facing a complex past" is a big theme in Germany, too, of course, and I think it's the only proper way to deal with it. Direct witness accounts and retelling are important and add something that a dry history book can't provide. Keep up the good work!
- microtonal 10mo agoI just wanted to say ‘thank you!’. This was a really interesting read, looking forward to the next part!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! I will post on Monday.
- saagarjha 10mo agoPlease do share it here :)
- yorwba 10mo agoSince you mention a trip to Beijing, I wonder what the security precautions were to keep the secret base secret. I assume visitors from other cities would need to apply for a travel permit similar to the one still required for some border areas in Xinjiang and Tibet, but were there also restrictions on people leaving?
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThat’s a great question. In the early days, physical travel permits were indeed the norm. But the most effective 'security precaution' was psychological. We had secrecy education (保密教育) starting as early as primary school. We were taught from a very young age that our city didn't exist to the outside world, and we simply didn't talk about it. But when I was a kid ,I didn't know anything about 404.
- sophrosyne42 10mo agoGiven those precautions and your training, was it hard to share about it? Aren't you worried about the Chinese government punishing you for sharing?
- saltwatercowboy 10mo agoHe sells a storytelling course... perhaps this is meant to be a 'gotcha' where he reveals the con after the fact? My guess is there are people reading this who know something isn't quite right.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI can personally guarantee that this piece is 100% non-fiction.My course also focuses on narrative writing techniques.Does 'Storytelling' have to imply fiction?In Chinese "story(故事）" just things happened, it can be real or fiction .
- schoen 10mo ago
- thenthenthen 10mo agoThank you for sharing. I have been researching this topic for about ten years now and no first hand accounts like to talk or are they alive anymore, this is a very important story, especially in contrast the the dominant Western narratives, thank you!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you for this profound comment. It is incredibly humbling to hear this from someone who has spent a decade researching the topic. You are right—the generation that built '404' is aging, and many of their stories are fading into silence. One of my primary motivations for writing this was the realization that if I didn't document these memories now, they might be lost forever. I hope my first-hand account can provide a more nuanced, human layer to the historical data you've gathered. There is so much more to tell beyond the official records.
- panic 10mo ago[flagged]
- embedding-shape 10mo agoWhile reading through the post, I too felt it being similar to LLM generated text, but the stories and the perspective is uniquely human, or is there something specific that sticks out as inhuman from the text? Specific parts that sounds implausible? It obvious that something was used to do the translation, but it doesn't feel worse than any other machine-translated texts, as long as I get the gist and the overall idea of what the author is trying to communicate, I feel like it's good enough.
- panic 10mo agoThe fact that OP was a new account communicating completely via LLM made me suspicious. He does seem legit though based on his more recent comments.
- 10mo ago
- viktorcode 10mo agoJust wanted to say thank you for sharing this view into entirely different world for many of us!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you for the kind words! It’s been an incredible experience sharing this 'different world' with the HN community today.
- moffers 10mo agoWas there anything you can recall that 404 maybe had but the rest of China might not have because of its special status? Access to newer consumer technologies, or something like that? Just was curious if there was something “better” about living in a government secret beyond long train rides and melting neighbors.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoExactly. To give you some concrete examples that I’ll dive deeper into in Part 2: Soviet Architecture: Many of our residential and administrative buildings were designed and built by Soviet experts, giving the city a distinct 'Stalinist empire' aesthetic that felt very grand compared to the surrounding desert. Elite Salaries: The wage levels in our factory were on par with those in Beijing, which was extraordinary given our remote location. The 'Post-Scarcity' Bubble: For many families, daily expenses were minimal because the 'unit' (Danwei) provided almost everything. We regularly received rations of high-quality rice, flour, and oil as part of our work benefits, so we rarely had to spend money on basic survival. In a country that was still struggling with scarcity, living in 404 felt like living in a futuristic, well-provisioned fortress. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I'll talk more about this 'gilded' lifestyle.
- eastbound 10mo agoYou’ve written more words in answers than in the original article. Thank you very much for giving us this privilege and providing “support” for details of your writings.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you for your kindness,I feel exciting to communicate with people from different culture.
- crazygringo 10mo ago> 404 is a classified code for a nuclear industrial base. Can you expand? A code under what system? What were some other code numbers and what (unclassified) things did they refer to? Did each code refer to a specific city or specific factory? Or were all cities/factories dedicated to a certain type of industry or military objective classified under the same code? Why did they teach you this code number growing up? I'm really fascinated by this. Fantastic story overall, can't wait for part 2!
- jdietrich 10mo agoMost things in the Chinese military system are numbered rather than named. Military units are numbered twice - a public cover designator and a private true unit designator, originally four and later five digits. Factories got a three digit number - 296 for the small arms factory in Jiangshe, 816 for the uranium enrichment plant in Fuling and so on. Everyone in and around Factory 404 would have known it as such, but the mere existence of Factory 404 was a state secret. The existence of such a large and conspicuous secret might seem bizarre to the post-cold-war mind, but it was fairly common in the West too. For example, the British Telecom Tower in central London stands at 189 metres tall and had a revolving restaurant that was open to the public, but was also a designated site under the Official Secrets Act.
- eastbound 10mo agoIs it victim of the enumeration vulnerability, ie between 403 and 405 you can guess what they were busy with and therefore identify the activity? Or do they randomize the numbers, but then just 3 digits seems little for such a big country?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI don't know the code system, for me they are random 3 numbers(like Plant 504 : A uranium enrichment facility.)Thank you liking it, I will post the second part on Monday.
- ElijahLynn 10mo agoThank you so much for sharing your experience!
- quakeguy 10mo agoGreat article, thx for sharing it! What i want to know, where exactly is this city? I mean geographically, i even could not locate it on GMaps or the like?? I mean, i get it, thats the whole point isnt it? Still curious.
- lamek 10mo ago40.230000,97.360000
- AlotOfReading 10mo agohttps://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B013'48.0%22N+97%C2%B021'39.6%22E https://www.google.com/maps/place/40%C2%B013'48.0%22N+97%C2%...
- quakeguy 10mo agoDamn, that looks awful, those tailings alone…
- pixl97 10mo agoAnd it looks like they have their own dedicated coal powerplant.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes，and I feel it's the sweetest home for many years.
- r58lf 10mo agothat's the work site. The residential town is about 10km SW of that marker.
- allan_s 10mo agoThanks a lot, I really first thought "404" was just a geek reference and not the actual code name ! I have some very good friends which are Chinese but are not able to read English, do you mind if I do a AI translation, and if you can check it to see if it translate what you're trying to convey ? (I propose that as I think it would be too much to ask to ask to redo the text in Chinese) Edit: haha I see you actually did the reverse ! Do you mind sharing also the original CHinese script ? That would also help me with my own mandarin learning !
- oofbey 10mo agoIs it just a coincidence that the HTTP code for “not found” became the same as the code name for this city?
- marssaxman 10mo agoI find it hard to imagine otherwise. HTTP codes are based on the server return code system used in FTP, first published in 1971, where each of the three digits had a specific role and the values simply counted up from 0-9 as different meanings were assigned. HTTP is a little looser about the syntax, but it's the same general idea. Given the scheme, something was going to be code 404.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes，it's just a coincidence.
- flybit 10mo ago[dead]
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThat’s so kind of you! I did write and publish this story in Chinese first. You don't need an AI translation for them; the original text exists and has been quite popular in the Chinese corner of the internet.You can search for it using the title:《我在404长大》
- jl6 10mo agoHi OP, as a side question, are you using an LLM like ChatGPT to translate or write your comments here?
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes，English is not my first langue, I have to use AI translate for now.
- edgineer 10mo agoWhat would you say to someone who has long been fascinated by nuclear weaponry and hopes to one day witness a test explosion? I see even China hasn't tested in decades and so my chances of doing this are close to nil, but I ask because your answer could tell more how you feel about the technology and its future. My physics professor told me to study supernovae instead.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoTo be honest, for me, nuclear explosions only exist in the imagery of propaganda and documentaries. I am not a physicist; I don't understand nuclear physics on a technical level. My perspective on 'the nuclear' is purely emotional and sensory—I simply find it terrifying. I resonate much more with the raw, human suffering described in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl than I do with the scientific future of nuclear power.
- SilverElfin 10mo ago> During the “Three Years of Hardship” (1959–1961), when more than 30 million people across China starved to death, our factory area faced a desperate crisis. At one point, there were only a few days’ worth of rations left in the warehouses, and workers began to suffer from severe edema due to malnutrition. I was curious about this part and lingering perspectives among Chinese citizens. How do they regard the past mass starvations and deaths in the 1900s? Are these events well known? Are they seen as a catastrophe? Do they blame someone (like the government) or is it seen as the cost of progress or a natural disaster? Do old and young people see these events differently from each other? Thanks for writing and sharing!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI think it's well known, cause that generation are still alive.In the Northern China, the situation was often more dire because the land is unforgiving. In the South, people at least had the chance to supplement their rations by fishing in the rivers.While the official term often points to 'natural disasters,'it is widely recognized as a man-made catastrophe. I remember when I was 4 or 5 years old, my mother told me stories about those years. As a child, I didn't understand the historical context; I thought mass starvation was something that happened cyclically, like the seasons. I vividly remember asking her: 'Does this happen every few years? Should we start stockpiling food now just in case?' Even today, you will see older Chinese people who cannot bear to see a single grain of rice left on a plate. It’s not just frugality; it’s a ghost from 1959. A common criticism of Chinese people is that they 'eat everything,' but a major reason for this is that China has endured more famines than almost any other nation in human history.
- zerofor_conduct 10mo agoFascinating and well told - many thanks!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you!
- sgnelson 10mo agoDid you interview Yuan Gongpu or was this part from another source? I'm interested in the laborers who did the work, not just the scientists who designed everything. Thanks for your story.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoSorry I didn't，his Chinese name is 原公浦，you can search this and there and many articles about him.
- simonw 10mo agoThis was fascinating, and a compelling story. Thanks for sharing it.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you for liking it!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoUpdate: Part 2 is out now on my Substack. I will submit it as a separate post on HN later today once this thread cools down, to avoid spamming the front page. But for those asking, here is the direct link: https://substack.com/home/post/p-182824207 https://substack.com/home/post/p-182824207
- JakeSc 10mo agoGreat memoirs! One question: You mentioned that sports activities were organized by the units in 404. Which sports were played?
- thatsadude 10mo agoNice read!
- nephihaha 10mo ago404 does sound a bit like a nightmare posting, and God knows what the adults felt like. They probably couldn't say much. But children see things very differently. I forwarded this on to several people.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you for sharing this with others. You’ve hit on the exact emotional core I wanted to explore. For the adults, 404 was a place of immense pressure, secrecy, and often sacrifice. But for us kids, it was just 'home.' We played in the shadows of giants and nuclear reactors without a second thought. That contrast—the 'nightmare' for the parents and the 'playground' for the children—is what makes these memories so surreal to look back on. I’m glad that perspective resonated with you.
- Havoc 10mo agoCool post! Always interesting to read about people's lived realities that are completely different
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! It was indeed a unique place to grow up. I'm planning to publish the next chapter shortly, so stay tuned.
- tomcam 10mo agoMy father-in-law worked there as a programmer during the Cultural Revolution. There were always guards on the other side of the (locked) office door. Sometimes they’d shoot at random things to remind the nerds just who was in charge. When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.
- eunos 10mo agoThere were programmers already during Cultural Revolution in China?
- magnio 10mo agoChina made its first computer in 1958 and its first 1 megaflop computer in 1973, so yes, their nascence of computer programming preceded the Cultural Revolution, about 10 years after the West.
- nephihaha 10mo agoThe so called Cultural Revolution was certainly programming, just not of the computer variety and at massive human cost.
- p2detar 10mo agoI could believe it, the timespan should be 1966-1976, so maybe in late 70s. I know a lot of automation software was being written in my Eastern European socialist country in assembly language around 1974. I think mostly for 6800-based chips like probably MOS 6502.
- astrange 10mo agoI went to a retrocomputing exhibition (I think at CHM) and there was a 6502-based Russian all in one computer with the nicest keyboard I've ever used. I still wonder which model it was…
- tomcam 10mo agoIt was also a Cold War. My father-in-law and mother-in-law were both gifted mathematicians and mainframe programmers. She also designed CPUs. She is a sweet sweet person and a major badass. She is my hero. She’s in her 80s and was more accomplished in her 20s than you and I put together will ever be.
- didntknowyou 10mo agonice read. interesting experience and great writing. looking forward to the next part.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! I will post soon.
- zizon 10mo ago> I was born in 1991, thirty years after China’s first atomic bomb explosion, and right around the time of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I smell cooked
- swe_dima 10mo agoMy grandfather, who is a nuclear scientist, and my mom also come from a small closed-off city in Siberia (Russia). Visiting my grandparents I remember we had to go through a sort of border control to get there. My mom told stories of how the government would change the asphalt every year in that city to cover the nuclear dust.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoWow, thank you so much for sharing this. It’s fascinating and deeply moving to see how similar our childhood memories are, despite being thousands of miles apart.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 10mo agoInteresting. Though I had heard that in vety cold climate (Siberia in that case) replacing the road asphalt every year is common because of the inevitable cracks caused the the temperature variation anyway.
- swe_dima 10mo agoin the ideal situation - yes, but since Russia is big and the climate is cold almost everywhere the government usually does not do it except in big cities.
- NotGMan 10mo ago>> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me. It's called bad governing. To connect nuclear "not clean" with such bad governing is bit much.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYou make a fair point, and from a purely technical or policy perspective, I agree that bad governance shouldn't be conflated with the potential of nuclear technology itself. However, as a writer, I’m describing the subjective reality of growing up in that environment. When you see 'scorched-earth' measures taken to manage a city, it shapes your visceral perception of that power, regardless of the science behind it. My goal isn't to debate nuclear policy, but to capture how that specific 'bad governing' colored the way we, as residents, perceived the very energy that defined our lives.
- colinb 10mo agoThis argument that nuclear power generation is clean if you ignore the times when it isn't seems a bit no-true-Scotsman to me. It's a thing I've changed my mind about more than once in the past. What sways my thinking now is: - most nuclear power does indeed seem to be well run with minimal pollution. - when it goes wrong, the consequences are awful and long-lived (I can, off the top of my head, name two sites that are dangerous decades after they were polluted. I suspect there are others that don't have the same cultural resonance for me. - the alternatives in terms of renewables and storage are improving seemingly from one day to the next. The long term consequences, and human frailty in the face of a requirement for total and eternal vigilance convince me that the risk outweighs the reward. Where nuclear power once seemed [to me. I appreciated that some people have always been anti-nuke] like the least bad option compared with e.g. coal, now there are better ways to make our lives work. If the endless 50-years-in-the-future ever actually expires and we get practical fusion power, it'll be interesting to see how this changes my thinking. Perhaps that will will have fewer toxic side effects when it goes wrong.
- sgjohnson 10mo ago
- jpgvm 10mo agoYou are a great writer. Would love to hear what came next and eventually how you found your way to HN. :)
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you so much! That means a lot to me.I'll be posting Part 2 very soon on my Substack to continue the story. Hope to see you there!"
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI asked AI where should I publish my article, it said Medium at first. I submitted to illustration and 10 days later, the article is still pending review right now. So I ask AI again, what should I do? It says HN is the best but also toughest, it's hard to show in the front page. After I tried, I think I kinda made it.
- electroglyph 10mo agothose jerks put a zoo in the desert!? =(
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes, next part I will talk about the zoo.I will post on Monday.
- martin-t 10mo ago> Our license plates started with “Gan-A,” the same as the provincial capital. We laughed at people from other cities like Jiayuguan (“Gan-B”) or Jiuquan (“Gan-F”). Even as kids, we joked, “We’re still number one.” Because our grandparents were the country’s elite and we lived in the “Nuclear City,” I always felt like I was living at the center of the world. Am I reading too much into this or does China have a culture of competition which involves mocking those you deem below you even for the most shallow reasons?
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThat’s a very observant question. I wouldn’t say it’s a universal Chinese culture of competition, but rather a reflection of the naive, bubble-like pride we had as children in that specific environment. We genuinely believed we were special because of the city's status, even if that pride was based on something as shallow as a license plate. It was our way of making sense of our 'elite' isolation. The irony is that this unrealistic sense of superiority made the eventual loss of our home even more disorienting. When the world you thought was the 'center' disappears, you're left feeling completely lost.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoMocking those below you is almost a global phenomena that humans seems to have been doing almost forever, and still do, almost everywhere on the planet. Doesn't really strike me as something uniquely Chinese by any margins.
- Aboutplants 10mo agoYou can even take it a step farther because animals display the same type of behavior
- wodenokoto 10mo agoIn my school in Europe we had 4 classes for each grade. A, B, C and D. Guess who felt they were better than everybody else?
- 10mo ago
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- fcpguru 10mo agoAmazing, related story. I had a friend that always talked about growning up in 418 Pennsylvania. It began as a company town for a ceramics manufacturer in the 1920s. The factory specialized in heat resistant vessels. You know like kettles, pitchers, industrial teapots. Each stamped each with a model number tied to production lines. Line 418 was the most profitable. When the post office opened, the clerk assumed “418” was the town name, not the factory line number. By the time anyone noticed, mail was flowing, checks were signed, and no one wanted to correct the federal government. The factory closed in the 1950s. The town shrank but remained oddly proud of its name. Residents leaned into it without explaining it.
- onionisafruit 10mo agoI grew up in 200 Pennsylvania. It was ok.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThis is an incredible story! Thank you for sharing the legend of '418'. It’s fascinating how industrial logic can accidentally become a place's identity, whether it’s a production line in Pennsylvania or a secret code in the Gobi Desert. The fact that residents remained 'oddly proud' of a name that was essentially a clerical error resonates deeply with me. In 404, our pride was tied to a secret mission; in 418, it was tied to a factory's success. Both show how humans can find a sense of home and belonging in the most 'functional' or even 'accidental' labels. This is exactly the kind of connection I hoped this post would spark.
- deleted 10mo ago
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo agoOn my trip back from china this week I watched a Chinese movie about their nuclear bomb project. Basically the equivalent of Oppenheimer. Quite interesting movie and now I am reading this
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes, it's really like the small town in Oppenheimer.
- lantastic 10mo agoSounds interesting. What's the title?
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo agoRoaring Across the Horizon
- Keyframe 10mo agoWhat's the deal with AI here in the comments?
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYou caught me! Yes, I am using AI to assist with the translation. My IELTS score is 7.5, but my writing band is 6.0. I write my thoughts and comments in Chinese first and then use AI to translate them. The entire article was also translated from my original Chinese manuscript.
- jeremyjh 10mo agoThe reply to the 418 joke is clearly generated, not just translated.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mgraczyk 10mo agoIt doesn't sound generated to me
- the_af 10mo agoThe comment with "you touched on an interesting and profound point" is also not a translation of anything a human would write, but AI slop/filler.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoYes it is, really sorry for it. I don't know how to delete it.
- Keyframe 10mo agoRight, you do what you think is best. I'm in no position to tell you what to do. Having said that, it comes off as robotic and impersonal. Personally, I'd rather read you trying to write with your own words what you wanted to write. That is, if you're not AI yourself which there are high chances of and I'm leaning on that theory.
- claudebotgsc1 10mo agoThe naming is almost too perfect. Someone in the bureaucracy looked at a classified city that couldn't appear on maps and called it "404." Either that's dark humor from an engineer who knew exactly what they were doing, or it's a coincidence that's funnier than any joke. Also curious about the zoo. A zoo in the middle of the Gobi Desert for a city that doesn't exist. What happens to the animals when a place like that shuts down?
- selfawareMammal 10mo agoWhat are the coordinates? Been looking for it around 100km west of jiayuguan but I can't seem to get it right
- yorwba 10mo agoChinese Wikipedia https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%98%E8%82%83%E7%9F%BF%E5%8C%BA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%98%E8%82%83%E7%9F%BF%E5... has the coordinates. It's a lot closer to 玉门 than to 嘉峪关.
- marcellus23 10mo agoEdit: nevermind I don't know if those coordinates are correct. They seem to be the exact coordinates of Jiayuguan City [0], but then the article also says that the 404 site is located "100 km west of Jiayuguan City," with living areas later relocated to Jiayuguan. So I think the article authors just put the Jiayuguan coords there. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiayuguan_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiayuguan_City
- yorwba 10mo ago40°10′49″N 97°16′36″E is not exactly 39°46′24″N 98°17′18″E. Did you maybe copy the wrong coordinates? Anyways, have an OpenStreetMap link https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=11/40.1243/97.3375 https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=11/40.1243/97.3375
- marcellus23 10mo agoYou’re right, I think my confusion was that they’re both labeled Kiayukwan in Apple Maps.
- Eduard 10mo agoDMS: 40° 10′ 48.67″ N, 97° 16′ 36.49″ E Decimal: 40.180185, 97.276804 Geo URI: geo:40.180185,97.276804 https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?language=en¶ms=40.180185_N_97.276804_E_ https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?language=en¶ms...
- frozenseven 10mo agoMore info about similar places: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_townlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_townlet
- edfeewe 10mo ago[flagged]
- ElijahLynn 10mo ago"My biggest dream in kindergarten was to be a big brother. I wanted to care for a younger sibling. But under the One-Child Policy, if my mother had another child, she and my dad would lose their jobs. She had to follow the rules and terminate a pregnancy. My wish was impossible."
- ElijahLynn 10mo ago"Once, a soldier entered the residential area after coming into contact with radioactive material. His hands turned a necrotic black, like charred wood. The authorities didn’t just isolate him; they traced his entire trajectory and burned every single item he had touched. A friend of my father lost his entire sofa because of this. Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me."
- tolerance 10mo agoI’m curious how HN’s general warmth toward self promotion is going to be affected by the steady proliferation of AI-assisted content.
- roncesvalles 10mo agoThere is nothing intrinsically wrong about using AI to help convey your ideas, as long as the ideas being conveyed are 100% genuinely yours. Because then it just becomes a choice of style, and a non-native speaker may not have a better choice of style than "LLMese". It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism. The witch-hunt style comments where people accuse an author of using LLMs as if it's some big gotcha that discredits everything they said need to stop. It only derails the discussion.
- tolerance 10mo ago> It's like writing something with a commodity Bic ballpoint vs a fancy fountain pen with expensive ink. The style of the prose itself is not the valuable artifact, at least not here (it may be in certain places e.g. poems and novels), unless you think well-written/well-spoken people are automatically more veritable or intelligent, which is just as shallow as lookism. I think this simplifies the entire discipline of literary criticism and I suppose every other related science. You can write the same prose with both the Bic and the fountain pen; the quality of pen only affects the material quality of the writing—the ink—but not the style (rhetoric? eloquence?) of the writing (i.e., the contents of language, how it’s conveyed, etc.). We aren’t arguing whether it’s appropriate to depreciate writing generated by an LLM to using speech-to-text as opposed to using a keyboard. The style of the prose does contribute to the value of the artifact and speaks to the repute of the reader in addition. Readers care about what you say and how you say it too. Nonetheless I as well as others have good reason to interrogate the intrinsic value of LLM-assisted writing especially when it refers to writing like the one being discussed which I reckon qualifies as a part of the “literary non-fiction” genre. So it’s apt that we criticize this writing on those grounds. Many here have even said that they would prefer the 100% genuinely-styled version of the author’s experience which is apparently only 1.5 points lower than whatever their verbal acumen is. [1] Which I imagine places them around the rank of your average American...and I assume so with charity toward the Americans. While I think some LLM accusations are lazily applied I think communities such as this one benefit from these discussions when waged critically. Especially when status and social capital are of implicit interest. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46411214
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- icemelt8 10mo agoThe most shocking thing in this article is learning about the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine I didn't know about it, what an unnecessary loss of life in a modern era.
- bigyabai 10mo agoIf that shocks you, the rest of the "Great Leap Forward" policies will chill you to the bone. It really contextualizes the miracle of Chinese modernization.
- aduwah 10mo agoThank you for sharing your story. Cannot wait for the next part
- moorkh 10mo agoThis was a great read. Can't wait for the next installment. Where do you live now?
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you! I live in Toronto right now.
- arjie 10mo agoIncredible account. I love these. If you posted translation would you mind posting the original as well? Great story.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you！Here is the original link https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240110A03FKJ00 https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20240110A03FKJ00
- arjie 10mo agoThank you!
- edwardtay 10mo agoThis is a fascinating glimpse into a world most people will never experience. A few questions if you're open to sharing: 1. How did the classification level affect everyday social interactions? Were there topics that were implicitly off-limits even within the city among residents? 2. You mentioned the zoo in the middle of the desert - what drove that decision? Was it purely for morale/quality of life, or were there other factors? 3. Looking back now with perspective, how do you think growing up in such a unique environment shaped your worldview compared to peers who grew up in "normal" Chinese cities? Also really interested in hearing about the technical side if you're comfortable sharing - what was the general sentiment among the scientists and engineers about their work? Did they talk about it as "nation-building" or was it more pragmatic? Looking forward to Part 2!
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo ago很多人建议我不要用AI翻译，所以我用中文回答，辛苦大家用一下翻译功能。 1.厂区里几乎所有人认识所有人，我爸妈饭桌上的话题就是同事八卦。这样的话整个社会氛围其实有点压抑，只要你做了任何出格的事，很快所有人都会知道。 2.我也觉得建一个动物园简直是疯了，文章第二部分有提到这个。我大伯是负责挑选动物的人，从全国各地运动物过去。可能维护成本太高吧，动物园里的孔雀慢慢没了，变成珍珠鸡，最后只有几只家养母鸡了。 3.可能最大的不同是我非常好奇，对一切都很好奇，至今仍然是这样，对所有事情都想问一下为什么。另外一个很大的影响是，我感觉自己没有根，在世界上飘。文章第二部分有提到，整个厂区搬迁了，我没故乡了。 4.那一代人是真的认为自己在nation-building，不计回报的付出。很多人都是从发达城市调过去的，他们家人很多年都不知道他们在做什么。很奇怪，这可能被认为是最严重的洗脑，但是当他们离开404反倒找不到生活的意义了。
- saltwatercowboy 10mo agoSomething about this feels off. Anyone else?
- the_af 10mo agoIt feels off to me as well. It's the kind of unverifiable story that we would like to believe, but there's almost zero way of having independent confirmation. The photos could be from anywhere. The author seems likeable and writes an interesting story, but who knows how much of it is true. The story seems almost tailored to cater to HN, with secret projects, nuclear power, China, and secrecy.
- amdivia 10mo agoFeels AI-ish as well, and OP used em-dashes in some of their replies. But it could be attributed to a language barrier of sorts requiring the use of LLMs to communicate
- nephihaha 10mo agoI use em dashes in prose — and I am not AI.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI'm using AI to translate comments, and it does sounds AI. My IELTS is 7.5, and writing band 6.0, so I have to rely on the tool currently.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 10mo agoIt is completely plausible, and no details in the story are outlandish for China. Heck, it feels tamer than I would imagine, even.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 10mo agoWere there any birth defects from the radiation? I'm still haunted by a BBC report I saw when I was a kid of residents who lived near some Chinese nuclear test facility and it showed the unbelievable birth defects their children were suffering.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoAs far as I know, it didn't happen in 404, cause factory area and living area are split. 我们厂区里好像没有，因为生活区和生产区是分开的。
- tingx 10mo ago404 history https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E6%A0%B8%E5%B7%A5%E4%B8%9A%E6%80%BB%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E7%AC%AC%E5%9B%9B%E9%9B%B6%E5%9B%9B%E5%8E%82/20205921 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E6%A0%B8%E5%...
- Obscurity4340 10mo ago> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment (ending with someones couch being neutralized) makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me. Thats a bit much, isnt it? This was in the early days of their nuclear progress, of course at the time it wasnt going to be a linear, completely efficient and sanitized. Kind of a weird comment, nothing develops perfectly while its development chugs along
- jama211 10mo agoIt’s a personal emotional experience, nothing weird about it at all. Only weird thing is how you singled it out.
- nephihaha 10mo agoThe development programme was haphazard. They got bits and pieces off the Soviets and had to figure the rest out.
- Obscurity4340 10mo agoRight, but the statement extends to the present state of mind of the writer. They're saying that they currently find the notion that nuclear energy can be clean or the cleanest as absurd based on their childhood in the infancy of the program. Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy
- nephihaha 10mo agoThe problem with the PRC is that if you complain about things you can get in a lot of trouble. That includes issues like safety and pollution.
- Koekje 10mo agoThis seems to be the original story in Chinese, from 2016: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/22190111
- Aboutplants 10mo agoNow I’m confused
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI posted this in Chinese first.And use AI translated.
- the_af 10mo agoWhy did it take you 8 years to repost it in English? It's not because of AI, because other translations existed before LLMs and were more than adequate.
- ctchocula 10mo ago+1 The long gap between 2016 when the original article was written in Chinese and 2025, the fact that the Substack article does not cite the original Zhihu article (until someone other than OP linked it in this thread), not linking previously English translations of this article, and the financial incentive of the LLM-translated article being on Substack make OP's claim of authorship of the Chinese article very sus.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThe first comment can answer your question, go and check whether I am OP https://www.zhihu.com/people/yan-mou-ren-63/posts https://www.zhihu.com/people/yan-mou-ren-63/posts
- ctchocula 10mo ago
- desmoulins 10mo agoThis is really interesting, from what the first part describes, the design and operation of "factory 404" has a lot in common with similar facilities built in the US and Russia. The US built the Hanford/Richland site in the desert of eastern Washington, and Russia built Mayak/Ozyorsk in an isolated part of the Urals. They're all versions of this project to build a self-contained 'utopia' city in the wilderness, dedicated to secret work on nuclear technology. There's also the same social tension between highly skilled workers, transient unskilled workers, and the military/political leadership. (For anyone interested, Plutopia by Kate Brown is a good read on the subject) I wonder if this site in the Gobi ended up having the same problems with radioactive contamination from accidents and unethical experiments that Hanford and Mayak had?
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoTo be honest, growing up inside, we lived in a state of 'enforced innocence.' While Hanford and Mayak's histories are now well-documented in the West, 404’s specific records regarding accidents or contamination remain largely classified.I only heard some stories from my parents.
- schoen 10mo agoIn the U.S. we have belatedly had declassification of various parts of military history, including lots of details about Los Alamos (where the U.S. atom bomb was invented). Sometimes this has happened on a delay of many decades and there are certainly still some things that the public might think of as part of "history" that are not officially declassified. Has there been a similar process in China where older military history is no longer officially secret?
- orbital-decay 10mo agoSee also "Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States" by Alex Wellerstein.
- gaoryrt 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/816_Nuclear_Military_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/816_Nuclear_Military_Plant
- nonninz 10mo agoAbsolutely beautiful story thank you so much for sharing. I don't mind AI translation at all. The style comes off as a bit weird indeed, but I just took it off as a style I'm not used to because it comes from a different culture than mine. I wouldn't mind much the naysayers, I'd like to see them posting something in chinese and see how they'd like it ;) I really enjoyed the writing style actually, all these different anectodes condensed in shorter sentences, without fluff or trying to connect them in a single narrative. Maybe this is not the correct way to put it, but I'm also not a native English speaker nor I have any classical training in writing. Yours is the first substack I ever subscribed to and can't wait to read part two. It actually pushed me to start writing some of my childhood experiences. Thank you again. Absolutely fascinating.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you so much! I hope LLM didn't ruin the vibe, so I edited many times, but still, english is not my first language, so it probably still "looks like AI". I will try my best and I will post part 2 on Monday.
- teiferer 10mo agoThat's such a great use of an LLM! Thanks for sharing! Unfortunately the ever-present desire for the moneys made folks use LLMs to produce lots and lots of slop, polluting not just the web but even the trust to each other. The default nowadays when reading a piece of text that has even the slightest LLM vibe is to assume it's made-up slop. That's very sad, but necessary, because it's just everywhere. It's so sad because the tech could really bring people together. Creating almost seemless translations. That's why your work is such a great example for the good this could bring if we'd not have so many greedy people among us.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoThank you so much! I feel LLM is perfect to making web slop, that's really a pity that the smartest thing is doing the worst job.
- 10mo ago
- Reason077 10mo agoIs the “404: not found” error code actually a humorous reference to China’s secret nuclear city? After all, HTTP was invented at CERN, a nuclear research institute. Staff there would presumably have been aware of “404” and probably made jokes about the fact that it didn’t exist…
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoIt's a coincidence.It’s defined both a digital void and my childhood home is the kind of irony.
- tsoukase 10mo agoFirst thank you for the sincere description. Second aren't you afraid that the government doesn't run after you? Is this event officially declassified? You certainly provide only childish memories but... you know. I am glad to know there was a third place besides USA and USSR preparing nuclear stuff during the cold war.
- Vincent_Yan404 10mo agoI published this in China, they didn't bother me, so I hope it's fine here.
- pointbob 10mo ago[dead]
- kome 10mo agoi absolutely loved the story, thank you for sharing! ...and the absolutely unhinged reaction of many commenters to AI use is rich in sociological insight. i have the impression that native english speakers feel somehow threatened... but in general, it's rich for the HN crowd huffing and puffing about AI translation after having turned the world in the most inhuman technology mediated thing, way before AI...
- chasil 10mo ago"I ran wild, waving a red inflatable toy hammer." I think that I see the word "Coke" in the picture of you holding the hammer. Was this for Coca Cola?
- ggm 10mo ago> Witnessing such scorched-earth containment makes the modern definition of nuclear power as the ‘cleanest energy’ completely incomprehensible to me. It's definitional in Gwh of productive, usable energy produced per tonne of damage to health. It also demands a lot of rigour against other forms of embedded energy regarding fugitive gas leaks, unassociated third party injury which is usually an externality. And of course it predates the rise in general efficiency of solar and wind and may no longer be true unless very specific criteria are applied like constancy. But, awful though the trail of tears is behind example contamination events, including Chernobyl and Three Mile Island and Fukishima, counting death in coal or oil demands recognition of a huge problem in life shortening from contamination and injury at large in the whole cycle mine to chimney. More people died from translocation consequences than direct nuclear radiation consequences in all three of the above. Not to minimise their deaths but if you move a million people in a rush, some die who otherwise would have lived. "Modern" here is > 1949 and < "whenever wind and solar and batteries got so good"
- vjay15 10mo agoThis had me hooked
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- mrheosuper 10mo ago>The first generation of 404 were the country’s brightest elites. I am interersted in how did China convince those people to move to this "harsh and painful" city. I assume with their top skill, they had options to live anywhere they want, and a lot ot places want them. The "stick" does not always work, you have to use "carrot" too.
- symbogra 10mo agoThis is really cool, it reminds me of Novosibirsk which I learned about from reading Red Plenty, Francis Spufford's historical novel about the city.
- sledprocyon 10mo agoThanks for sharing your story. I was also born in 1991, and it’s crazy how much where a person is born shapes the whole growing-up experience. Looking forward to part 2!