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The story begins with the film "Gold-Silver Sands," or "Jinyintan" in Chinese. The film depicted the lives of herdsmen living on the grasslands of the same name in a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in northwest China's Qinghai Province. It became a hit when it was released in 1954.


Despite obvious critical and market success, it was withdrawn from theaters soon after a short public appearance, with no specific reasons given.


Du didn't get to see the film, but a mysterious trip four years later would connect him to its disappearance from cinemas.


Early in the winter of 1958, Du Wholesale Hockey Jerseys , 23, then a hoist technician with a mining machinery factory in Luoyang in central China's Henan Province, left his pregnant wife for a mission unknown. He was on a train heading west with several dozens of his colleagues. None of them knew what the exact destination was.


"All I knew was to go to the front," Du told Xinhua.


After almost a whole day on the train, they were transferred to trucks, which carried them to a barren grassland over another two days. The place Wholesale Adidas NHL Jerseys , which is known by locals as Jinyintan, covers an area of more than 1,100 sq km and features plains surrounded by mountains on the Qinghai-Tibet plateau.


In the summer of that year, Jinyintan was selected as the location of China's first nuclear testing base, a Chinese counterpart to Oak Ridge, the U.S. "Atomic City" established in 1942.


Du was told they would build a factory there Wholesale NHL Jerseys , and he knew its name later -- Factory 221. But again, he didn't know what the factory would produce.


"We were told not to pry, but we guessed it must be something big, and it had something to do with national defense because '221' is more like a military code name. We were all excited," Du recalled.


However, the "big project" had to start from zero. Du recalled he spent the first night on Jinyintan in a self-made tent and it was snowing all night.


"We put on all the clothes we had Wholesale Jerseys Online , but found we all became Santa Clauses the next morning as our faces were all frosty," Du said.


That's all it took to disillusion him.


The hardship was far beyond his imagination. The height of construction from 1959 to 1961 coincided with a nationwide famine caused by natural disasters. Du found himself in survival mode as the food supply quota per person was only 10 kg per month.


"We were so starving that our legs were swollen, a typical sign of malnutrition. We had to look for mushrooms and hunt in the mountains for food," recalled Du.


Despite the hardships, the base was built in 1963. Du took his first bath in five years that summer. He was given an even bigger bonus -- a vacation back to Henan to visit his family, including his five-year-old son he had never seen in person.


While Du was back for a long-awaited family reunion Wholesale Jerseys From China , Liu Zhaoming, an explosives engineer, left a Beijing-based institute for an unknown destination.


"I was only told to go to the front," Liu told Xinhua.


He also arrived at Factory 221 and worked in an explosives lab.


"You could never imagine how simple the lab's facilities were. We used bronze saws to cut the explosives with no insulation protection at all. It was really dangerous. After all, an explosion could happen any time," said Liu.


Liu had no idea that he was one of more than 10 Wholesale Jerseys China ,000 scientists and engineers working for the country's first atomic bomb. They worked in more than 400 factories and scientific research organizations, which were scattered among 20 provincial regions. They were preparing different parts of the bomb and most of them didn't know the final product was a nuclear weapon.


On 6 June 1963, China successfully detonated a quasi-atomic bomb, which contained no nuclear material, at the Jinyintan base, paving the way for its first formal nuclear test.


NORTH BY NORTHWEST


Du was once again on a train westward to a "mysterious front" at the end of 1963. The