Tangshan
— a city the earth tore open, and then rebuilt.
Not only on a wall.
“An industrial city in eastern Hebei province, about 180 kilometres east of Beijing on the road to the Bohai Sea coast. On the morning of July 28, 1976, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake destroyed Tangshan in fewer than thirty seconds, killing at least 242,000 people. The rebuilt city now holds a memorial park, a wall carved with the names of the dead, and a museum that lets the record stand without commentary.
Tangshan, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Tangshan is a prefecture-level city of about 7.7 million in Hebei province on the northern coast of the Bohai Sea, roughly 180 kilometres east of Beijing. The municipality grew around late-nineteenth-century coal mining at the Kailuan colliery, China's first large mechanised mine, opened in 1878. Today the urban core spans the Douhe River; heavy industry (steel, cement, ceramics) still shapes the surrounding districts. Beijing-Harbin high-speed rail reaches the city centre in about an hour from Beijing South Station.
At the centre of Tangshan Earthquake Memorial Park, dedicated in 2008 on the thirty-second anniversary of the quake, four black-granite walls hold the names of 242,419 confirmed victims of the 1976 earthquake, the official toll the state released in the years afterward. The walls run nearly 500 metres in length and are carved with one name per line. The Tangshan Earthquake Museum sits alongside the wall and holds rescue records, photographs of the ruined city, and the testimonies of survivors.
The earthquake struck at 3:42 in the morning on July 28, 1976. The U.S. Geological Survey records the magnitude as 7.5; a magnitude-7.1 aftershock followed the same afternoon. The city was effectively levelled within seconds, and rescue work was complicated by the loss of road, rail, and telegraph lines. The official death toll, released some years later, stands at 242,419, with roughly 164,000 severely injured. Reconstruction began the same year and was substantially complete by the mid-1980s.