In the Qaidam Basin, in the vast desert at the foot of mount Argin, there is an abandoned oil town that once prospered and decayed because of oil. From no man's land to a prosperous town inhabited by tens of thousands of people, it has now returned to no man's land, circled around and returned to the original point.
A forgotten oil town
Aksay oil town
The town is located in Aksai Kazakh Autonomous County, which belongs to Jiuquan City, Gansu Province, and is located at the intersection of Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang provinces. There are mysterious wildernesses, vast grasslands, sacred snow-capped mountains, mysterious ruins... Most shockingly, the Lenghu oil field, one of the four largest oil fields in China at that time, was found here, but since the relocation of the Qinghai Petroleum Administration to Dunhuang in 1991, Lenghu has greatly decayed.
Endless mysteries of the past
In 1983, the oil town of Aksay was attacked overnight for unknown reasons, and the next morning, the bustling town was uninhabited and in ruins. In 1985, the expedition team came to this place and found that it had been attacked by monsters, causing the destruction of the entire town.
This is the plot of director Lu Chuan's 2015 film "Nine-Story Demon Tower". The mysterious disappearance of the town in the movie gives people unlimited reverie, the oil town was built to achieve modern industry, but one night encountered the hunting of an ancient mysterious civilization, and this town that people had built for many years became a ghost town overnight, hidden in the vast desert.
In fact, the city's original facilities are all real. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the most popular was the 100,000, up to 100,000 people came to the Qaidam cornucopia to pan for gold. When the boom subsides, it is like the tide, leaving only silence, walking in the empty town where no one can feel the prosperity of this town.
The town is still desolate, with broken walls, yellow sand dirt roads, and empty and dark buildings, as if telling its endless mysterious past to the vast desert.
Perhaps in a few years, this dilapidated town will eventually be unknown, or crushed into endless dust by the rolling wheels of the times until it disappears. But this land will tell us that whether it is the bustle of the pre-20th century or the ruins and loneliness of the 21st century, it will always be inscribed on the rings of Chinese history.
The cold lake oilfield base of the "empty city of ten thousand people"
Cold Lake was originally no man's land. In 1954, the geological team entered the Qaidam Basin for exploration, and the following year, the geological team found a freshwater lake in the northern edge of the Qaidam Basin, the lake was very cold, so it was called the location of the cold lake, and at the same time, the oil structure was found around the cold lake, and since then the cold lake has embarked on the historical stage of oil exploitation.
At that time, the town was often windy and sandy, there were no tiles, and there was no saline land under the feet, except for the construction team, not even insects. Usually, the workers live separately in the old base, water source, oil well, the town is prosperous when there are more than 100,000 people, these oil people with their families and mouths, dedicate their lives to the frontier of the motherland.
In the early 1990s, with the depletion of petroleum resources, the Cold Lake oil field fell into a trough of development, and the oil town that once had tens of thousands of people gradually became a ruin, and the oil people who had made important contributions to the development of Qinghai and the oil industry in the Cold Lake area were now empty.
salute
Before the decline of a city, it was the most prosperous time in history, which recorded the rise and fall of the Cold Lake oil field and the struggle and struggle of the older generation of oil people. The oil people have taken root and grown up here, suffered too much, and contained too much bitterness.
The experience of hard struggle has made the oil people strengthen their will. Bad weather, oil people are still rooted in this vast Gobi, survived countless years, for what? For the sake of public interest, for the revitalization of petrochemical industry, for the foundation of the future of the nation, and for the great rejuvenation dream of the motherland, they are willing to sprinkle their blood on the mountains and rivers of the motherland.
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