Chenguang 1865 Science and Technology Creative Industry Park 晨光1865科技创意产业园

Welcome, everyone, to Nanjing 1865 Creative Industry Park! Today I'll be taking you through the park in the following order: Old Main Gate → Jinling Arsenal Exhibition Hall (Main Machine Shop) → Qing-Dynasty Workshop Complex (Right and Left Machine Shops) → Copper Smelting and Rolling Shop → Timber Workshop Building and Heavy Machine Shop → Republican-Period Office Building and Sawtooth-Roof Workshop → Anti-War Sculpture → Buddha's Hand Bronze → Central Square. Together we'll explore a living industrial heritage museum that stretches across a hundred and sixty years.

Let me start with a quick overview of the 1865 park. The park traces its origins to the Jinling Arsenal, established in 1865 by Li Hongzhang — one of China's earliest modern munitions factories, and one of the "four great defense enterprises of the late Qing dynasty" alongside the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai, the Fuzhou Shipyard, and the Tianjin Machinery Bureau. What does 1865 actually mean in context? It was the fourth year of the Tongzhi Emperor's reign — the Taiping Rebellion had just collapsed, the Opium Wars were more than twenty years in the past, and China had been battered to the bone. Li Hongzhang reached a simple conclusion: without making your own guns and cannons, you will always be beaten. So he relocated the Suzhou Foreign Ordnance Bureau to Nanjing and built this factory on the banks of the Qinhuai River, just outside Zhonghua Gate.

From that point on, this place never stopped. The Qing dynasty brought rifles and artillery. The Republic brought machine guns and mortars. During the War of Resistance Against Japan the factory relocated to Chongqing and became the backbone of the nation's munitions supply. After Liberation it pivoted to aerospace. In the 1980s it began casting monumental bronze Buddhist statues. In 2007 it reinvented itself as a science and creative industry park. One factory: a hundred years of weapons, half a century of rockets, some of the largest bronze Buddhas in the world — and now a building full of designers and engineers. There is nowhere else on earth with a story quite like this.

Now, look at the Old Main Gate in front of you. The stone lintel above the entrance bears the carved characters for "Jinling Zhizao Ju" — Jinling Manufacturing Bureau. And notice the bronze sculpture out front: two workers leaning into a rail cart loaded with artillery shells, pushing it along the track. That was an ordinary morning at the arsenal more than a hundred years ago. Li Hongzhang set the rule: the steam whistle signals the start of the shift; the steam whistle signals the end. A rule we take completely for granted today — but at the time it was nothing short of revolutionary. The clerks in the offices next door were still turning up at the hour of the hare, following a thousand-year-old bureaucratic custom. That whistle was the first signal of China's crossing from an agrarian civilization into an industrial one. Now let's walk through the Old Main Gate and into the workshops where the machinery ran without pause for a century and a half.

The two-story grey-brick building in front of you is the Main Machine Shop — built in 1866, which makes it exactly 160 years old and the oldest surviving industrial building in Nanjing. Look closely at the roof: a gabled form with triangular trusses — standard construction for a 19th-century British factory. Li Hongzhang hired a British superintendent named Halliday Macartney, imported equipment from Europe, and built the workshops along British lines. Which means that standing here, you are effectively looking at the British Industrial Revolution, transplanted to Nanjing a hundred and sixty years ago.

The building now houses the Jinling Arsenal Exhibition Hall. Let's step inside. First, look at this bronze cannon — made in the 1870s, with a bore of 92 millimeters, cast in solid copper. Shine a torch down the barrel and the rifling grooves are still perfectly clear. Cannons like this one were used to equip the Huai Army and the Xiang Army of the late Qing dynasty. The smaller cannon beside it is even more remarkable — China's first wheeled Krusen-type breech-loading cannon, made in 1888, with a bore of 37 millimeters. With older artillery, every shot required men to physically push the gun back into position and re-aim from scratch. This "recoil-mounted" design had a hydraulic mechanism that returned it automatically after firing. By today's standards that's unremarkable; in 1888, it was the equivalent of upgrading from an abacus to a calculator.

Moving deeper into the hall, look at the photographs on the wall — the aftermath of Japanese air raids in 1937. Japanese aircraft bombed the Jinling Arsenal repeatedly. Working under fire, the factory workers spent 16 days dismantling and crating 4,300 tons of equipment, then shipped it upriver to Chongqing. People died along the way. Once rebuilt in Chongqing, the factory was redesignated the 21st Arsenal, and during the war it produced 18,000 Maxim heavy machine guns and 7,660 mortars — 60 percent of the entire country's munitions output from a single factory. Put it this way: six out of every ten machine guns in the hands of frontline soldiers came from here. That is what "the lifeblood of the arsenal" actually means.

Before you leave, look at the far end of the display cases — artifacts and photographs documenting Chenguang Factory's contributions to the Two Bombs, One Satellite program after Liberation. From a late-Qing bronze cannon to a Cold War rocket: this one room holds the complete arc of China's transformation from a nation at the mercy of others to one that stood up. Let's go and see the rest of the Qing-dynasty workshops.

Coming out of the exhibition hall, the two buildings flanking it — nearly identical to the Main Shop — are the Right Machine Shop and the Left Machine Shop. The Right Shop was built in 1873; the Left Shop in 1879. The three workshops stand shoulder to shoulder in what was known as a "separate-workshop, interconnected" layout — by this point the Jinling Arsenal was already a large, integrated weapons complex, with guns, cannons, ammunition, and gunpowder each assigned to their own production areas, all linked by a network of internal rail tracks. Look at the iron rail grooves still embedded in the ground — that is where the carts loaded with parts shuttled between workshops all day long.

The Right Shop is now home to a creative design company; the Left Shop is a cultural exhibition space. Let's step into the Left Shop. Look at the corner of the room — you can still see the original iron furnace base and sand-casting pit. Sand casting is a foundry technique: molten copper or iron is poured into a sand mold; once cooled, the sand shell is broken away and the part takes shape. The barrels of Maxim machine guns were cast right here, in this spot, a hundred years ago. Now look at the mortars on display along the wall — 82-millimeter bore, the model successfully prototype-tested in 1944, with production batch numbers still scratched into the barrel by the workers who made them. One detail worth noticing: the wall around those cannon barrels has discolored slightly over the decades — a subtle temperature stain left by the heat of industrial production. The building still carries the physical memory of what happened inside it.

Walking ahead, the red-brick building you see now is the most photogenic structure in the entire park: the Copper Smelting and Rolling Shop, built in 1881. Stop here for a moment and really look at this wall: the semicircular arched windows, the ornamental brick voussoirs, the depth of color in the exposed red brick — this beauty was never the point. Every design decision was driven by function. Semicircular arches let in the maximum amount of natural light while the arched form is more resistant to vibration than a rectangular opening — and remember, inside this building there were copper-smelting furnaces running constantly, generating intense heat, vibration, and dust. Every choice was made in service of one principle: durability. And yet, a hundred and forty years later, those purely functional decisions have become the most beautiful part of the building.

Now look up at the roof — a grey-tile hipped roof with a raised ventilation ridge running along the ridge line. When the copper smelting was at full blast, the workshop floor was like a steam room; without those vents, no one could have worked inside. One more detail: the grey tiles are not modern replacements. During the 2007 renovation, replacement tiles were custom-fired to match the specifications of the original Qing-dynasty kilns — the principle of "restoring the old to look old" was applied right down to the roof tiles. If you want the best photograph, position yourself on the diagonal from the west-facing arched windows. In the afternoon light, around two or three o'clock, the sun cuts through the arches and falls on the floor in layered shadows. That is the most rewarding shot in the park.

Continuing on, we come to two Qing-dynasty workshops that look quite different from each other. The one on the left combines a square pyramidal roof on its eastern wing with a hipped roof on the western wing — this is the Timber Workshop Building, built in 1886, purpose-built for crafting the wooden components of weapons: gunstocks, gun carriages, artillery frames. You might wonder why an arsenal needed a dedicated woodworking shop. In that era, the gunstock of a heavy machine gun and the wheels and frame of a gun carriage were all made from hardwood. A fine piece of walnut would come in here, and the carpenters would shape it by hand, cut by cut, before it was joined to the gun barrel produced in the next workshop. Never underestimate the wood: every single rifle was half timber.

The large building on the right is the Heavy Machine Shop — also built in 1886 and the biggest Qing-dynasty workshop in the park. Stand at the entrance and feel the scale: 47 meters long, 16 meters wide, 9 meters to the eaves, all built without a crane, brick by brick, by hand. Look at the massive corner stones at each of the four corners — over a meter tall. They are not merely decorative. The arsenal was a military target; these walls had to be able to absorb the impact of artillery shrapnel.

Now let's go inside and look at the structure. Look up: an 18-meter-span gabled timber roof frame bearing down on brick walls nearly a meter thick. The truss joints are connected with metal hardware and iron tension rods — the most advanced timber structural technology in Chinese industrial construction of the late 19th century. And try the floor underfoot — planks 30 centimeters wide and 8 centimeters thick, solid timber, 160 years old and still perfectly fitted together. What used to roll across these boards was not visitors' feet but iron-wheeled carts loaded with artillery shells and machine tools. A hundred and more years of that punishment, and not a board has failed. This is what Li Hongzhang meant when he specified that his factories be built "in the Western manner."

Leaving the Qing-dynasty workshop area, we move into the Republican-era buildings. The two-story plastered building in front of you is the Office Building, built in 1934. Please step lightly on the wooden staircase — it is over ninety years old, and every creak is a genuine echo of time.

Who is the central figure behind this building? Li Chenggan — appointed director of the Jinling Arsenal in 1928, trained in Japan, a man who understood both engineering and management. When he took over, he did something fundamental: he transformed the factory's entire production model from skilled handcraft to standardized assembly-line manufacturing. Before his reforms, making a machine gun meant having a master craftsman hammer each part to fit by eye — one gun's components might not swap with another's. After Li Chenggan introduced standardized drawings, every part was interchangeable. That is basic practice today, but in 1934 it was the difference between a workshop and a real factory. During his tenure he added more than 50,000 square meters of new workshops, and this office building was his command center.

Now look out the window across the way — that building with the serrated roofline is the finest architectural achievement of the Li Chenggan era: the Sawtooth-Roof Workshop, built in 1936. Why a sawtooth roof? Each "tooth" has a tall vertical face fitted with a full-length glass skylight. Daylight enters through the north-facing glass and distributes evenly across the workshop floor, without casting direct sun onto precision machined surfaces where shadows would interfere with the work. This design was standard practice in early-20th-century European precision manufacturing, and Li Chenggan brought it to Nanjing. Inside this workshop today, robots from the Jinling Smart Manufacturing Research Institute roll slowly along tracks that were once worn smooth by machine tools — some of these robots have been used in quality-control inspection for the C919 commercial aircraft. From Maxim machine guns to intelligent inspection robots: the same building has witnessed the leap from tools that extend human hands to tools that extend the human mind. That is what makes 1865 so compelling — it is not a sealed museum. It is alive.

Coming out of the Sawtooth-Roof Workshop, let's walk to the northwest corner of the park. The sculpture in front of you — look carefully — is a pistol with its barrel tied in a knot. You may recognize the image: there is a sculpture with the same form in the garden of the United Nations headquarters in New York, donated by Luxembourg in 1988. But this one carries its own meaning. Read the inscription on the base: "War to end war, weapons to silence weapons — the sword of righteousness exists to defend peace."

These are lyrics from the Jinling Arsenal's factory anthem. The lyricist was Guo Moruo; the composer was He Lvting — two towering figures in the history of modern Chinese literature and music. The song was written in the middle of the War of Resistance Against Japan: frontline soldiers were fighting the invasion with guns and artillery made at the Jinling Arsenal, while behind the lines the factory workers kept producing in the rubble of bombed workshops, singing "the sword of righteousness exists to defend peace" even as they worked. What kind of spirit does that take?

On this single patch of ground: cast cannons, then cast Buddhas, then erect an anti-war sculpture — three complete reversals of value: making weapons, then casting devotion, then standing against war itself. I'd like to ask everyone to pause here for a moment — not to draw large conclusions, but to make one simple connection. The Maxim machine gun you saw in the exhibition hall, and the knotted pistol in front of you now, are both products of the same factory — one the product, the other the reckoning. A single institution can choose to become something entirely different in a different era. That capacity for self-renewal is one of the most precious things human civilization has ever produced.

Walking west along Yanghu Lane, you will come to a massive bronze hand rising from the ground: the Buddha's Hand Bronze. This is not a standalone artwork. It is a casting-trial twin of the Tian Tan Buddha in Hong Kong, produced in 1989 using the same materials and the same techniques as a test piece before the full statue was cast.

Why would a century-old weapons factory take on a commission to cast a Buddha? The answer involves a rather unexpected historical turn. In the 1980s, the Chenguang Machinery Factory was under pressure to shift from military to civilian production. The factory had accumulated over a hundred years of precision casting expertise — expertise that was just as well suited to producing large-scale bronze art as it was to producing artillery shells. So they accepted the commission for the Tian Tan Buddha: 34 meters tall, 250 tons, facing the open sea — still the world's tallest outdoor bronze seated Buddha.

And it did not stop there. They went on to cast the 88-meter Lingshan Grand Buddha in Wuxi and the 108-meter Nanshan Guanyin statue in Sanya, Hainan — the largest bronze Buddhist statues in China, all from the same foundry. Li Hongzhang built this factory to "strengthen national power and forge superior weapons." Who could have imagined that a hundred years later, the same workers using the same techniques would pour molten bronze not into artillery shells but into the form of Guanyin? From casting cannons to casting Buddhas — that is 1865's deepest metaphor: technology is a neutral force. What it becomes depends entirely on whose hands hold it and in what era.

Look closely at the Buddha's Hand — the texture of each finger, the curve of the nails, the faint suggestion of tendons beneath the bronze skin. Every detail is the result of lost-wax precision casting. Go ahead and touch the fingertip. What you feel is not just the temperature of bronze — it is an ancient craft that traveled from an arsenal, through a century of transformation, from destruction to creation.

That brings our tour of 1865 Creative Industry Park to a close. From the Old Main Gate to the Central Square, we have followed the timeline from the Qing dynasty through the Republican era and into the present day — walking the full arc of a single factory's one hundred and sixty years of life.

I'll leave you with one number worth thinking about. Within this 50,000-square-meter park: 9 Qing-dynasty buildings, 23 Republican-era buildings, and more than 20 contemporary structures. Every single one of them is still in use. Not one has been abandoned. There is probably no other place in China where you can, in a single day, walk through a 19th-century British-style industrial workshop, a 1930s sawtooth-roofed machine shop, and a room where designers are sitting at their computers right now, drawing plans for 2026. This is not a preserved ruin. This is history that is still breathing.

One suggestion as you leave: if you have time, head out through the Yanghu Lane exit to Yingtian Avenue and walk east for about 800 meters to the Bao'en Temple Ruins Park. From the top of the Glazed Pagoda you can look down over the entire 1865 park and the Qinhuai River in one sweeping view. The layers of history hit differently from up there.

Thank you for joining me today. Enjoy the rest of your time in Nanjing!