Stuff You Should Know - Living Underground in Beijing

Episode Date: October 20, 2016

Chairman Mao’s paranoia of a Soviet invasion led to hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents put to work for a decade building an 85-square-km underground city to serve as a massive bomb shelter. Instead it’s illegal underground housing today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry, so it's Stuff You Should Know.

Gong, the Chinese edition. Right, which probably isn't even heard in China. Aren't we banned? Yeah, we say that, and then we always hear from people like, no, you're not banned, I get to hear you guys all the time. The government actually promotes you for being such communist lackeys. They're like, they send a guy to my house

to read your transcripts. Right, at gunpoint. Yeah, this is the China edition, and you wrote this too, didn't you? Yup. Is this an old one? Yup. You just dug it out from the old memory banks. Yeah, it was on the list.

I think I just ran across it randomly, and I was like, oh yeah, this one. Pretty interesting, I think. Yeah, I think so, too. So, one of the things that interested me was I got to do some historical research on it, initially. Are you familiar with the Sino-Russian conflicts along the border, starting in the mid 17th century,

the Romanov-Zars versus the Manchu and later Ming dynasties? I'm more familiar now than I ever have been before in my life. Yeah. Let's put it that way. But it did surprise me, I just kind of thought, I don't know, I didn't know much about.

Commie heart, commie, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's what I would have thought, too. Yeah. And apparently I did at some point, but once I started researching, turns out those guys didn't like each other so much, and it actually did go back to the 1600s, for sure,

where China apparently didn't trade outside of China and didn't have any diplomats. The emperor controlled all trade with other countries, and it was through a system of tribute, where you give the emperor the best stuff you got, he'll see what he wants to give you back. And the Russians didn't like that very much. So they just kind of were a little more tense,

a little more tense, not the best of neighbors. But then, yeah, after World War II, when Russia starts taking over Eurasia, and China follows suit, right, thank you. And then China follows suit in 1949 with Mao Zedong's Communist Revolution. Then, yeah, basically this whole area was red, and that's how we were taught to view it, right?

Yeah. It's all red, so it's all the same, but that's very much an oversimplification of the geopolitics of that area. Yeah, like you said, commie, heart, commie, that's kind of what I always thought was that they were neighbors, they were politically aligned in the broadest sense,

so what issues would they have? Right. But as usual... It's like Nancy Reagan said, kill all the commies like God sort them out. Do you remember that, PSA? I do. Saturday morning cartoons?

As usual, the beef is in the land, and neighbors oftentimes, whether it's Georgia and Tennessee fighting over a river, it's water, or it's Israel and Palestine, there are a lot of neighbors that say, no, that stuff is ours, not yours. And that seems like to be the heart of the beef between China and Russia. So I think that the border disputes were actually a symptom

of a larger thing. Which was? Which was, so Mao, Chairman Mao, used to publicly deride the Soviets as revisionists that they'd abandoned the roots of revolutionary communism, and it were basically sellouts. Interesting. Yeah, and he used to publicly say this stuff about them,

and the Russians would be like, we're sick of you, Mao, you talk too much trash, shut up. And he would talk more trash, like he criticized Khrushchev for backing down from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Stuff like that, right? It's really poking them a lot. And the Soviets, in retaliation, withdrew all military and economic support.

And then they recalled all of the scientists that were over there working on joint projects, and the scientists all left with the blueprints to whatever they were working on, even if it was Chinese technology. So there was a lot of tensions, and it seemed to erupt in the border disputes, rather than it was over the border disputes.

You know what I mean? Sure. So when we say erupt, we mean erupt with gunfire. Yeah, for real. And then the spring of 1969, some bad stuff went down, and March specifically, there was an attack on a patrol boat, what was the name of the river? The Ussuri River?

That's on the eastern border of China, of course. And 24 Soviets were left dead, and stuff got real after that. Yeah, the Soviets were like, oh, okay, it's like that? Yeah. So they rolled into the area with tanks. They used missiles, aircraft, and took out like 800 Chinese in retaliation that same year.

Yes, only losing about 60 of their own, which was a big victory. And so they said, you see that? There's more where that came from if you don't mind your peas and queues. Yeah, and they were saying this too, using the New York Times as this international mouthpiece, basically threatening one another

through the international press. Yeah, China said, what are peas and queues? We don't have those letters. Right, well, they have queues and peas. Well, it was just a joke. I got ya. So Mao Zedong says, I understand that you're coming after us now.

I think we should have a plan in place because I don't want you creeping into, let's say Beijing, our capital, with all your tanks, like you did along the river there. So here's what we'll do. 60% of the population go red dawn and head for the hills. The other 40%, here's what we'll do. Let's all get to work building an underground bunker,

but one that can house 40% of our 7 million. Yeah. Which is, they didn't quite hit that number. Was that about 2.8 million? Something like that. They made enough for 300,000 people. Was not even close. But it's still a pretty neat accomplishment

that they created, right? Yeah, and this is what would become known as, do you know how to pronounce it? Exactly, like it's spelled. I looked it up. Oh really? So go ahead. Dixie Cheng.

Okay. I thought that was Chinese for Dixie Chicks. I thought it would have been Dixie Cheng or something, but yeah. I thought so too. That's why I was like, I'm not getting this one wrong. Okay. I even looked it up and I couldn't find it.

I found, I don't remember the site, but there's a site where, I guess, users submit and say what language they speak naturally. Yeah, yeah. So then it'll have like this whole list of like, you know, Spanish from Catalonia or like Spanish spoken by Mexican person or Scandinavian or whatever.

Right. But if you listen to all of them, they're all saying it the same way. Yeah. Dixie Cheng. It's funny. Some people say Shang, but it's wrong. In the office here, I know people think

we probably never look up pronunciations, but we do. And YouTube has a lot of them now, you know, where they will, that little thing will spin and reveal the word and then the polite lady, computer lady will say it. But I hear in the office a lot because it's not worth it to get out the headphones

for just that. So like I'll hear Strickland to the left or Holly over there to the right or me and you'll just hear random computers all day long with like Dixie Cheng or Menarche. Menarche. And you just hear words kind of popping up and everyone's like, sorry, sorry.

Yeah. But I think we all get it. Yeah. All right, so Dixie Cheng. And I mean, we should say, we'll get to the meat of this stuff. But an underground bunker capable of housing, 300,000 of Beijing's residence was built

because Chairman Mao got paranoid that the Soviets were gonna invade. Also to a lesser extent, he was worried about American imperialism extending to China. But really he was worried the Soviets were going to either invade or launch some nukes on his people. It was like my dad when we saw the day after.

Exactly. Except he just put my brother and I to work. Whereas the chairman put, I think it was 300,000 people. I found that somewhere. 300,000 was how many people it could house. No, I thought I saw it was 300,000 working. Maybe it was more than that even. No, I see what you're talking about.

There's 300,000 right there. But women, children, men, all kinds of people digging by hand. Yeah, we found this really cool blog post from like 2010 by a guy named Anthony Tao or Dao, depending on, I guess how you say it. And he said that, well, it was basically like an urban exploration post.

There's a lot of pictures of this abandoned stuff. It's really cool. But it turns out his relatives, including his mother, helped build this. So he includes some of their recollections in it where they're like, yeah, we used to go to school and then you'd come home from school and you'd work like several hours building this,

like making bricks or digging or something like that. And so this excavation was being carried out by the very people who were going to use it as part of this cultural revolution, this great communist experiment that Chairman Mao was carrying out. Like everybody would just get to work because the Russians might invade.

And he said very famously, Shen Ma Dong, Cheng Ji Liang, I'm not saying this correctly, and then Bu Cheng Ba. Which means? It means dig deep tunnels, store food, and prepare for war. He told his population that

and that's what kicked off this thing in 1969. You really like to get to the point. Yeah. Yeah, 1969 to 1979 is when this was going on. And we'll take a little break here and tell you a little bit about Dixie Cheng. Stuff you should know. You know, everybody, if you're starting your own business,

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Use our offer code WORTS for 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace, make it professional, make it beautiful. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. I think it sounds like I'm saying Cheng with an A, but it's Cheng. Cheng.

With an E. I'm just not good at, as a southerner, I'm not good at pronouncing the E in words like pen, I say pen. Pen. Like P-I-N. Cheng. It's a P-E-N.

Cheng. Yeah, we got it. All right, so this- You say Dixia, I'll say Cheng. You say Dixia, I'll say Cheng. Dixia. Cheng. Terrible.

So what lies underground, beneath about 26 to 60 feet, depending on where you are, there are 18 miles roughly of tunnels. Supposedly it connects every district in the city. Yeah, and for those of us who don't live in the U.S. or Liberia, that's 30 kilometers of basically underground living space.

52 square miles, 85 kilometers squared. And it was, it's called an undertaking was an understatement. It was a big deal. Right. Requiring lots of hands. Yeah, so they used a lot of the old city gates, the city walls as construction material.

But again, they were also making their own bricks and they weren't using like back hose or anything like that. They were using shovels and removing dirt with bamboo baskets and making their own bricks on site. Amazing. And they constructed this just amazing labyrinth of not just tunnels,

but also they had bomb shelters in the bomb shelter. Yeah. They had ventilation shafts that were designed to keep out fallout and contamination from nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons. I guess they built the Great Wall. They were like, pfft. Yeah, this is nothing.

Exactly. They had recreational stuff too, like a movie theater, I think a roller skating rink, basketball courts. Yeah, they had a barber shop, they had restaurants. They had, if you wanted to get down in here, this is kind of the coolest part to me, is there were about 90 different entrances around the city that were sometimes in parks,

sometimes in a private home, sometimes in a shop that you needed a black light to read a special map on the wall. It's like kind of neat when you think about it like that. Oh yeah, it is. It's like all the residents of Beijing are clued into this big secret. Yeah.

Like this official secret. Yeah, it is like a speakeasy. Except those places, come on. Didn't that kind of, hadn't that run its course? Uh, yeah. Like they just opened one in Atlanta right here next door to us. Where?

At the city winery. Oh really, there's a speakeasy there? Yeah, now there's a speakeasy downstairs. If you know the code word, you say it at the unmarked door. What's the code word? Mike Mann, New York did this 20 years ago. What's the code word? This week?

Uh, actually wrote it down because I'm going to a show there tomorrow night. They have shows at the speakeasy? Well no, at the city winery. Oh okay. I'm going to see Blitzen Trapper, my boys. Oh really? Wow.

Yeah, they're doing like this acoustic storyteller tour. Nice. It's kind of neat. Yeah, apparently if you go there and you say you know Ms. Violet this week, they'll let you in. Oh.

So I'm gonna go down there and make fun of them. And probably get a drink. Sure. And leave a big tip. Yeah. That's what you gotta do. That's right. You're gonna go there and it's gonna be overrun

with people. I just wonder if you go to one of these places, especially in Atlanta, like I get it in New York when there's supply and demand. They can literally say no, turn around and go home. But in Atlanta I would be like, dude, come on. I don't know the password. Just let me in the freaking building.

And if they literally say no, then they're dead to me. In fact, I'm not even gonna say I know Ms. Violet. Oh yeah, you're gonna test them, huh? I'm gonna say I know Ms. Scarlett. Let me know how that pans out. You will. Ms. Scarlett. I'll send you a text of either me sitting on the sidewalk,

drink list. Drinking a 40. Yes. It's a substitute. I used to drink the occasional 40 in college back when you thought you were cool to do so. Right, because the BC boys did it. Yeah.

Oh, I'll drink this swill. And it's totally hot after about the first like 10 minutes. Well, you have to hold it up around the neck. Oh, is that the deal? Sure. It's champagne. I was, I'd never got to the bottom cause I was pouring some out for my homies.

Oh, well, that's pretty thoughtful of you. So where were we? Speak easy. That's right. Nope, even further back than that. Well, yeah, the complex, and by the way, Dixie Chang literally means underground city. Yeah, like that's it.

You don't even capitalize it. Yeah, it was never used because the big apocalypse never happened. Well, not only that, Chairman Mao died. And apparently, I didn't know this, but shortly after he died, I think in the 70s, his cultural revolution seems to have died with him, which was news to me because I thought

that China was communist to the core up until a couple of years ago. But apparently there was a real opening of their culture, starting pretty much, and slowly and incrementally, right after Chairman Mao's death. And so I saw a bunch of different stuff. This is part of the problem with researching China without ever going to China.

Because the dispatches you read from the place are, they just vary wildly in the accounts. And this is a good example that I saw somewhere that they, so Chairman Mao died in 1976. I saw that by 1981, they had the place open for tours. Right. And it cost like 10 Chinese cents a ticket. And if you were Chinese, you could not even get in.

It was only for tourists. Right. I saw in my own article that they boarded up and forgot about it, and it wasn't until 2000 that people started to find their way in. I had the same problem. I was trying to find out like literally the current state because I saw that in 2008,

in preparation for the Olympics, they closed it for renovations and it's still not open. And I tried to find out the most recent information I couldn't. So I'm going with not even myself. I'm not even going with my own article. The article where they recounted that it was 10 Chinese cents a ticket to get in back in 1981.

I'm thinking that's probably right. So you're going with that because it has numbers in it. Right. It seems legitimate. All right. Well, let's take our final break here and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the rat tribe of Beijing.

Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Pay Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

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Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. So Chuck, one of the first things that happened, whether it was in 1981 or 2000, was people started to move into this area illegally. And at first, I get the impression that they opened up businesses. And there was actually like an official stretch, like about a one kilometer stretch of Dixie Chang

that was open for tours. Like Underground Atlanta? Yes. But then the other like 29 kilometers were closed off permanently and frozen in time, right? Yeah. Well, that kind of stuff attracts people like moths to a flame, especially like urban explorers.

And again, go check out Anthony Tao's post last visit to Beijing's Underground City. It's got some great photos of this abandoned stuff. But over the years, there are people who have worked their way into the other shut-off 29 kilometers and have reported back that it's just like eerie, a time capsule. There's like posters of Chairman Mao on the walls

with slogans like, dig the tunnels deep, accumulate grain, oppose hegemony. Yeah, I mean, you can see the pictures of it. It's pretty neat. Right. And creepy. And then get this, if you were, let's say like Ronald Reagan had told us all this when we were kids, for the people,

prepare for war, prepare for famine. It's kind of unsettling when they keep you on your toes. Sure. So there's a lot of it that's like just this kind of rotting time capsule. Because again, like you said, it was never used. But then plenty of it has been used. Yeah.

And that's, I couldn't even figure out for sure. These are definitely parts of that complex where people are living. Yes. OK, I didn't know if it was other bomb shelters. It's both. OK. It's both.

Gotcha. You're right. It's both. All right. So what we're talking about is the rat tribe or the shouzu. And it's basically about a million people. They don't know exact numbers, but about a million people in Beijing have moved underground.

About a million of the 21 million people who live there. Yeah, and if you talk about a population boom in 1995, there were about 9 million people in Beijing. Now there are 21 million. That's a lot of people and not a very long span of time. So it's expensive. I really don't know like median incomes compared to housing. But this article made it seem like the only reason

these people are doing it is because they can't afford to live above ground. Or that there's just such a shortage. Like your choice is this. You can live above ground in a dorm-like room with 6 to 10 people in the suburbs and pay about what you would pay for your own room below ground, which is about 50 to 70 American dollars a month.

Right. So you want to go live with 6 to 10 people in a dorm out in the suburbs? Or you want your own cozy little 8-foot-by-8-foot concrete room underground? And a lot of people are saying I'd rather be underground. Yeah. And they're normal people.

They're not. It's not like a situation like I'm trying to think it's something comparable. But this woman interviewed a lot of these people. Annette Kim from USC, Southern California. Go Trojans for a friend, Brian Bishop. Oh yeah, congratulations to Brian on the birth of his child. Yeah, that too.

So what she found out was that as she suspected, these are computer programmers and waiters and waitresses and barbers. And they are literally just mainly migrants that have come there. From the countryside to work. Right. And they're not weirdos.

They just, they're like, you know, this is what I can afford. I have a job above ground. And this is just how I choose to live, because we don't have a lot of options. So there's like the specter of Mao is still around, because apparently part of the housing code in China, or in Beijing at least, requires that if you are going to build like a building,

you have to build something between one to three stories of basement or bomb shelter below ground. That's still the thing? Yeah. So in addition to people squatting in Dixie Chang, which does happen, these people are going to the owners of the building and saying, can I please stay here?

I'll give you 70 bucks a month. Yeah, they're like, sure. And even though it's illegal, yeah, the owners are like, yeah. Just leave it under the trash can out front, and I'll come find you. Yeah, like I'm not using that tiny room. Right. Because these are small spaces.

They're communal toilets and showers. You've got to pay like $0.50 for a shower for five minutes. Is that right? Yeah, I didn't see that. Yeah, there's this photographer, Sim Chi Yin, based in Beijing, and he has a collection called China's Rat Tribe. If you want to look at pictures, and there's a stigma to it,

first of all, A, because it's illegal. They call them the rat tribe. And B, yeah, because they interviewed some of these people, and the guy was like, yeah, my dad was like, son, no, you can't live down here. And he's like, dad, this is what I can afford. I've got a job, and I don't want to live with 10 people in a room.

And there's no windows. It's dark. Apparently, there's signs in some of these tunnels that advise people to go up and get sun and stuff like that. That's thoughtful. Sure. I think one of the other reasons, too, why they're considered like the rat tribe

is in a lot of the cases, they're living beneath fairly Tony apartment buildings. So the people above ground, there's like a huge class difference in the same sprout of living space in Beijing. And the people above ground are not in contact with the people below ground, and they do not trust them.

They're weird. They're different. They're poor. They're from the country. So they don't communicate with one another. But they know they're there, so the people above ground are very suspicious of the people below ground. Yeah.

Apparently mold is a problem. Yeah. Because it's underground, it's kind of dank. So they have to work to keep mold at bay. And I don't think we mentioned that the original plan, too, with Chairman Mao was to grow things like mushrooms, like things you didn't need the sun, to grow down there. You know how fast you would get sick of eating mushrooms

if that's all you had to eat? If it was me, it would be one bite of mushroom later. Oh, you don't like mushrooms, huh? Can't do it. What if you put soy sauce and mayonnaise on it? I mean, I could choke it down, but it's a texture thing for me. Yeah. You know?

It's not even the taste. What about uncooked raw? It's almost got like a bit of a crunch to it. I'll try one. Yeah, yeah. Try like a white button mushroom. Little salt, like lick it first, put a little salt on it, take a bite.

It's not like the mushroom you're describing. It's that slimy texture. It doesn't have that. Although wash it off first. Yeah, yeah, give it a good scrub with your tongue. I'll bring you one. I'll bring you one to work. I actually have one here in my pocket.

I'm good. OK. Pocket mushrooms, no. Right. You got anything else? No, do you? No. Oh, I do have one other thing.

So there were longstanding rumors that they had built like secret tunnels in this underground bunker, the Dixie Chang, that connected to like the People's Hall and other government buildings. Yeah. And no one knew if it was real or not. Until 1989, when the Tiananmen Square uprising happened,

and all of a sudden, all these government troops come out of nowhere, flooding out of the People's Hall to quell these protesters. They're like, oh, those underground tunnels really are real. Yeah, and apparently, there's only out of the 90 original entrances, there's only a handful of those left. Yeah, because the area where this was built beneath

is called Kin Mian, I believe, or Kin Mian. And it's a very famous stretch of shops in Beijing. And it's been just recreated and rebuilt so much, especially since right before the Olympics, that a lot of these old shops are being leveled. And they're there to go the entrances to the places and the fluorescent maps. So it is in danger of being lost,

but it'll still be there for people to go find. Yeah, go check out the pictures. Pretty neat. Yeah. If you want to know more about Beijing, type that word in the search bar, howstuffworks.com. See what comes up. Press your luck.

And as I said, press your luck. It's time for Listener Mail. This was about the mining episode, so it's been a bit. But we always like good information. So here it is. I've been listening to your show for about a year now. Been blissfully enlightened on so many topics, currently pursuing my master's degree in economic geology.

Whoa. Whoa. In the unlikely state of Iowa, and I have a few friendly clarifications. On your mining episode, you mentioned hard and soft rock mining, and we're unsure of the difference between the two, whether it comes for the rock or the ore. The term soft and hard rock mining

relates to the hardness of the rock from which the ore is being extracted, not the ore itself. So that clears that up. Good. I think that's what I said. I don't remember. Actually, I think I hedged and said it could be either one. So I was right either way.

So soft rock mining typically pertains to sedimentary rock, whereas hard rock typically pertains to igneous or metamorphic rocks. Furthermore, just finish your wonderful episode on Ice Ages and giggled a little from your pronunciation of Lois. I was always told it was pronounced lus, and even though Lois is a bit more fun to say, just thought I'd let you guys know.

Keep up the amazing work. Thanks for making my ears happy. And Megan, that is exactly how you send in corrections in a very nice, friendly way, and that's how you get on the air. Right, exactly. And we love our corrections, and we tend to favor the ones that are hospitable.

Sure. Because it's just nice and light. Thanks, Megan. Thank you for the demonstration, top notch. If you want to get in touch with us too and possibly get complimented by Chuck, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast or Josh Clark. You can hang out with us on Facebook

at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to StuffPodcast at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.