![]() ![]() And if you know anything about photo interpretation, you know the tulou story is ridiculous. Because today, unlike 20 years ago, I spend a lot of my time interpreting satellite images. ![]() This vignette came back to me after Eveleth found those silos. Another local, who was a big advocate for preserving the heritage of the area, pointed out that the story was an “unproven rumor and should not be hyped in tourism promotion.” The local official denied telling the story, while the father and daughter admitted that it was a completely fictional account. A Japanese architect read the article and was impressed enough that he wanted to come visit Fujian and see them for himself-but it took two or three years to get the visit cleared.Ī different local scholar tracked down the authors of the original story, a father and his daughter who was in college at the time, as well as the local official to whom the story was attributed. One Chinese scholar pointed out a pretty obvious flaw: “in the 1980s, coastal cities had just implemented an opening-up policy, and the unopened mountainous villages did not allow foreigners to inspect at will.” He had published an academic article in an international architecture journal on those very same roundhouses in 1984. But even back in the mid-2000s, it was pretty clear to a lot of Chinese that the roundhouse story was ridiculous. Local officials went along with it because it was good for tourism-and because it fit a national narrative of paranoid Americans misinterpreting a peaceful China. The story was made up in a 1999 online Chinese magazine and went viral in China at about the same time I started traveling there. ![]() The first time I heard this story, I almost kind of believed it. ( Hint, hint.) You can find this story in guidebooks like Lonely Planet or Rough Guide from the period, and it gets reprinted from time to time in state media like Beijing Review. government had to dispatch a team to the area to investigate, only to realize their mistake but fall in love with the beauty of the place. Ultimately-and this is how the locals claim they found out about it-the U.S. intelligence analysts saw those circles in satellite images for the first time in the 1980s, they mistook them for missile silos. The Hakka there traditionally lived in communal roundhouses called tulou, and a lot of guidebooks told the same story about those houses, trying to lure the reader to take a long bus ride to a tourist site and cough up 50 yuan for entrance.įrom the air, those roundhouses look like giant circles. If you happen to have flipped through a guidebook to China back then, you might well have come across an interesting story about an ethnic Hakka community in the province of Fujian. I started traveling to China in the early 2000s. After all, China is thought to have just about 100 nuclear weapons that can reach the United States-that’s up from just 18 when I was a graduate student two decades ago. ![]() Two hundred or 300 silos is, potentially, a pretty big development. “If you enjoy looking at commercial satellite imagery or stuff in China, can I suggest you keep looking?” (Another group has now found a third site that they describe as early construction for a third field of silos, although it is in a very early stage of construction and differs in some respects from the first two sites, which are extremely similar.) “I usually have to pay someone to do that,” the commander of U.S. Both of us expected he would find something, but the sheer number was a jolt.Ī week or so after Eveleth shared his findings, another researcher named Matt Korda reported finding a second field large enough to eventually accommodate another 100 or more silos. I had spent the previous summer working with Eveleth on mapping China’s nuclear forces for a project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and had encouraged him to take a second look. This summer, my former colleague Decker Eveleth discovered that China was constructing more than 100 missile silos in the country’s remote interior. ![]()
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