Why is there an underground city beneath Beijing?

The Beijing underground city may sound like the stuff of legends, but it's a real place built to escape Soviets. Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the fact and fiction surrounding the city underneath Beijing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson, joined today by Josh Clark is
looking rather toned and selly of chlorine from his trip

(00:21):
to the Beijing Olympics, where he competed and came away
with a what what color medal did they give to
someone who comes in last? Green? Yeah, something like that.
Although I did, I couldn't catch up to Michael Phelps
if I tried. Um, that kid is just built to swim,
long arms, long legs, short shrunk, winning smile. Although I

(00:43):
will say my my claim to fame, aside from my
green metal um, is that I took one of his
toes in my mouth accidentally. I was in the lane
next to him, so there you go. I'm planning on
cloning him. You know. I did a swab immediately afterwards,
so we're cool. But um, you know, while I was there,
I had found out I hadn't seen it. I just heard,

(01:06):
you know, rumor that um that there were some sights
to see that that the rest of the people who
were above ground and Beijing we're going to miss, and
that that was there is an underground city somewhere below Beijing.
So I'm looking all over the place trying to find this,
you know, I'm I'm looking under garbage cans for you know, manholes,

(01:26):
that kind of thing, and I couldn't find it. Um.
So you, in your all knowing wisdom, you're you're quite omniscient.
I was wondering if you might be able to tell
me if that's fact or fiction, since I couldn't find
any you know, definitive evidence myself. It's fact. So I
missed the underground city. It is that? Really? Sorry you did.

(01:47):
I was actually kind of hoping that they might route
the marathon ors through there. It's about eighteen miles UM total,
and I thought, maybe, you know, just just passed through
just so we can see. It's sort of a nice
break from the heat of the street. You knew that
the underground city was there, and you knew what I
was going to Beijing. He didn't tell me to go
to the underground city. Just one more way I manipulate

(02:07):
your life. Well, yeah, it's not enough being your editor.
I have to control your vacation too, So tell me
why why is there a city beneath Beijing? If you
really want to know. This story begins in the seventeenth
century with the Romanovs and the Ming dynasty, and this
was essentially the start of a centuries a long border

(02:29):
skirmish between China and Russia. Yeah, they have a lot
of border, Yeah they do. I was amazed when I
was there. It's really long. Yeah. And there are plenty
of other countries in the world to share borders that
managed to get along pretty well, like the USA in
Canada or the USA in Mexico. Yep. Anyway, China and
Russia not so much. It was always, you know, a

(02:52):
power struggle for for borders and different out partils of land,
and everyone wanted part of the others back and forth. Well. Fine,
only when communism began to sweep across Eastern Europe everything
came to peace. Right, Well you would think so, But
again still that was not the case with China and
the Soviet Union. It's pretty surprising. I would think they'd

(03:12):
be like, hey, I'm communist, your communist. Let's have a
picnic along the border or something like that, you would hope.
But now, and as we know, the Cold War lost
in and as far as the US and the Soviet
Union went, there were no really physically violent skirmishes. It
was a war of threats. We've talked about the Cold

(03:33):
War before, one of our proxy wars. Both sides fought
each other using other nation's armies, which is kind of
screwed up. But yeah, well, China and the uss are
actually came to physical blows and it was pretty serious.
And one of the first times it happened, the Chinese
attacked a boatload of Soviet soldiers and I feel like

(03:55):
a literal boatload or just oh no, no, I'm sorry,
a literal boatload, literal boatload, and about twenty four of
them died. But then the Soviets retaliated and they were
a little bit more how shall I say this delicately
um ardent with their mission, and about eight hundred Chinese died.

(04:16):
That's like the Chicago way. Somebody brings a knife, you
bring a gun. They put one of yours in the hospital,
You put one of theirs in the morgue. See the
Soviets got that, apparently they did. They did, okay, so
people and only about sixty Soviets died. And it was
at this point that Chairman Mel said, now you know
what enough is enough? We need to be prepared because

(04:38):
by then the Soviets were using aircraft strikes and the
Chinese were afraid that missiles might come next or an
all out invasion over the Chinese borders. So he devised
a plan for his country just in case of an attack,
and about I think four to sixty, we're supposed to
just run towards really remote mountainous regions, run to the

(04:59):
hi run to the hills quite literally. Yeah, you guys,
run to the hills. But then China's population just kept
growing and growing and growing that he had to accommodate
the rest. So he decided to build the aforementioned underground city.
So it was like an air raid shelter, yeah, pretty much,
only it was a really glorified air raide shelter. It

(05:21):
was complete with a movie theater and a roller skating
rink and a barber shop, and it was enforced with
things like places to dig wells, places to grow crops
that didn't need sunlight. I heard that you could grow
mushrooms down there. Yeah, And they were little schoolrooms and
beds and separate little living quarters for everyone. It was

(05:42):
really like China, just below ground, and the point being
that people could live down here for up to four
months if stuff on land got too tough. How many
people could hold I think it could hold around. Yeah,
that's a lot of people. There's a lot of people.
And the best part is that, you know, China has
always been a nation who prizes working together accomplishing a goal,

(06:07):
you know, with everyone's hand in the pot. And that's
how the underground city was built, men, women and children.
They dug it by hand. Well, yeah, this was during
the Cultural Revolution, I would imagine, right, you said it
was nineteen sixty nine that they started. Yeah, that was
the height of Chairman Mouth's like, let's all work together
to establish communism in China. Huh. Indeed. And you know

(06:29):
it's funny because underneath today, supposedly there's still pictures of
Chairman Mauth, you know, propaganda posters hanging up, and not
a whole lot has changed. And so you could have
gone underneath to see the city, and you would have
entered through a very secretive portal. One of the reasons

(06:49):
I understand that I couldn't find it was that I
didn't know it did actually exist. But supposedly there were
secret entrances throughout the city, and I couldn't find one.
And although I did hear that there was this wall
in the shop and inflorescent like marker something like that,
there was a map of this underground city and you

(07:11):
had to maybe like hold the black light up to
it or something to see it, which I think is
super cool. Is that right? That's true? And so it
was a secret map so that only the Chinese would
know how to find the underground sitting. If the Soviets
came in, they would be completely unawares not there. It
just looked like the city was deserted. Wow, that's really cool.
But even with the eighteen miles of all these underground

(07:32):
tunnels and all the area and all the facilities and
all the resource resources not being used, um, most of
it's closed off today. And with the Olympics coming through
in Beijing, when they were trying to spruce up the
city and get things looking shining and new for all
the visitors, they inadvertently or maybe purposefully, I don't know,
they tore down some of the old sites where these

(07:53):
secret interests were. So now there's even fewer spaces where
you can get underneath. That's well, that definitely explains why
I couldn't find my way down to this underground city.
That and if you're looking for a Chinese tour guide,
because no Chinese are allowed down there, I don't know.
That's really weird mystery. Yeah. Well, I hope that they
hold the Olympics in Beijing again for years from now

(08:15):
because I plan on going back. I'm gonna go for
the yellow this time, not the gold, the yellow um
which is better than green. But if it is there,
I'm going to go to the underground city, which does exist.
It's fact, right, it's fact. It's fact. And I'll tell
you one more fact. During the Olympics and all the
clamoring and excitement as people got ready, thousands of children

(08:36):
were named after the Olympics, some actually after the Olympics. Well,
some of them were actually named Olympics than others were
named after the Olympic mascots. Yeah, that's that's Olympic fever.
I read and I read an article on the Onion
that said, um deadly virus outbreak in China actually just

(08:56):
the Olympic fever. Oh no. I read when an NPI
word sort of guy who'd gotten his whole face tattooed
with Olympic memorabile. Yeah, you know, that's just something you
regret by what September, Well, he said that he didn't
regret it. He wanted to remember it forever, and I
think he will agree. Yeah. Well, if you want to
learn even more about Underground Beijing, you could read why

(09:17):
is there an Underground city Beneath Beijing on how staff
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