Dubbed ‘Tin City’ 锡城, Gejiu is a large mining town with the tin industry still dominating the skyline. Worked since the early Ming dynasty, the tin mines at Gejiu had little economic importance until foreign interests, especially French, began to materialise. From 1910, the year the railway to Haiphong opened, the mining operations increased dramatically as the overseas route to Hongkong for final refinement became economically viable.
With its increased economic importance, Gejiu’s political status rose. Administered since age immemorial from Mengzi, Gejiu became in 1913 a city in its own right (Barnett 1993, p. 556) and by the 1920s presented itself as a fairly modern town:
Kotchiu, a thriving town of some 30,000 inhabitants, is in a narrow valley at an altitude of 5,640 feet west of a range of mountains separating the Kotchiu valley from the larger and lower adjoining Mengtze plain. (Draper 1931, p. 483)
In the 1950s China’s reliance on heavy industry made Gejiu a ‘resource city’ on the same level as the copper town Dongchuan. The early five-year plans brought massive investment to Gejiu, which allowed Gejiu to eclipse Mengzi in political status when it became the administrative centre of the reshuffled and enlarged Honghe autonomous region in 1957 (Moseley 1973, pp.95–96).
In 1954 after prolonged and heavy rains disaster struck Gejiu when a huge karst cavern collapsed, swallowing the entire centre of town. The existence of the fissures and caves underground had been nothing unknown, indeed most mines relied on them to filter air into the mine-shafts and to allow water to drain away:
Faulting is much in evidence throughout the district, and from the position of the various limestone sinks, many of these seem to be joined by fault fissures enlarged by solution and erosion to cavernous openings which are sometimes surprisingly large. The drainage of the Kotchiu [Gejiu] valley, covering in all a probable area of 100 square miles, flows into such a cave on a well-defined fault at the power house of the Tin Company. The water reappears on the east side of the Kotchiu range on the Mengtze [Mengzi] slope several miles away. These open fissures and caves are common in the various mine workings and have constituted an extremely valuable assistance, in mining operations by providing natural ventilation and drainage. They are responsible in a large degree for the Chinese miners’ ability to have worked the mines to depths of from 1,500 to 2,500 feet vertically below the surface, and though now and again ‘bad air’ or water is reported in some long drift or dead end this is rare.” (Draper 1931, p. 485)
Where the town had been, a lake, later called ‘Golden Lake’ 金湖, began to form and the city grew around it. While a few streets of the old town have survived on the western side, the modern business district located is at the lake’s southern tip, no so far from the slopes of Baohua Park 宝华公园. This extensive park is by far the most attractive bit of an otherwise grimy city with now maybe 200,000 inhabitants.
By the 1990s Gejiu had completely outgrown its narrow valley, preventing the construction of the modern style wide avenues lined with exorbitant public buildings. With tin mining declining in importance and trade rising, the old rival Mengzi was once declared the political centre again. Today, stripped of its administrative role, Gejiu today is a city in serious decline.