Gejiu Selection Plant 1910

In 1910, at the foot of Mount Laoyin, the Gejiu Tin Company began a project that ended two millennia of manual ore dressing in China. This was the Gejiu Ore Concentration Plant, a facility built to bring mechanized gravity concentration to the nation's tin industry. The opening of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway in April 1910 allowed builders to import heavy industrial machinery directly to the site. By 1913, the plant commenced production, transforming how miners processed raw ore.

The architecture reflects the steep hillside terrain. Spanning 4,536 square meters, the plant descends across five stepped platforms with a thirteen-meter elevation drop. Raw ore from the Malage mine arrived at the top platform, first by aerial ropeways and later via tunnel tracks. The material cascaded downward through grinding and separation phases. Water from Zhadian and underground mine drainage washed the minerals. Heavy tailings were thickened at the front of the plant and pumped to the Xiao'utang reservoir.

Human presence remains visible in the surviving structures. Visitors can stand in the steel-frame shaking table room built in 1913, where the floor once vibrated with the sorting of rich tin, copper, and lead. Nearby, a horse stable from 1923 recalls the draft animals that hauled supplies. A French-style clock tower, built in 1940, rises above the complex, its face once directing the shifts of hundreds of workers. These laborers were the "sand workers" whose harsh lives inspired the writer Ba Jin to publish his work Sand Ding in 1932, before his personal visit to these mines in 1960.

Today, the plant is a preserved historical block. The gravity-fed channels, the quiet shaking tables, and the 1940 clock tower stand as physical records of China's early industrial age, preserved at Jinhu East Road for those who wish to hear the echoes of the machines.