Mengzhuiwan Neighborhood
Riverside neighborhood reborn from a secret nineteen-fifties electronics factory zone into a night-market food and culture block.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Mengzhuiwan neighborhood in Chengdu opens inside a secret 1950s factory complex, codenamed seven seven three, where workers once bent glass into tubes for a machine most had never seen switched on. It follows that Soviet-aided plant through a run of firsts in China's television industry, then traces how the gated compounds around it emptied and slid into disrepair after the year two thousand. Along the way it lingers on the neighborhood's old public swimming pool and what it meant to the kids who grew up here, a memory locals kept alive long after the factories went quiet.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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