东郊记忆

This guide to 东郊记忆 in Chengdu opens inside the old Hongguang Electron Tube Factory, where in the winter of 1970 director Li Tiechui and his engineers stopped going home, racing to solve one stubborn problem: a color picture tube officials half-jokingly called the atomic bomb of the electronics industry. It reaches back to the Soviet engineers who raised the plant in 1958, and to young Tao Mingzhang, who taught himself the machinery by translating manuals at night and stayed forty-one years. Walk the grounds and you're standing on their old workshop floor.