HEGANG, Heilongjiang, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- Li Jianguo, 72, remembers the mountain of coal waste that once loomed outside his front door.
"Coal dust blew into the house with the wind all year round. You had to keep the windows shut even in summer," Li recalled. That was the nature of life in the city he knew for three decades as a coal miner.
Today, the retiree strolls through a lakeside park every morning, thermos of tea in hand, watching children run across well-trimmed lawns while elderly neighbors practice Tai Chi under birch trees.
The park is built on what was once a collapsed mining wasteland, a subsidence zone pockmarked with abandoned pits and shanties.
In many ways, it tells the story of an entire city and its transformation.
CITY BUILT ON "BLACK GOLD"
The city of Hegang is located in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, near the Russian border, where forested hills give way to lowland plains. Though the city's name translates as crane ridge, it actually derives from an old word for the raccoon dogs that once roamed its wilderness.
In 1914, a hunter accidentally found coal while clearing land along a river. A mining company was established four years later, drawing waves of mine workers. By 1929, a town had taken shape. Hegang got its present name when the People's Republic was founded in 1949, and went on to become one of new China's four major "coal capitals," an engine fueling the country's industrialization.
But the "black gold" that gave birth to the city was finite. As reserves dried up and mines shut down one after another from the early 2000s onward, young people left, and Hegang became a city with far more homes than people.
In 2019, the internet turned this surplus into a punchline. In one of the most extreme cases, an old walk-up apartment sold for just 15,000 yuan (2,246 U.S. dollars). Netizens joked that homes in Hegang were selling for "cabbage prices," meaning dirt cheap.
"We were under huge pressure," said Xiao Yu, an official at the municipal bureau of housing and urban-rural development.
Rather than doubling down on cheap housing to attract bargain hunters, the city chose to reverse course. Officials traveled across the country studying advanced building techniques, developed new construction standards tailored to extreme cold, and urged local developers to pursue quality over volume.
Between 2019 and 2025, commercial housing sales grew nearly five-fold. Average prices at premium developments now exceed 4,800 yuan per square meter.
"This is just the beginning," said Li Baiyang, chief of the municipal bureau of housing and urban-rural development. "We plan to upgrade all of Hegang's old housing into decent homes."
This quiet, frigid city has its own appeal, especially for those fed up with the humid south or burned out by the whirlwind pace of life in megacities.
Yan Bo and his wife, from the bustling city of Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, drove more than 2,000 kilometers to Hegang for a taste of its slower rhythm. They bought an apartment here and never left.
Ivan, a Russian cross-border trader who asked that only his first name be used, settled here last year. He describes the city as "livable," and its people as "genuinely friendly."
METAMORPHOSIS OF A CITY
Hegang's transformation is even more dramatic than its housing market. A little over a decade ago, the city was still coated in soot. All its 16 waterways, including two rivers and 14 drainage channels, ran black with pollution. Years of systematic cleanup efforts have now turned them clear.
The city demolished over 4,100 old buildings along riverbanks, planted 96 hectares of riverside greenery, and converted former mining subsidence zones into 32 parks and public squares. The deserted mine pit of Xinling has been renovated into a scenic area, and the Dulu River wetland has become an important stopover for migratory birds and home to some endangered species.
A new economy is also taking shape underground. Hegang holds 2.3 billion tonnes of proven graphite ore, the raw material for lithium-ion battery anodes. More than 80 percent of China's natural graphite for battery production comes from here.
The city has partnered with China Minmetals to apply modern technologies such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing across the whole graphite industrial chain, including mining and processing, and to overcome key technical hurdles in achieving high-purity graphite. The former coal capital is aiming to build a technological innovation highland for the graphite new materials industry.
Chinese people have long held that food is the first pleasure of life. In Hegang, a traditional grain production base, that pleasure comes in the form of crayfish raised alongside rice paddies, and a signature street food: grilled meat skewers.
This snack, popular since the 1950s when it provided quick calories for miners emerging from shifts, has grown into a 4.5-billion-yuan industry, with more than 1,200 franchise outlets across China.
To foster further development, mayor Deng Weiyuan said the city will focus on upgrading traditional industries, cultivating emerging ones, and developing new quality productive forces tailored to local conditions.
With a population of 935,000 and a modest GDP of 37.6 billion yuan in 2024, Hegang still faces many challenges. The shadow of the coal era lingers in old infrastructure and in the collective memory of its people.
"Globally, resource-dependent cities face daunting transformation hurdles," said Sun Haojin, director of the Institute of Economics at the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences. "Both economic restructuring and ecological improvement are difficult."
He described Hegang's push for green development as exemplary.
Like many rust-belt cities worldwide, Hegang is not so much reborn as it is being rebuilt. Its next chapter is being written by the people who stayed, and those who chose to arrive.
Zheng Siduo, 32, graduated from a university in the provincial capital Harbin, and returned to his hometown to start a business.
"Compared to the first-tier cities, Hegang's relaxed, livable and low-cost environment provides ideal soil for tech startups to grow," said Zheng, founder of Zhanhui Industrial Design, Hegang's first digital printing and creative design firm.
The company, established in May this year, makes customized 3D-printed models and industrial components, exporting them globally via cross-border e-commerce platforms like Amazon. ■
