--- title: The Insane City Located Beneath Beijing... description: "A ballistic missile can cross hundreds of kilometers in minutes. Longer-range ones can go from Russia to the United States in about thirty minutes. And if it's carrying a nuclear warhead, the explosion is only the start of your problems. Then comes the blast wave, the heat, the radiation, and decades of nuclear fallout.\n\nWhich means survival comes down to one ugly fact. You need to have somewhere underground to run to. The problem is that proper nuclear bunkers are grotesquely expensive, painfully slow to build, and seldom big enough. They are usually designed for a handful of generals, bureaucrats, and whichever lucky pencil-pusher gets to die slightly later than everyone else.\n\nAnd building one big enough for an actual city is almost impossible.\n\nAnd yet, under Beijing, one of the busiest capitals on Earth, there exists a whole city built specifically to shelter millions, where you could watch a movie and do some shopping while the poor idiots above ground were being reduced to ash.\n\nSo who signed off on this? How did they pull it off? And what in God's name did they think was coming?\n\nLet's look into it.\n\n## Chapter I: Comrades in Arms\n\nBefore we get to the possibility of spending the apocalypse in the world's bleakest underground shopping district, we need to meet the main cast. Mao Zedong. Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union. Communist China. And, one of the Cold War's nastiest breakups, except that the two exes controlled entire armies and had nukes in the basement.\n\nIn the 1950s, China and the Soviet Union were supposed to be the two giant pillars of the communist world.\n\nMoscow was the original superpower of the bloc, with the massive army, the sprawling industrial base, and the prestige of having built the first socialist state, following the October Revolution in 1917. China, on the other hand, was the most populous communist country by far, and proof that communism could triumph outside Europe.\n\nThe countries signed the 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, and that alliance was soon tested in war. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and the conflict quickly drew in the United States and UN forces. When those forces advanced deep into the north and approached the Yalu River, China sent massive numbers of troops to fight on North Korea's side. The Soviet Union backed both China and North Korea with weapons, aircraft, advisers, and broader military support.\n\nAt the same time, Moscow was helping China build itself from the ground up. While the Communists in China, led by Chairman Mao Zedong, had plenty of experience with guerrilla war, peasant mobilization, and local political control, they had never actually run a modern state or managed large-scale economic development. The People's Republic of China had only been founded in 1949, after the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Nationalists in the civil war, and Mao proclaimed the new state in Beijing. The Soviets, by contrast, had been doing Communism 101 since 1917 and had decades of experience in how to run a one-party state, build heavy industry, and terrify their own population into meeting quotas.\n\nThe Soviet five-year $300 million credit financed part of a much larger transfer of industrial knowledge and infrastructure so they could get things running. The so-called \"156 projects\" were a set of major Soviet-assisted developments across China, especially in heavy industry and defense. They included steel mills, power plants, machinery works, mines, oil and chemical facilities, and arms-related production sites, all built around Soviet technical models and often with Soviet engineers on site.\n\nEverything was hunky-dory at that point. Yay, communism.\n\nBut by the late 1950s, the alliance was already rotting from the inside. The bad blood went all the way back to Mao's trip to Moscow in December 1949, just weeks after founding the People's Republic of China. This was supposed to be the grand meeting of communist titans. Instead, the Soviet Union's leader, Joseph Stalin, kept Mao waiting for days, treated him coldly, and made it clear that China, despite its size and revolutionary victory, was still expected to behave like the junior partner in the relationship. Mao never forgot the humiliation. Years later, he complained that the Russians \"never had faith in the Chinese people,\" and honestly, he had a valid point.\n\nStalin, for his part, was hardly hiding his contempt. He reportedly viewed Mao as an \"egotistical peasant\" and a \"caveman Marxist,\" so even when the alliance looked solid on the surface, the personal chemistry underneath was already a disaster.\n\nStalin died in March 1953, after suffering a massive stroke, and his death plunged the Soviet leadership into a messy power struggle. But one man, Nikita Khrushchev, gradually outmaneuvered his opponents, engineered the execution of one of his main rivals — secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria — and by the mid 1950s had emerged as the new undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, taking over the roles of First Secretary and Premier. Khrushchev had different ideas for the Soviet Union's future. In 1956, during his famous Secret Speech, he denounced Stalin's cult of personality, purges, and abuses of power. Khrushchev was trying to steady the Soviet ship, reduce terror at home, and lower the risk of catastrophic war abroad.\n\nSensible, which of course made it absolutely intolerable to Mao.\n\nFor what it's worth, Khrushchev did try to repair things with Beijing. He was friendlier, more diplomatic, and much more eager to smooth over Stalin's damage. But he also brought ideas Mao hated. Khrushchev's advocacy for \"peaceful coexistence\" with the West meant the Soviet Union no longer treated conflict with capitalism as a constant race toward collision, which Mao saw as weakness and a betrayal of the Marxist-Leninist principles of inevitable struggle against capitalism. He wanted a continuous revolution, anti-Western militancy, and a harder policy across the board. So rather than cool off, he doubled down. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward, Mao's attempt to overtake the Soviet Union as the leader of the socialist world. Instead, his plan helped trigger a famine so catastrophic that somewhere around 20 to 30 million people died in China in just a few years.\n\nSo the relationship somehow got worse under the man who was trying to be nicer, and in one of history's more absurd reversals, the Soviets ended up looking like the adults in the room.\n\nBy the early 1960s, Khrushchev was fed up with Mao's tantrums and pulled all 1,400 Soviet technical advisors from China, cancelling over 200 scientific projects in retaliation. This effectively ended the alliance, leaving two huge, armed, deeply ideological states sharing a massive border and steadily learning to hate each other.\n\nFor years, the countries tolerated each other, albeit begrudgingly. But then came the Prague Spring in 1968, and for Mao, this was the moment the warning lights really started flashing. The Prague Spring was a reform movement in communist Czechoslovakia led by Alexander Dubček, who tried to loosen censorship, allow more open debate, and create what he called \"socialism with a human face.\"\n\nMoscow hated it.\n\nIn August 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the reforms by force. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader at the time, then defended that invasion with what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine: the claim that if any socialist country started drifting in a direction Moscow saw as dangerous, the Soviet Union had the right to intervene to stop it. The Kremlin was basically saying, \"Your country may be yours on paper, but if we think you are doing socialism wrong, we reserve the right to send in tanks.\"\n\nYou'd think that a brutal crackdown on a freedom-seeking movement would make Mao giddy, but no. It appears it did the opposite.\n\nWhen Beijing watched Soviet tanks roll into Prague and heard the justification afterward, the Chinese leadership had every reason to ask an obvious question: if the Kremlin could invade one socialist state for ideological deviance, why not another?\n\nSo China sent bodies to the Russian border. Lots of them. By 1969, the Chinese had as many as 1.5 million troops across the broader border zone, enough to make Soviet planners sweat through their uniforms. The problem for Beijing was that many of these formations were lightly equipped and far less mobile than the Soviet army. The problem for Moscow was that even if those troops came on foot, there were still an awful lot of feet. Recognizing they were vastly outnumbered, Moscow began a frantic \"catch-up.\" In 1961, it had about 12 understrength divisions stationed in the regions nearest China. Just for context, a single division could include thousands of soldiers plus tanks, artillery, and support units. But over the next decade, Moscow expanded that presence dramatically, first to around 25 full divisions and later to roughly 55, backed by 120 SS-11 nuclear missiles. By 1969, they had about 270,000 Soviet troops stationed along the border, backed by \"armageddon-level\" artillery.\n\nNow, at this point, you may be saying to yourself: surely two nuclear powers with enough firepower to blow up Earth several times over would not start blasting each other over some miserable little conflict. A fair assumption. Turns out, it's also a wrong one.\n\nThe Zhenbao Island, known to the Soviets as Damansky, was a small strip of land on the Ussuri River where the exact border between the two countries was placed. By early 1969, Chinese and Soviet border guards had already been tangling there for years, with patrols shoving, surrounding, and baiting each other in a grim little ritual of communist macho posturing. Then, on 2 March 1969, Chinese forces hit a Soviet patrol on the island, killing dozens of Soviet troops. The Soviets responded with a much heavier force, this time involving artillery and armored vehicles. Casualty figures still vary depending on whose version of patriotic arithmetic you prefer, but the important part is not the final body count. The important part is that a small patch of river island had just become the site of direct combat between two nuclear-armed states.\n\nChina's fear was that Moscow would not leave it there. China's nuclear program was still relatively young. Beijing was politically isolated. The Cultural Revolution was still staggering through the country, the military had become politically central, and the leadership knew the Soviets had both the means and, potentially, the motive to hit much harder.\n\nEven other governments were taking the possibility seriously. We know this because Soviet officials started testing the waters with the Americans.\n\nOne of the most chilling documents from the period is a U.S. record of a conversation with the Soviet diplomat Boris Davydov in August 1969. Davydov asked, bluntly, what the United States would do \"if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China's nuclear installations.\" He argued that such a strike would eliminate the Chinese nuclear threat for decades and would weaken and discredit the \"Mao clique,\" possibly allowing dissident military and party figures to rise in Beijing.\n\nSo what do you do if you are Mao in 1969? Which, to be clear, is already a terrible way to begin any sentence.\n\nYour giant neighbor has invaded another socialist country under a doctrine that could easily be pointed your way. That same neighbor has piled troops and missiles along your frontier. Shooting has already broken out, and blood has been spilled. And somewhere in the diplomatic backchannels, Soviet officials are openly floating the destruction of your nuclear facilities as a plausible strategic move. At that point, you do not need a perfect intelligence picture to conclude that Beijing itself might one day be in the target set.\n\nMao's answer was: build an underground city.\n\nBy late summer 1969, the Chinese leadership was no longer treating a Soviet nuclear attack as a theoretical problem. And Beijing was a uniquely terrifying target to leave exposed. This was not just China's capital. It was the political brain of the state, the symbolic center of the revolution, and a city packed with millions of people who could not simply be whisked away. A few ordinary shelters were not going to solve that problem. If the Soviets hit Beijing hard, they could kill the leadership, break the command structure, and throw the country into chaos in a single blow. So, like any paranoid conspiracy theorist worrying that the world might end, China went a bit overkill in their preparations. Mao and other top leaders were moved out of Beijing, so the government would not be wiped out in a single blow.\n\nChina's nuclear forces went on full alert in 1969, and Beijing had also carried out two unannounced nuclear tests, just to tell Russia, \"hey, don't forget we have nukes too.\" If you are wondering why Mao did not just start fantasizing about a preemptive strike, China had already adopted a no-first-use policy in 1964. Officially, that meant Beijing would not fire nuclear weapons first under any circumstances. They also set up a People's Air Defense Small Group to deal with practical questions such as where civilians would go, which factories might need to be moved, and how to stockpile grain and essential supplies if the capital came under attack. The tone had already been set in April 1969, when Mao issued the directive: \"Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony.\" Even under the shadow of a nuclear showdown, he still found time to sound annoyingly quotable.\n\nSo in 1969, with the Sino-Soviet crisis peaking and Beijing preparing for the possibility of nuclear attack, the capital began work on one of the strangest civil-defense projects in human history: Dixia Cheng, literally \"Underground City.\"\n\n## Chapter II: The Underground City\n\nDixia Cheng wasn't simply a cluster of bunkers tucked under a few government buildings. This was, in effect, an effort to build a backup version of Beijing beneath its surface.\n\nWork began that same year and continued through 1979, turning the project into a full decade of excavation, construction, and wartime planning. More than 300,000 Beijing residents were mobilized to dig tunnels and chambers beneath the capital. These were not elite engineers in spotless hard hats consulting blueprints over cigarettes. They were ordinary people, including students, and reportedly even some schoolchildren, all drafted into \"volunteer work,\" which in communist systems usually means volunteering in the same way hostages volunteer to read statements. Much of it was done the old-fashioned way, by hand, without heavy machinery, because if you are going to build a second city under the first one, you may as well do it in the most exhausting way possible. Over time, the network spread beneath central Beijing, eventually covering around 85 square kilometers with more than 30 kilometers of passageways.\n\nSo when you hear people call it a backup Beijing, and by people I mean me, that is not really an exaggeration. That was the whole point. Dixia Cheng was built as a shadow version of the capital, meant to help the city function underground just in case the original got vaporized.\n\nAt one time, there were said to be around 90 entrances, many hidden in shops and back rooms along the streets of Qianmen. That means the underground city was not isolated somewhere on the edge of Beijing like a military base. You could be buying noodles, getting a haircut, or arguing over the price of socks, and somewhere nearby, there might be a stairwell leading into a buried survival network.\n\nOfficial propaganda pushed heroic claims that Dixia Cheng could shelter all six million residents of Beijing. Now, whether that would actually have worked is another matter. Governments do enjoy advertising their apocalypse hardware as if it were a premium product with excellent customer reviews. Still, even if you cut those claims down to size, the scale remains extraordinary.\n\nTo help build and reinforce the underground city, parts of old Beijing were torn apart. Centuries-old walls, towers, and gates from the Ming-era city, including places like Xizhimen, Fuchengmen, and Chongwenmen, were dismantled to supply construction materials. So the capital was, in part, feeding the first city into the second. That gives the whole project a grim kind of poetry; Beijing was preparing for a future catastrophe by cannibalizing its past. To make the whole thing even stranger, fluorescent maps were posted in shops and public buildings so locals would know exactly where to run if the sirens ever started screaming.\n\nNow, the obvious question is, how exactly are millions of people supposed to stay alive down there without the whole place turning into the world's largest panic attack?\n\nWell, what they were building was meant to function. The tunnels sat roughly 8 to 18 meters below the surface. There were said to be restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, factories, and, oddly enough, a roller-skating area so they could burn some calories while the world above them caught fire.\n\nFood was an obvious issue, which is why one of the most famous features of the Underground City was its mushroom farm. And honestly, mushrooms were one of the few foods that actually made sense down there. Most crops are useless in a sealed underground space. Wheat needs open land. Tomatoes need sunlight. Mushrooms are different. They can grow in dark and damp conditions, and they take up much less space. In a place built under a city, it made them one of the smartest choices available. They were not going to create a feast, obviously, but they could at least provide some fresh food instead of forcing everyone to live entirely on dry stored supplies.\n\nThe Underground City also included grain and oil warehouses. Grain stores well for long periods, can feed a huge number of people, and gives you the calories needed to keep a population going in an emergency.\n\nAir, of course, was also non-negotiable. The tunnel system reportedly included around 2,300 ventilation shafts, designed so they could be sealed off against poison gas and radioactive fallout, and kept the temperature at a cozy 27 degrees Celsius.\n\nYou'd also need drinking water, washing water, medical water, and enough of it that disease does not start doing the enemy's work for them. The Underground City reportedly had nearly 70 potential well sites, places where water could be dug or drawn if the system had to operate for a prolonged period.\n\nThe result was something almost absurd in its ambition: a city beneath the city, built over ten years by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, designed to resist nuclear, biochemical, and conventional attack, and hidden just far enough below daily life that the capital above could keep functioning normally.\n\nBreathable air. Drinking water. Food. Schools. Clinics. Everything was taken care of. Even morale, if you count the theater and the roller-skating rink, which frankly you should, because a city trapped underground for months would need distraction almost as much as it needed mushrooms.\n\nConstruction finally wound down around 1979.\n\nBut the China that finished the project was no longer the China that had started it.\n\nMao died in Beijing on September 9, 1976, after a long decline in health. And with that, one version of China started dying with him. Within months, the Cultural Revolution began to wind down, and the country that emerged from the wreckage was exhausted, poorer than it should have been, and badly in need of someone who preferred results to revolutionary theater.\n\nThat someone was Deng Xiaoping. Deng was basically the anti-Mao in style. He was pragmatic, disciplined, and almost aggressively unimpressed by ideology for ideology's sake. Deng pushed for grain output, factory output, foreign investment, and a country that wasn't hell-bent on being the aggressor, as the version of China Mao seemed to imagine in its final form. At first, Mao's chosen successor was Hua Guofeng, the Chinese Communist Party chairman and a loyal figure who tried to preserve Mao's legacy with the \"Two Whatevers\" policy, which was essentially: whatever Mao said, let's keep doing that. Which was not exactly a thrilling plan for a country that had just been dragged through years of upheaval. Hua had the title and the official blessing, but Deng had support from senior party figures, a reputation for competence, and a much better read of what China actually needed to prosper.\n\nSo while Hua looked like Mao's heir on paper, Deng slowly outmaneuvered him in real life. By 1978, Deng had effectively displaced Guofeng, taken over the reins to the country, and pushed China into what became known as the \"reform and opening up\" era, shifting the national focus from class struggle and mass campaigns toward economic growth, stability, and modernization. Farmers got more freedom to produce and sell. Factories were pushed to be more efficient. Foreign investment started coming in. China began opening itself to outside trade and technology. The government's message changed, too. Instead of telling people to sacrifice everything for one more political campaign, it started telling them to build, produce, modernize, and deliver results.\n\nUnder Mao, the question had been: how do we survive the impending apocalypse? Under Deng, the question became: what useful thing can we do with all this underground concrete now that the apocalypse has failed to arrive on schedule? So in the early 1980s, as China opened to markets and local authorities were encouraged to think more economically, Beijing's defense authorities began leasing the shelter spaces of the Underground City to private operators. China, under Deng, was learning to monetize almost anything that stood still long enough, and apparently that included Cold War survival architecture.\n\nAt first, parts of the underground network became what you might call practical urban overflow space. According to a memoir by a senior official involved in the project, by the 1980s, these spaces had become an underground world of around 800 hostels, plus supermarkets, cinemas, and roller-skating rinks. That is a remarkable afterlife for a nuclear shelter. And the fact that this shows up in a memoir at all tells you how much China had changed. Under Mao, casually revealing details about a secret wartime shelter network in your memoir would have been less \"interesting historical disclosure\" and more \"excellent way to ruin your week, your career, and possibly your existence.\"\n\nThat transformation also tells you something important about Deng's China. Mao had ruled like an impatient dictator. Deng ruled more like a mechanic trying to get a broken machine running again, except the machine was a billion-person country and the repair manual had been set on fire. His entire style was more practical, more flexible, and, for the average Chinese citizen, a lot easier to live under than Mao's final years. Now, don't get me wrong, Deng was not exactly Nelson Mandela in how he ran things. The party under Deng still insisted on one-party rule, still kept a hard line on political dissent, and still policed the limits of acceptable speech. But economically, it loosened.\n\nAnd as Beijing's economy boomed, the city grew richer, shinier, and vastly more expensive. Migrants also swarmed in huge numbers looking for work, study, or some version of the Chinese dream. Unfortunately, that dream was not exactly budget-friendly, since housing was ridiculously expensive in China's capital. If only there had been some giant subterranean bunker network built during the Cold War, just sitting there waiting to become cheap housing. Sounds ridiculous, but that was more or less the situation. Over time, the more public-facing underground businesses, like cinemas and shopping areas, mostly disappeared, making room for the hostels, dorm-style rentals, and tiny windowless rooms. Unlike the entertainment spaces, they could solve an actual housing problem.\n\nSo by the 1990s and 2000s, the Underground City had become a parallel housing market for people who could not afford life above ground. Around this time, those people started being lumped together under the label \"Rat Tribe,\" or *shuzu*. It was a derogatory label for basement and bunker dwellers, mostly migrants and students, people living in cramped underground rooms beneath high-rises, hotels, and residential blocks, because that was the cheapest shelter the capital had to offer.\n\nThe term \"Rat Tribe\" tells you how people above ground saw the people below. Yet many of these residents were not criminals or social failures, like many people believed them to be. They were waiters, delivery workers, kitchen staff, foot masseuses, insurance salesmen, students, aspiring actors and designers, and young migrants hungry for the Chinese dream.\n\nLike Zhang Xi, a 21-year-old from Inner Mongolia who moved to Beijing to chase acting work and lived underground because it was the only way to make a living in the city. Or Liu Hao, a young writer, poet, photographer, and filmmaker, and Wei Kuan, an insurance salesman who lived in a basement because he was trying to save money for a car and a better life. These people did not move into Beijing's underground city because they had a taste for bunker chic. They moved there because the city above ground had become so brutally expensive that a damp box under the pavement started to look like a rational financial decision.\n\nA \"room\" underground could cost around 400 yuan a month, roughly $66 at the time. Even the pricier end, around 650 to 800 yuan, was only about $105 to $130. That sounds cheap right up until you remember what the tenant was actually buying: a windowless shoebox barely large enough to hold a bed and a tired adult. Four square meters, in some cases.\n\nAnd even then, it was only cheap relative to the city above it. In 2011, the average one-bedroom apartment in Beijing rented for about 3,250 yuan a month, or roughly $500 at the time, and by the mid-2010s, apartments were going for as much as 5,000 yuan. So 400 yuan is hostel money, maybe, and not luxurious hostel money either. And those 400 hard-earned yuan were not getting you some charming underground adventure. You were buying housing stripped down to the barest minimum that could still legally, or semi-legally, pass as a place for a human being to live in.\n\nIt was affordable in the same way a life raft is affordable compared to a yacht. Technically true. Also, a sign that something has gone very, very wrong.\n\nThat helps explain why the legal status of these places became so messy. For years, they sat in a grey zone. Everyone knew the conditions were bad, but the city mostly looked away anyway, because the arrangement was useful. Beijing needed those workers, and those workers needed a place they could actually afford. At one point, roughly one million of these people were living underground in a city of about twenty-one million.\n\nBut in 2010, the authorities changed their mind. The city stopped granting new permits for underground apartments and launched a three-year plan to clear them. Officials pointed to serious hazards like poor ventilation, weak fire escapes, overcrowding, and flood risk. They said the vacant spaces would be turned into public facilities such as car parks, community centers, gyms, and billiards rooms. Officially, this was about safety and urban order. Unofficially, it was also part of a bigger campaign to shrink the migrant presence in central Beijing and \"improve the population structure,\" which is the kind of phrase governments use when they want to move poor people somewhere less visible.\n\nBy early 2015, it was reported that approximately 120,000 people had been officially evicted from Dixia Cheng.\n\nTo be fair, some of these spaces really were dangerous. Reports described hundreds of people packed into warrens of rooms with minimal light, poor ventilation, communal facilities, and sometimes frighteningly limited escape routes. A 2017 city inspection of one central Beijing basement complex found 400 people living underground with just one fire escape. Residents were reportedly sleeping next to gas pipes, electrical wiring, and sewers. So officials were not making that part up. The problem was that they offered no housing alternative at all.\n\n## Chapter III: The Ghost Under Beijing\n\nBeijing's Underground City, luckily, never had the ending it was built for.\n\nThe war it was meant to outlast never came. The Soviet bombs never fell on the capital. The six million people it was supposed to protect never had to flood underground with sacks of grain, children in tow. Instead, the place ended up as cheap housing for people who could only afford the trial version of Beijing. The public tourist section, which opened around 2000, allowed a limited glimpse into the underground world Mao had created. But even that has been closed since 2008, officially for \"renovation.\" That is a wonderfully elastic word, \"renovation.\" It can mean work is happening. It can mean nothing is happening. It can mean nobody wants to tell you what is happening. Finally, in August 2019, Beijing issued policies requiring that underground rooms have a per capita living area of no less than 5 square meters, with no more than 2 people per room, effectively shutting down the dense, low-rent, high-capacity living situations many relied on.\n\nSo what is the Underground City now?\n\nParts of the tunnel system continued to receive routine maintenance, such as water-leak checks and pest control. That does not prove some dramatic hidden rearmament program, sadly for the conspiracy-minded. It does, however, tell you the place has not simply been forgotten and left to fill with dust, rats, and the occasional tragic urban explorer with bad instincts. Which leaves three possibilities.\n\nMaybe parts of it are being preserved, because no one quite knows what to do with a Cold War undercity. Nobody really knows how much of that underground nuclear city was ever actually finished, or how far its maze of tunnels and chambers was supposed to spread. One of the most persistent rumors is that the tunnels connect to the political core of Beijing itself, including Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound just west of the Forbidden City, and the Great Hall of the People, the huge state building on the west side of Tiananmen Square where the National People's Congress meets. To be clear, this is speculation, not something Beijing has publicly laid out on a nice, clean map for everyone to inspect. But it fits the original purpose of the place. If you are designing a wartime refuge for the capital, connecting major political sites and evacuation routes is exactly the kind of thing people would expect.\n\nAnd maybe large sections are simply rotting, sealed behind concrete and steel, trapped in the usual fate of mega-projects whose purpose expired before their meaning did. There are accounts of mostly homeless people still using parts of the tunnels to escape Beijing's savage summers and freezing winters, but the honest answer is that we don't know the full picture. What we do know is that the Underground City never fully vanished. It has lingered in a weird half-state: closed, partly maintained, and not quite dead. A ghost city under a living one.\n\nAnd the *shuzu*? They were pushed farther and farther toward the outskirts, trading underground darkness for punishing commutes that could swallow hours each day. Which is a pretty neat summary of how the Chinese Dream turned out in practice. So in the end, Beijing's Underground City was, if nothing else, a bizarre project. A city built for the end of the world. Now it is a monument to a war that never happened, a relic of Maoist paranoia turned into a housing solution for the poor, only to be emptied once the capital got rich enough to find that arrangement embarrassing.\n\nWhich, in its own way, is probably the strangest and most fitting ending it could have had.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- Beijing's underground city, Dixia Cheng, was built to shelter millions during a potential nuclear attack.\n- Construction began in 1969 due to tensions between China and the Soviet Union, with over 300,000 residents involved.\n- The underground city included amenities like restaurants, clinics, and even a roller-skating rink to support long-term survival.\n- After Mao's death, the underground city was repurposed for affordable housing, known as the 'Rat Tribe' dwellings.\n- The underground city was eventually cleared due to safety concerns, pushing residents to the outskirts of Beijing.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n### What is the Underground City beneath Beijing?\n\nThe Underground City, also known as Dixia Cheng, is a massive network of tunnels and chambers built beneath Beijing to shelter millions of people in case of a nuclear attack. It includes facilities like restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, and even a roller-skating area.\n\n### Why was the Underground City built?\n\nThe Underground City was built in response to the deteriorating relationship between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. Mao Zedong ordered its construction after the Sino-Soviet border conflict and the fear of a potential Soviet nuclear attack on Beijing.\n\n### How long did it take to build the Underground City?\n\nConstruction of the Underground City began in 1969 and continued through 1979, taking a full decade to complete.\n\n### Who was involved in the construction of the Underground City?\n\nOver 300,000 Beijing residents, including students and reportedly even schoolchildren, were mobilized to dig tunnels and chambers by hand, without heavy machinery.\n\n### What facilities were included in the Underground City?\n\nThe Underground City included restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, factories, a roller-skating area, mushroom farms, grain and oil warehouses, ventilation shafts, and potential well sites for water.\n\n### What happened to the Underground City after its construction?\n\nAfter Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Underground City was repurposed. In the 1980s, it was leased to private operators and became a housing solution for migrants and students who could not afford above-ground living.\n\n### What is the current status of the Underground City?\n\nThe Underground City is largely closed and maintained in a state of limbo. Some parts are preserved, while others may be rotting. It has been used by homeless people to escape extreme weather conditions, but its full extent and current use are not entirely known.\n\n### What was the 'Rat Tribe'?\n\nThe 'Rat Tribe' was a derogatory term for migrants and students who lived in the cramped, underground rooms of the Underground City because they were the cheapest housing option in Beijing.\n\n### Why did the Chinese government evict people from the Underground City?\n\nThe Chinese government evicted people from the Underground City in 2010 due to safety concerns, including poor ventilation, weak fire escapes, overcrowding, and flood risk. The evictions were also part of a campaign to reduce the migrant presence in central Beijing.\n\n### What is the significance of the Underground City today?\n\nThe Underground City serves as a monument to a war that never happened and a relic of Maoist paranoia. It highlights the transformation of Beijing from a city preparing for nuclear war to a modern metropolis dealing with housing and economic challenges.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Original Side Projects video: The Insane Labyrinth Found Beneath Beijing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTuenEcCxtE)\n- [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/The_platform_and_commuter_tracks_of_Leningradsky_Rail_Terminal_at_night._Moscow%2C_Russia%2C_2026.jpg) by Zac Allan / openverse, by-sa.\n\n## Related Coverage" url: https://sideprojects.pub/article/the-insane-city-located-beneath-beijing.md canonical: https://sideprojects.pub/article/the-insane-city-located-beneath-beijing datePublished: 2026-04-21 dateModified: 2026-07-28 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://sideprojects.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Side Projects image: "https://media.sideprojects.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/xTuenEcCxtE/hero.jpg" type: NewsArticle contentHash: eaaea22395a468ef8877446b9bc16121e14f97f5110f052335e96485a5322a0f tokens: 8997 summaryUrl: https://sideprojects.pub/article/the-insane-city-located-beneath-beijing.md.summary.md --- A ballistic missile can cross hundreds of kilometers in minutes. Longer-range ones can go from Russia to the United States in about thirty minutes. And if it's carrying a nuclear warhead, the explosion is only the start of your problems. Then comes the blast wave, the heat, the radiation, and decades of nuclear fallout. Which means survival comes down to one ugly fact. You need to have somewhere underground to run to. The problem is that proper nuclear bunkers are grotesquely expensive, painfully slow to build, and seldom big enough. They are usually designed for a handful of generals, bureaucrats, and whichever lucky pencil-pusher gets to die slightly later than everyone else. And building one big enough for an actual city is almost impossible. And yet, under Beijing, one of the busiest capitals on Earth, there exists a whole city built specifically to shelter millions, where you could watch a movie and do some shopping while the poor idiots above ground were being reduced to ash. So who signed off on this? How did they pull it off? And what in God's name did they think was coming? Let's look into it. ## Chapter I: Comrades in Arms Before we get to the possibility of spending the apocalypse in the world's bleakest underground shopping district, we need to meet the main cast. Mao Zedong. Joseph Stalin. The Soviet Union. Communist China. And, one of the Cold War's nastiest breakups, except that the two exes controlled entire armies and had nukes in the basement. In the 1950s, China and the Soviet Union were supposed to be the two giant pillars of the communist world. Moscow was the original superpower of the bloc, with the massive army, the sprawling industrial base, and the prestige of having built the first socialist state, following the October Revolution in 1917. China, on the other hand, was the most populous communist country by far, and proof that communism could triumph outside Europe. The countries signed the 1950 Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, and that alliance was soon tested in war. In 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea, and the conflict quickly drew in the United States and UN forces. When those forces advanced deep into the north and approached the Yalu River, China sent massive numbers of troops to fight on North Korea's side. The Soviet Union backed both China and North Korea with weapons, aircraft, advisers, and broader military support. At the same time, Moscow was helping China build itself from the ground up. While the Communists in China, led by Chairman Mao Zedong, had plenty of experience with guerrilla war, peasant mobilization, and local political control, they had never actually run a modern state or managed large-scale economic development. The People's Republic of China had only been founded in 1949, after the Chinese Communist Party defeated the Nationalists in the civil war, and Mao proclaimed the new state in Beijing. The Soviets, by contrast, had been doing Communism 101 since 1917 and had decades of experience in how to run a one-party state, build heavy industry, and terrify their own population into meeting quotas. The Soviet five-year $300 million credit financed part of a much larger transfer of industrial knowledge and infrastructure so they could get things running. The so-called "156 projects" were a set of major Soviet-assisted developments across China, especially in heavy industry and defense. They included steel mills, power plants, machinery works, mines, oil and chemical facilities, and arms-related production sites, all built around Soviet technical models and often with Soviet engineers on site. Everything was hunky-dory at that point. Yay, communism. But by the late 1950s, the alliance was already rotting from the inside. The bad blood went all the way back to Mao's trip to Moscow in December 1949, just weeks after founding the People's Republic of China. This was supposed to be the grand meeting of communist titans. Instead, the Soviet Union's leader, Joseph Stalin, kept Mao waiting for days, treated him coldly, and made it clear that China, despite its size and revolutionary victory, was still expected to behave like the junior partner in the relationship. Mao never forgot the humiliation. Years later, he complained that the Russians "never had faith in the Chinese people," and honestly, he had a valid point. Stalin, for his part, was hardly hiding his contempt. He reportedly viewed Mao as an "egotistical peasant" and a "caveman Marxist," so even when the alliance looked solid on the surface, the personal chemistry underneath was already a disaster. Stalin died in March 1953, after suffering a massive stroke, and his death plunged the Soviet leadership into a messy power struggle. But one man, Nikita Khrushchev, gradually outmaneuvered his opponents, engineered the execution of one of his main rivals — secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria — and by the mid 1950s had emerged as the new undisputed leader of the Soviet Union, taking over the roles of First Secretary and Premier. Khrushchev had different ideas for the Soviet Union's future. In 1956, during his famous Secret Speech, he denounced Stalin's cult of personality, purges, and abuses of power. Khrushchev was trying to steady the Soviet ship, reduce terror at home, and lower the risk of catastrophic war abroad. Sensible, which of course made it absolutely intolerable to Mao. For what it's worth, Khrushchev did try to repair things with Beijing. He was friendlier, more diplomatic, and much more eager to smooth over Stalin's damage. But he also brought ideas Mao hated. Khrushchev's advocacy for "peaceful coexistence" with the West meant the Soviet Union no longer treated conflict with capitalism as a constant race toward collision, which Mao saw as weakness and a betrayal of the Marxist-Leninist principles of inevitable struggle against capitalism. He wanted a continuous revolution, anti-Western militancy, and a harder policy across the board. So rather than cool off, he doubled down. In 1958, he launched the Great Leap Forward, Mao's attempt to overtake the Soviet Union as the leader of the socialist world. Instead, his plan helped trigger a famine so catastrophic that somewhere around 20 to 30 million people died in China in just a few years. So the relationship somehow got worse under the man who was trying to be nicer, and in one of history's more absurd reversals, the Soviets ended up looking like the adults in the room. By the early 1960s, Khrushchev was fed up with Mao's tantrums and pulled all 1,400 Soviet technical advisors from China, cancelling over 200 scientific projects in retaliation. This effectively ended the alliance, leaving two huge, armed, deeply ideological states sharing a massive border and steadily learning to hate each other. For years, the countries tolerated each other, albeit begrudgingly. But then came the Prague Spring in 1968, and for Mao, this was the moment the warning lights really started flashing. The Prague Spring was a reform movement in communist Czechoslovakia led by Alexander Dubček, who tried to loosen censorship, allow more open debate, and create what he called "socialism with a human face." Moscow hated it. In August 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the reforms by force. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader at the time, then defended that invasion with what became known as the Brezhnev Doctrine: the claim that if any socialist country started drifting in a direction Moscow saw as dangerous, the Soviet Union had the right to intervene to stop it. The Kremlin was basically saying, "Your country may be yours on paper, but if we think you are doing socialism wrong, we reserve the right to send in tanks." You'd think that a brutal crackdown on a freedom-seeking movement would make Mao giddy, but no. It appears it did the opposite. When Beijing watched Soviet tanks roll into Prague and heard the justification afterward, the Chinese leadership had every reason to ask an obvious question: if the Kremlin could invade one socialist state for ideological deviance, why not another? So China sent bodies to the Russian border. Lots of them. By 1969, the Chinese had as many as 1.5 million troops across the broader border zone, enough to make Soviet planners sweat through their uniforms. The problem for Beijing was that many of these formations were lightly equipped and far less mobile than the Soviet army. The problem for Moscow was that even if those troops came on foot, there were still an awful lot of feet. Recognizing they were vastly outnumbered, Moscow began a frantic "catch-up." In 1961, it had about 12 understrength divisions stationed in the regions nearest China. Just for context, a single division could include thousands of soldiers plus tanks, artillery, and support units. But over the next decade, Moscow expanded that presence dramatically, first to around 25 full divisions and later to roughly 55, backed by 120 SS-11 nuclear missiles. By 1969, they had about 270,000 Soviet troops stationed along the border, backed by "armageddon-level" artillery. Now, at this point, you may be saying to yourself: surely two nuclear powers with enough firepower to blow up Earth several times over would not start blasting each other over some miserable little conflict. A fair assumption. Turns out, it's also a wrong one. The Zhenbao Island, known to the Soviets as Damansky, was a small strip of land on the Ussuri River where the exact border between the two countries was placed. By early 1969, Chinese and Soviet border guards had already been tangling there for years, with patrols shoving, surrounding, and baiting each other in a grim little ritual of communist macho posturing. Then, on 2 March 1969, Chinese forces hit a Soviet patrol on the island, killing dozens of Soviet troops. The Soviets responded with a much heavier force, this time involving artillery and armored vehicles. Casualty figures still vary depending on whose version of patriotic arithmetic you prefer, but the important part is not the final body count. The important part is that a small patch of river island had just become the site of direct combat between two nuclear-armed states. China's fear was that Moscow would not leave it there. China's nuclear program was still relatively young. Beijing was politically isolated. The Cultural Revolution was still staggering through the country, the military had become politically central, and the leadership knew the Soviets had both the means and, potentially, the motive to hit much harder. Even other governments were taking the possibility seriously. We know this because Soviet officials started testing the waters with the Americans. One of the most chilling documents from the period is a U.S. record of a conversation with the Soviet diplomat Boris Davydov in August 1969. Davydov asked, bluntly, what the United States would do "if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China's nuclear installations." He argued that such a strike would eliminate the Chinese nuclear threat for decades and would weaken and discredit the "Mao clique," possibly allowing dissident military and party figures to rise in Beijing. So what do you do if you are Mao in 1969? Which, to be clear, is already a terrible way to begin any sentence. Your giant neighbor has invaded another socialist country under a doctrine that could easily be pointed your way. That same neighbor has piled troops and missiles along your frontier. Shooting has already broken out, and blood has been spilled. And somewhere in the diplomatic backchannels, Soviet officials are openly floating the destruction of your nuclear facilities as a plausible strategic move. At that point, you do not need a perfect intelligence picture to conclude that Beijing itself might one day be in the target set. Mao's answer was: build an underground city. By late summer 1969, the Chinese leadership was no longer treating a Soviet nuclear attack as a theoretical problem. And Beijing was a uniquely terrifying target to leave exposed. This was not just China's capital. It was the political brain of the state, the symbolic center of the revolution, and a city packed with millions of people who could not simply be whisked away. A few ordinary shelters were not going to solve that problem. If the Soviets hit Beijing hard, they could kill the leadership, break the command structure, and throw the country into chaos in a single blow. So, like any paranoid conspiracy theorist worrying that the world might end, China went a bit overkill in their preparations. Mao and other top leaders were moved out of Beijing, so the government would not be wiped out in a single blow. China's nuclear forces went on full alert in 1969, and Beijing had also carried out two unannounced nuclear tests, just to tell Russia, "hey, don't forget we have nukes too." If you are wondering why Mao did not just start fantasizing about a preemptive strike, China had already adopted a no-first-use policy in 1964. Officially, that meant Beijing would not fire nuclear weapons first under any circumstances. They also set up a People's Air Defense Small Group to deal with practical questions such as where civilians would go, which factories might need to be moved, and how to stockpile grain and essential supplies if the capital came under attack. The tone had already been set in April 1969, when Mao issued the directive: "Dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony." Even under the shadow of a nuclear showdown, he still found time to sound annoyingly quotable. So in 1969, with the Sino-Soviet crisis peaking and Beijing preparing for the possibility of nuclear attack, the capital began work on one of the strangest civil-defense projects in human history: Dixia Cheng, literally "Underground City." ## Chapter II: The Underground City Dixia Cheng wasn't simply a cluster of bunkers tucked under a few government buildings. This was, in effect, an effort to build a backup version of Beijing beneath its surface. Work began that same year and continued through 1979, turning the project into a full decade of excavation, construction, and wartime planning. More than 300,000 Beijing residents were mobilized to dig tunnels and chambers beneath the capital. These were not elite engineers in spotless hard hats consulting blueprints over cigarettes. They were ordinary people, including students, and reportedly even some schoolchildren, all drafted into "volunteer work," which in communist systems usually means volunteering in the same way hostages volunteer to read statements. Much of it was done the old-fashioned way, by hand, without heavy machinery, because if you are going to build a second city under the first one, you may as well do it in the most exhausting way possible. Over time, the network spread beneath central Beijing, eventually covering around 85 square kilometers with more than 30 kilometers of passageways. So when you hear people call it a backup Beijing, and by people I mean me, that is not really an exaggeration. That was the whole point. Dixia Cheng was built as a shadow version of the capital, meant to help the city function underground just in case the original got vaporized. At one time, there were said to be around 90 entrances, many hidden in shops and back rooms along the streets of Qianmen. That means the underground city was not isolated somewhere on the edge of Beijing like a military base. You could be buying noodles, getting a haircut, or arguing over the price of socks, and somewhere nearby, there might be a stairwell leading into a buried survival network. Official propaganda pushed heroic claims that Dixia Cheng could shelter all six million residents of Beijing. Now, whether that would actually have worked is another matter. Governments do enjoy advertising their apocalypse hardware as if it were a premium product with excellent customer reviews. Still, even if you cut those claims down to size, the scale remains extraordinary. To help build and reinforce the underground city, parts of old Beijing were torn apart. Centuries-old walls, towers, and gates from the Ming-era city, including places like Xizhimen, Fuchengmen, and Chongwenmen, were dismantled to supply construction materials. So the capital was, in part, feeding the first city into the second. That gives the whole project a grim kind of poetry; Beijing was preparing for a future catastrophe by cannibalizing its past. To make the whole thing even stranger, fluorescent maps were posted in shops and public buildings so locals would know exactly where to run if the sirens ever started screaming. Now, the obvious question is, how exactly are millions of people supposed to stay alive down there without the whole place turning into the world's largest panic attack? Well, what they were building was meant to function. The tunnels sat roughly 8 to 18 meters below the surface. There were said to be restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, factories, and, oddly enough, a roller-skating area so they could burn some calories while the world above them caught fire. Food was an obvious issue, which is why one of the most famous features of the Underground City was its mushroom farm. And honestly, mushrooms were one of the few foods that actually made sense down there. Most crops are useless in a sealed underground space. Wheat needs open land. Tomatoes need sunlight. Mushrooms are different. They can grow in dark and damp conditions, and they take up much less space. In a place built under a city, it made them one of the smartest choices available. They were not going to create a feast, obviously, but they could at least provide some fresh food instead of forcing everyone to live entirely on dry stored supplies. The Underground City also included grain and oil warehouses. Grain stores well for long periods, can feed a huge number of people, and gives you the calories needed to keep a population going in an emergency. Air, of course, was also non-negotiable. The tunnel system reportedly included around 2,300 ventilation shafts, designed so they could be sealed off against poison gas and radioactive fallout, and kept the temperature at a cozy 27 degrees Celsius. You'd also need drinking water, washing water, medical water, and enough of it that disease does not start doing the enemy's work for them. The Underground City reportedly had nearly 70 potential well sites, places where water could be dug or drawn if the system had to operate for a prolonged period. The result was something almost absurd in its ambition: a city beneath the city, built over ten years by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, designed to resist nuclear, biochemical, and conventional attack, and hidden just far enough below daily life that the capital above could keep functioning normally. Breathable air. Drinking water. Food. Schools. Clinics. Everything was taken care of. Even morale, if you count the theater and the roller-skating rink, which frankly you should, because a city trapped underground for months would need distraction almost as much as it needed mushrooms. Construction finally wound down around 1979. But the China that finished the project was no longer the China that had started it. Mao died in Beijing on September 9, 1976, after a long decline in health. And with that, one version of China started dying with him. Within months, the Cultural Revolution began to wind down, and the country that emerged from the wreckage was exhausted, poorer than it should have been, and badly in need of someone who preferred results to revolutionary theater. That someone was Deng Xiaoping. Deng was basically the anti-Mao in style. He was pragmatic, disciplined, and almost aggressively unimpressed by ideology for ideology's sake. Deng pushed for grain output, factory output, foreign investment, and a country that wasn't hell-bent on being the aggressor, as the version of China Mao seemed to imagine in its final form. At first, Mao's chosen successor was Hua Guofeng, the Chinese Communist Party chairman and a loyal figure who tried to preserve Mao's legacy with the "Two Whatevers" policy, which was essentially: whatever Mao said, let's keep doing that. Which was not exactly a thrilling plan for a country that had just been dragged through years of upheaval. Hua had the title and the official blessing, but Deng had support from senior party figures, a reputation for competence, and a much better read of what China actually needed to prosper. So while Hua looked like Mao's heir on paper, Deng slowly outmaneuvered him in real life. By 1978, Deng had effectively displaced Guofeng, taken over the reins to the country, and pushed China into what became known as the "reform and opening up" era, shifting the national focus from class struggle and mass campaigns toward economic growth, stability, and modernization. Farmers got more freedom to produce and sell. Factories were pushed to be more efficient. Foreign investment started coming in. China began opening itself to outside trade and technology. The government's message changed, too. Instead of telling people to sacrifice everything for one more political campaign, it started telling them to build, produce, modernize, and deliver results. Under Mao, the question had been: how do we survive the impending apocalypse? Under Deng, the question became: what useful thing can we do with all this underground concrete now that the apocalypse has failed to arrive on schedule? So in the early 1980s, as China opened to markets and local authorities were encouraged to think more economically, Beijing's defense authorities began leasing the shelter spaces of the Underground City to private operators. China, under Deng, was learning to monetize almost anything that stood still long enough, and apparently that included Cold War survival architecture. At first, parts of the underground network became what you might call practical urban overflow space. According to a memoir by a senior official involved in the project, by the 1980s, these spaces had become an underground world of around 800 hostels, plus supermarkets, cinemas, and roller-skating rinks. That is a remarkable afterlife for a nuclear shelter. And the fact that this shows up in a memoir at all tells you how much China had changed. Under Mao, casually revealing details about a secret wartime shelter network in your memoir would have been less "interesting historical disclosure" and more "excellent way to ruin your week, your career, and possibly your existence." That transformation also tells you something important about Deng's China. Mao had ruled like an impatient dictator. Deng ruled more like a mechanic trying to get a broken machine running again, except the machine was a billion-person country and the repair manual had been set on fire. His entire style was more practical, more flexible, and, for the average Chinese citizen, a lot easier to live under than Mao's final years. Now, don't get me wrong, Deng was not exactly Nelson Mandela in how he ran things. The party under Deng still insisted on one-party rule, still kept a hard line on political dissent, and still policed the limits of acceptable speech. But economically, it loosened. And as Beijing's economy boomed, the city grew richer, shinier, and vastly more expensive. Migrants also swarmed in huge numbers looking for work, study, or some version of the Chinese dream. Unfortunately, that dream was not exactly budget-friendly, since housing was ridiculously expensive in China's capital. If only there had been some giant subterranean bunker network built during the Cold War, just sitting there waiting to become cheap housing. Sounds ridiculous, but that was more or less the situation. Over time, the more public-facing underground businesses, like cinemas and shopping areas, mostly disappeared, making room for the hostels, dorm-style rentals, and tiny windowless rooms. Unlike the entertainment spaces, they could solve an actual housing problem. So by the 1990s and 2000s, the Underground City had become a parallel housing market for people who could not afford life above ground. Around this time, those people started being lumped together under the label "Rat Tribe," or *shuzu*. It was a derogatory label for basement and bunker dwellers, mostly migrants and students, people living in cramped underground rooms beneath high-rises, hotels, and residential blocks, because that was the cheapest shelter the capital had to offer. The term "Rat Tribe" tells you how people above ground saw the people below. Yet many of these residents were not criminals or social failures, like many people believed them to be. They were waiters, delivery workers, kitchen staff, foot masseuses, insurance salesmen, students, aspiring actors and designers, and young migrants hungry for the Chinese dream. Like Zhang Xi, a 21-year-old from Inner Mongolia who moved to Beijing to chase acting work and lived underground because it was the only way to make a living in the city. Or Liu Hao, a young writer, poet, photographer, and filmmaker, and Wei Kuan, an insurance salesman who lived in a basement because he was trying to save money for a car and a better life. These people did not move into Beijing's underground city because they had a taste for bunker chic. They moved there because the city above ground had become so brutally expensive that a damp box under the pavement started to look like a rational financial decision. A "room" underground could cost around 400 yuan a month, roughly $66 at the time. Even the pricier end, around 650 to 800 yuan, was only about $105 to $130. That sounds cheap right up until you remember what the tenant was actually buying: a windowless shoebox barely large enough to hold a bed and a tired adult. Four square meters, in some cases. And even then, it was only cheap relative to the city above it. In 2011, the average one-bedroom apartment in Beijing rented for about 3,250 yuan a month, or roughly $500 at the time, and by the mid-2010s, apartments were going for as much as 5,000 yuan. So 400 yuan is hostel money, maybe, and not luxurious hostel money either. And those 400 hard-earned yuan were not getting you some charming underground adventure. You were buying housing stripped down to the barest minimum that could still legally, or semi-legally, pass as a place for a human being to live in. It was affordable in the same way a life raft is affordable compared to a yacht. Technically true. Also, a sign that something has gone very, very wrong. That helps explain why the legal status of these places became so messy. For years, they sat in a grey zone. Everyone knew the conditions were bad, but the city mostly looked away anyway, because the arrangement was useful. Beijing needed those workers, and those workers needed a place they could actually afford. At one point, roughly one million of these people were living underground in a city of about twenty-one million. But in 2010, the authorities changed their mind. The city stopped granting new permits for underground apartments and launched a three-year plan to clear them. Officials pointed to serious hazards like poor ventilation, weak fire escapes, overcrowding, and flood risk. They said the vacant spaces would be turned into public facilities such as car parks, community centers, gyms, and billiards rooms. Officially, this was about safety and urban order. Unofficially, it was also part of a bigger campaign to shrink the migrant presence in central Beijing and "improve the population structure," which is the kind of phrase governments use when they want to move poor people somewhere less visible. By early 2015, it was reported that approximately 120,000 people had been officially evicted from Dixia Cheng. To be fair, some of these spaces really were dangerous. Reports described hundreds of people packed into warrens of rooms with minimal light, poor ventilation, communal facilities, and sometimes frighteningly limited escape routes. A 2017 city inspection of one central Beijing basement complex found 400 people living underground with just one fire escape. Residents were reportedly sleeping next to gas pipes, electrical wiring, and sewers. So officials were not making that part up. The problem was that they offered no housing alternative at all. ## Chapter III: The Ghost Under Beijing Beijing's Underground City, luckily, never had the ending it was built for. The war it was meant to outlast never came. The Soviet bombs never fell on the capital. The six million people it was supposed to protect never had to flood underground with sacks of grain, children in tow. Instead, the place ended up as cheap housing for people who could only afford the trial version of Beijing. The public tourist section, which opened around 2000, allowed a limited glimpse into the underground world Mao had created. But even that has been closed since 2008, officially for "renovation." That is a wonderfully elastic word, "renovation." It can mean work is happening. It can mean nothing is happening. It can mean nobody wants to tell you what is happening. Finally, in August 2019, Beijing issued policies requiring that underground rooms have a per capita living area of no less than 5 square meters, with no more than 2 people per room, effectively shutting down the dense, low-rent, high-capacity living situations many relied on. So what is the Underground City now? Parts of the tunnel system continued to receive routine maintenance, such as water-leak checks and pest control. That does not prove some dramatic hidden rearmament program, sadly for the conspiracy-minded. It does, however, tell you the place has not simply been forgotten and left to fill with dust, rats, and the occasional tragic urban explorer with bad instincts. Which leaves three possibilities. Maybe parts of it are being preserved, because no one quite knows what to do with a Cold War undercity. Nobody really knows how much of that underground nuclear city was ever actually finished, or how far its maze of tunnels and chambers was supposed to spread. One of the most persistent rumors is that the tunnels connect to the political core of Beijing itself, including Zhongnanhai, the leadership compound just west of the Forbidden City, and the Great Hall of the People, the huge state building on the west side of Tiananmen Square where the National People's Congress meets. To be clear, this is speculation, not something Beijing has publicly laid out on a nice, clean map for everyone to inspect. But it fits the original purpose of the place. If you are designing a wartime refuge for the capital, connecting major political sites and evacuation routes is exactly the kind of thing people would expect. And maybe large sections are simply rotting, sealed behind concrete and steel, trapped in the usual fate of mega-projects whose purpose expired before their meaning did. There are accounts of mostly homeless people still using parts of the tunnels to escape Beijing's savage summers and freezing winters, but the honest answer is that we don't know the full picture. What we do know is that the Underground City never fully vanished. It has lingered in a weird half-state: closed, partly maintained, and not quite dead. A ghost city under a living one. And the *shuzu*? They were pushed farther and farther toward the outskirts, trading underground darkness for punishing commutes that could swallow hours each day. Which is a pretty neat summary of how the Chinese Dream turned out in practice. So in the end, Beijing's Underground City was, if nothing else, a bizarre project. A city built for the end of the world. Now it is a monument to a war that never happened, a relic of Maoist paranoia turned into a housing solution for the poor, only to be emptied once the capital got rich enough to find that arrangement embarrassing. Which, in its own way, is probably the strangest and most fitting ending it could have had. ## Key Takeaways - Beijing's underground city, Dixia Cheng, was built to shelter millions during a potential nuclear attack. - Construction began in 1969 due to tensions between China and the Soviet Union, with over 300,000 residents involved. - The underground city included amenities like restaurants, clinics, and even a roller-skating rink to support long-term survival. - After Mao's death, the underground city was repurposed for affordable housing, known as the 'Rat Tribe' dwellings. - The underground city was eventually cleared due to safety concerns, pushing residents to the outskirts of Beijing. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Underground City beneath Beijing? The Underground City, also known as Dixia Cheng, is a massive network of tunnels and chambers built beneath Beijing to shelter millions of people in case of a nuclear attack. It includes facilities like restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, and even a roller-skating area. ### Why was the Underground City built? The Underground City was built in response to the deteriorating relationship between China and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s. Mao Zedong ordered its construction after the Sino-Soviet border conflict and the fear of a potential Soviet nuclear attack on Beijing. ### How long did it take to build the Underground City? Construction of the Underground City began in 1969 and continued through 1979, taking a full decade to complete. ### Who was involved in the construction of the Underground City? Over 300,000 Beijing residents, including students and reportedly even schoolchildren, were mobilized to dig tunnels and chambers by hand, without heavy machinery. ### What facilities were included in the Underground City? The Underground City included restaurants, clinics, schools, theaters, factories, a roller-skating area, mushroom farms, grain and oil warehouses, ventilation shafts, and potential well sites for water. ### What happened to the Underground City after its construction? After Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Underground City was repurposed. In the 1980s, it was leased to private operators and became a housing solution for migrants and students who could not afford above-ground living. ### What is the current status of the Underground City? The Underground City is largely closed and maintained in a state of limbo. Some parts are preserved, while others may be rotting. It has been used by homeless people to escape extreme weather conditions, but its full extent and current use are not entirely known. ### What was the 'Rat Tribe'? The 'Rat Tribe' was a derogatory term for migrants and students who lived in the cramped, underground rooms of the Underground City because they were the cheapest housing option in Beijing. ### Why did the Chinese government evict people from the Underground City? The Chinese government evicted people from the Underground City in 2010 due to safety concerns, including poor ventilation, weak fire escapes, overcrowding, and flood risk. The evictions were also part of a campaign to reduce the migrant presence in central Beijing. ### What is the significance of the Underground City today? The Underground City serves as a monument to a war that never happened and a relic of Maoist paranoia. It highlights the transformation of Beijing from a city preparing for nuclear war to a modern metropolis dealing with housing and economic challenges. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: The Insane Labyrinth Found Beneath Beijing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTuenEcCxtE) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/28/The_platform_and_commuter_tracks_of_Leningradsky_Rail_Terminal_at_night._Moscow%2C_Russia%2C_2026.jpg) by Zac Allan / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage