Panzhihua City, why doesn’t it look like a city in Sichuan?

Panzhihua City in Sichuan Province is undoubtedly unique. It is the only city in the country named after a flower and enjoys the reputation of "the flower is a city and the city is a flower". However, Panzhihua is very unlike any city in Sichuan. Why do we say that? Today we will talk about this city.

Panzhihua is located at the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan in southwest my country, the southernmost tip of Sichuan, and the middle and southern section of the Panxi Rift Valley. It is surrounded by Liangshan Prefecture of Sichuan on the north, east and south, and borders Lijiang and Chuxiong of Yunnan on the west. Panzhihua has a complex terrain, with the Hengduan Mountains to the west, the Daliang Mountains to the east, and the Daxue Mountains to the north. The Jinsha River runs through the city and meets the Yalong River here. The mountains are high and the valleys are deep. More than 90% of the city is mountainous. The total area of ​​the city is 7,414 square kilometers, and it has 3 districts and 2 counties under its jurisdiction: East District, West District, Renhe District, Miyi County, and Yanbian County, with a permanent population of 1.214 million (2019).

Panzhihua is a famous resource-based city in my country with extremely rich mineral resources. For example, the proven iron ore reserves account for 72.3% of the proven iron ore reserves in Sichuan Province, making it one of the four major iron ore areas in my country. The titanium resource reserves account for 93% of the country, ranking first in the world; the vanadium resource reserves account for 63% of the country, ranking third in the world; and the proven graphite resource reserves rank third in the country. The establishment of Panzhihua City is related to the local mineral resources. In other words, it was established because of the mines.

This was originally a village with only 7 households. It was named Panzhihua Village because there was a huge Panzhihua tree at the entrance of the village. In the 1950s, geologists discovered a large vanadium-titanium magnetite mine with a reserve of hundreds of millions of tons here. Since then, the quiet village has gradually become noisy.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the international situation was grim and the national third-line construction was in full swing. The iron ore discovered in Panzhihua happened to be the resource needed for industrialization. Starting in 1964, 100,000 young people began to come to Panzhihua from all over the country and began to build mines and steel mills in the mountains with extremely difficult conditions. In 1965, the Panzhihua Special Zone was established and renamed "Dukou City" for confidentiality. Why is it called Dukou City? Because it used to be the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan. That area was the transfer station for the salt and tea trade between Sichuan and Yunnan on the Ancient Tea Horse Road. Not far after the Jinsha River is the border of Yunnan. People had to cross there to go, so it was called "Dukou". In 1987, Dukou City was renamed Panzhihua City.

According to statistics, from 1965 to 1978, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from 28 places across the country gathered in Panzhihua and made immortal contributions to the construction of Panzhihua. There are people from nearby Sichuan and Yunnan, people from farther away Hubei, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Beijing, Tianjin, etc., and many people from the Northeast, the old industrial base in the Northeast. These people from different parts of the country gathered together, naturally with different accents, and finally formed the unique Panzhihua dialect, a southwestern dialect with a strong Northeastern accent.

Someone once said that if you meet a Sichuanese with a strong northeastern accent, nine out of ten are from Panzhihua. In Panzhihua City, you can hear northern accented Mandarin everywhere. Language is one aspect, and the food, customs and other aspects are obviously different from other places in Sichuan. It is said that more than 80% of the population of Panzhihua are immigrants and their descendants, making it the largest immigrant city in western my country. Because it is closer than Kunming, Yunnan, some Panzhihua people may have been to Kunming, but not to Chengdu. Panzhihua is more influenced by Yunnan.

Panzhihua has made great contributions to my country's industrialization process, but due to its special terrain, it has not yet been connected to high-speed rail. You should know that Panzhihua Iron and Steel is one of only three companies in the world that can produce 100-meter rails. It can provide 50,000 meters of rails for my country's high-speed rail every day, and has contracted two-thirds of the country's 100-meter high-speed rail rails.

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