The traditional iron industry in Hunan and Jiangxi

‘Old charcoal blast furnace in the interior of China’ (probably Hunan or Jiangxi), 1938. (Technische Mitteilungen Krupp: Technische Berichte, 6, no. 4, 1938, pp. 108–12).

Blast furnaces in Hunan, 1958. (Photo Rewi Alley, archives of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge).

Diagram of a blast furnace with wooden facing in Sichuan, 1958. (Yang Kuan, Zhongguo gudai yetie jishu fazhan shi, Shanghai 1982, p. 185).

In Hunan and Jiangxi provinces in central China we again find two very different types of blast furnace in operation, large and small. The large furnaces, seen here on the right, had an inner shaft of sandstone and an outer frame of wood; the space between these was filled with hard-tamped earth. The fuel was most often charcoal, but in some places coke. They produced typically 1.3–1.4 tons of pig iron per day.

Ironworks in central China, either Hunan or Jiangxi, ca. 1910. (Stahl und Eisen, 1912, 32.4: 1407).

One of the small blast furnaces is shown in the photograph above. The fuel was either coke or anthracite, never charcoal. Production was typically 0.4–0.5 tons per day.

Mao Zedong’s report on local conditions in Xunwu County, in southern Jiangxi in 1930, tells more about the economic and social conditions of the operation of (presumably) the large blast furnaces. Production had declined because of foreign competition, but the iron industry was still active, with six ironworks in operation.

The report also tells briefly of Yudu county, further north, where there were said to be 3800–3900 large and small ironworks in operation. On its face it is difficult to believe that there should have been so many in a single county (3000 sq.km, about the size of Cornwall or Delaware), but it is not impossible. It may very well be that agricultural conditions in Yudu were so poor that a large part of the population lived on iron production alone – once again a question of comparative advantage. This was the case in large parts of Shanxi.

Click on any image to see it enlarged.