Keeping the fires burning

At Shougang Park, efforts have been underway to keep those heritage bonds alive. At the mid-April event, three retired employees donated personal items to root the place more deeply in its own history.

Zhang Shijun, in his 70s, walked up to the front and center of the themed day event, holding a few old French newspapers that he had kept for 38 years. He entered Shougang in 1980 after finishing metallurgical machinery and electrical engineering studies in college. In his younger days at work, he won just about every award a young employee could win.

"I can't document the past 100 years — I wasn't born yet," Zhang says with a smile. "But I can document 50 years."

The newspapers reported on a Shougang team that was sent to the northern French city of Calais in 1988 on a mission to dismantle an entire steel plant and ship the equipment back to China for reassembly. The timeline was pressing, and the 45 men of the team worked around the clock.

The coverage emphasized their exceptional efficiency, technical expertise, and strong work ethic, noting that they dismantled thousands of tons of equipment in months for immediate reassembly in China. The French report also framed Shougang's actions as evidence of China's impending economic rise.

By then, they could not have known that by 1994, Shougang would produce 8.24 million tons of steel annually, ranking it first in China, Zhang says with pride. Although the French newspapers are no longer in his hands, he says it gives him great comfort to see them enter the museum's collection.

Zhang's bond with Shougang is personal, forged over decades inside the plant. But today, Shougang's bond with its former employees has expanded to the public.

Shougang Park received over 13 million visitors in 2024, an 8 percent increase from the previous year.

But average spending per visitor was below the citywide average, and the park's service area is limited, considering daily visitors reached 150,000 during the 2022 Winter Olympics, according to Fu Fan, a professor at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. Fu has conducted extensive research in the park area.

He notes that the official strategy blends culture, commerce, sports, tourism, technology, and science education, but says there are always ways to improve the visitor experience.

Fu suggests further tapping into the site's history, architecture, and nostalgia to develop a vessel — something that can be consumed, experienced, and shared — so the public and the industrial site can build a closer relationship.

Bu Xiting, a professor at the Communication University of China, offers a way forward, which he calls "cultural reproduction".

He points to the Tate Modern in London, a power plant built in the mid-20th century and now a world-famous museum that deliberately preserved its industrial space.

The lesson for Shougang, he says, is clear: "Instead of waiting 20 years for it to become waste, why not treat it today as an industrial design and an artistic statement?"

He emphasizes immersive experiences that invite visitors to step inside and take it all in.

"The space must wrap around them. The narrative must invite participation. The experience must engage all the senses: hearing, smell, touch, temperature," he says.

Besides envisioning Shougang as a new stage for cultural consumption, an incubator for technological innovation, and a laboratory for the digital economy, Bu says the key is to turn distant collective memory into personal experience — something that can be touched and felt.

At Shougang Park, the furnace no longer burns, but the event's participants concur that something else is burning now.

"The difficulty of preserving living heritage is that it depends on people — on oral transmission, on hand-me-down stories," Song says.

"But that is also its value. It is not a museum specimen. It is life still unfolding."