“I worked in China Fall ‘76 to Spring ‘77 in a fertilizer plant being built in Shuifu village in Yunnan Province on the Yangtze River. When I arrived, there were men hauling barges up the river using towlines. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
They built an enormous dam there and now river navigation is all with modern freighters. I don’t recognize the place in the photos!”
in 1981 they were widening the narrow, harrowing road from Beijing to the Great Wall tourist site ... they had a plethora of workers literally breaking rocks by hand with hammers and chisels and using hand-drawn, two-wheel wooden carts to move the rocks about ... the Great Wall hotel they built for the Reagan visit visibly leaned from the vertical ...
today they have superhighways and incredible skyscrapers everywhere ... Japan did a similar thing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ... the orientals are an amazing people ...
They cast a concrete foundation for the boiler stack a couple feet two tall. It was about 12 feet in diameter. They put a crew on it with crude rebar chisels to reduce the height by two feet. By hand!
Same as you saw.