It’s tempting to file Zigong under “history and festivals,” but that misses something important: this is, at heart, an engineering town. The same instinct that drove its salt-workers to drill a kilometre into the earth with bamboo and muscle is still visible in the city today — in its industry, its export trade, and its relationship with technology.
The first deep-drilling technology on Earth
Zigong’s great original contribution to world technology is deep percussion drilling. Centuries before the petroleum industry existed, local crews were sinking boreholes hundreds of metres deep using a heavy iron bit on a bamboo cable, lining the holes with bamboo casing, and even fishing broken tools out of the bottom with purpose-built recovery implements. When the Shenhai Well passed 1,000 metres in 1835, Zigong held a world record that wouldn’t be casually beaten for a long time.
This toolkit — boring, casing, and downhole recovery — is essentially the ancestor of modern oil and gas drilling. The method spread outward from Sichuan, which is why Zigong is sometimes called the cradle of the borehole.
Harnessing natural gas, early
Zigong’s drillers didn’t just find brine; they found natural gas, and they learned to pipe and burn it as fuel to evaporate the brine — an integrated energy-and-chemicals operation running centuries ago. Managing flammable gas, bamboo pipelines, and giant evaporation pans safely was its own hard-won body of practical engineering knowledge.
A working town, still
That industrial DNA never left. Modern Zigong remains a manufacturing and export city, and its single most globally visible high-tech-meets-craft product is, fittingly, the festival lantern: an export business that blends traditional artistry with steel framing, motors, LED lighting, and logistics to ship room-sized illuminated sculptures to clients around the world. Salt chemistry, hard-hat industry, and a thriving lantern-export trade all trace back to the same local habit — figuring out how to build the thing yourself.
The throughline
From a bamboo drill bit in 1835 to LED dinosaurs crated for export today, Zigong’s story is one long demonstration of practical, hands-on innovation in a place few outsiders would think to look for it.