🏭 Niangziguan Power Plant: Where Three-Body Was Born

In eastern Shanxi Province, China, at the foot of the Taihang Mountains, there's a place called Niangziguan.

Here stands a decommissioned coal-fired power plant. Its smokestacks no longer smoke, its turbines no longer turn. But in the hearts of Chinese sci-fi fans, a light still burns there.

Because this is where Liu Cixin — a computer engineer — spent more than twenty years writing the Three-Body trilogy in his spare time.

The Power Plant Years

From the 1980s into the 2010s, Liu Cixin worked as a computer engineer at the Niangziguan Power Plant. His day job had nothing to do with science fiction — maintaining the plant's computer systems, troubleshooting technical issues. After work, he would return to his dormitory, sit at his desk, and write.

That desk was the cradle of Three-Body.

Liu Cixin once recalled that life at the plant was monotonous and isolated. The plant was far from the city, surrounded by mountains. Every day he faced not stars and galaxies, but boilers and turbines.

Yet it was precisely this isolation that freed his imagination. In the least sci-fi place imaginable, he wrote the most ambitious sci-fi epic of our time.

What His Writing Space Looked Like

Liu Cixin's "writing room" was simply a desk in the plant dormitory. He once described it:

> "After work, the whole building was quiet. I'd make a cup of tea, turn on the desk lamp, and start writing on manuscript paper. Outside the window was the silhouette of the Taihang Mountains. In those moments, I felt the world outside was very small — but the world inside my head was immense."

It's said that the earliest manuscripts of Three-Body were written on the back of A4 printer paper from the plant's office supplies.

Why "Niangziguan"?

Niangziguan (literally "Lady Pass") is a famous historical fortress in Chinese history, named after Princess Pingyang, sister of Emperor Taizong of Tang, who once commanded a women's army stationed there. It has been a strategic military site for centuries. Centuries later, a sci-fi writer wrote a story about cosmic warfare here — history's coincidences can be stranger than fiction.

The Plant Today

The Niangziguan Power Plant was officially decommissioned in 2017. However, its identity as the "birthplace of Three-Body" has attracted large numbers of sci-fi fans on pilgrimage. The buildings still stand, but the site is not open to the public.

There are rumors that local government and cultural authorities are planning to transform the plant into a sci-fi cultural landmark — possibly an expansion of the Liu Cixin Sci-Fi Literature Museum.

How to Make the Pilgrimage

If you want to visit Niangziguan:

- Location: Niangziguan Town, Pingding County, Yangquan City, Shanxi Province

- Transport: About 1 hour by car from downtown Yangquan

- Nearby: The Liu Cixin Sci-Fi Literature Museum is in Yangquan city center

- Note: The plant itself is not open to the public, but you can feel the atmosphere from outside

A Three-Body fan's tribute: Stand outside the plant, look at those silent cooling towers, and think — beneath every tower's shadow, a line of text might have been born that would later be read by tens of millions.