Masonry Magazine October 1998 Page. 33
Pieces of plywood form bridges over a poured concrete foundation of an apartment complex under construction in China. When work on the high-rise portion of the structure continued all night, the men wheeling concrete from the mixer had to negotiate the maze of boards in almost total darkness. The only construction lights were a couple of bare bulbs high up in the building where the concrete was being poured.
foundations of an addition. Power machinery? Forget it. The tools of the project were picks and shovels. Ten men were slowly accomplishing what a machine could have knocked out in an hour.
Work methods don't seem to have changed much over the centuries. At the gorgeous collection of buildings and parks near Beijing that the former emperors used as their summer palace, an artificial lake was constructed hundreds of years ago. It took 100,000 men with shovels to do it, but the same job would probably be done the same way today. It is supposed to have taken a million laborers to erect the 800 buildings of the Forbidden City, where the emperors ruled. The same size crew would probably be needed today.
The Great Wall, 3,000-plus miles long, must have required immense numbers of men to haul rocks and baskets of clay over steep mountains. The technology may have been crude, but the results remain spectacular. Given the terrain where the wall is, creeping across the tops of mountains, any repairs done now will still likely have to be undertaken with hand tools and concrete carried up the countless steps in buckets.
One thing is the same on Chinese building sites as it is on those here. Workers welcome visitors. When a tourist showed up on a site in Xian with a camera in hand, all work stopped and the smiling laborers quickly laid down their tools and posed for pictures. The foreman finally realized that the visitor wanted pictures of work in progress, not just smiling faces, so with a couple of words he sent his men back to work. As they continued shoveling they still made sly grins toward the camera.
Editor note: Frank Bredell is a public relations counselor and writer based in Lincoln Park, Michigan, and has toured China
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MASONRY-SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER, 1998 33