Inside mysterious radioactive city '404' where China built its first atomic bomb and carried out nuclear experiments

The abandoned city has derelict apartment buildings, a shuttered park and a zoo with empty cages
By CHRIS KITCHING

Haunting footage shows the decaying remains of a deserted city which was built to develop nuclear bombs during the Cold War.
The mysterious Chinese city, called 404, has been abandoned for years, with derelict buildings falling into ruin, public squares left eerily desolate and vegetation overgrown.
Buildings once used in the early stages of China's nuclear weapons programme still contain equipment.
Set in the Gobi Desert, the ghost town was once home to the country's top nuclear experts and was named after a company owned by the China National Nuclear Corporation.

A Statue of Mao Zedong.
Equipment left behind in one of the buildings.
Apartments that were once home to thousands of workers are scattered throughout the city in China's Gansu province.
It has become a favourite stop for urban explorers and photographers.
There is an abandoned park and children's playground in the centre of 404, a zoo with empty cages and a rail line that ferried employees between their homes and work.
A public square is home to a statue of Mao Zedong and the city contains empty hotels, post offices, hospitals, police stations, supermarkets and old power plant cooling towers.

The population dwindled over the decades.

The City was once a thriving settlement.
It isn't listed on public maps and its location was a secret when it was used for nuclear experiments and the building of China's first atomic bomb.
But it is still home to hundreds of residents and businesses.
In 1958 China's government approved the construction of the country's first nuclear production factory, coded 404, and a flourishing city grew around it, CRI reported.
Abandoned 404 once had everything you could want in a city.

Some buildings have fallen into ruin.

But the city started to fail in the 1970s as other cities grew.
It became virtually deserted after China announced the end of nuclear experiments in 1996, with only about 1,000 people remaining.
In a blog post, Li Yang, who grew up in 404, said the city covers an area of four square kilometres and was home to a court, government, media, school, theatre, park "and anything else you want from a city."

The city is still home to around 1,000 people.

He wrote: "It also used to have the first military nuclear reactor of China. Today, it is basically deserted. It is said that there is an underground nuclear base. But I have never seen it.
"But the air-raid shelter in 404 is like a large labyrinth. In the 1980s, the underground project was deserted and become a children's secret amusement park."
He added: "Today, only some old people live in that town, and they have decided to die there. I am afraid my hometown will disappear forever together with its last senior residents."

Tibetan Buddhist monk self-immolates in west China

By Christopher Bodeen

BEIJING — A Tibetan Buddhist monk has set himself on fire in western China in what appeared to be the latest such radical protest against Beijing's rule, a U.S. government-backed radio station and rights monitoring group said.
The unidentified monk set himself alight on a road outside the town of Machu in a traditionally Tibetan area of Gansu province at around 7 p.m. Thursday, Radio Free Asia and London-based Free Tibet reported.
Police who arrived shortly afterward took the monk away and there was no immediate word on his condition, they said.
A man who answered the phone at a regional police station hung up immediately after the caller asked for information. 

Calls to other government offices rang unanswered.
While information from the isolated area is incomplete, the incident is believed to bring to at least 146 the number of Tibetans who have self-immolated in recent years, about 125 of whom have died, according to monitoring groups.
Eyewitnesses have been quoted as saying that many of those who self-immolated cried out for Tibetan independence or prayed for the return of the Dalai Lama. 

Tibet's Buddhist leader fled Tibet in 1959 amid an abortive uprising against Chinese forces who had occupied the Himalayan region a decade earlier.
While China claims Tibet has been part of its territory for more than seven centuries, many Tibetans say they were essentially independent for most of that time.
Thursday's self-immolation was the first known to have occurred since either March or May, perhaps reflecting stepped-up security measures in Tibetan areas of western China where most such incidents have occurred.
The protests are seen as an extreme expression of the anger and frustration felt by many Tibetans — both lay people and members of the Buddhist clergy — living under heavy-handed Chinese rule.
In a new book on the self-immolations, Tibetan writer and rights activist Tsering Woeser describes them as forming a "broad protest movement that continues to this day."
"Because no other method is available for Tibetans to voice their protests, and because only the horror of self-immolation is able to capture the attention of the world, it has become the choice of the bravest protesters in Tibet," Woeser writes in "Tibet on Fire: Self-Immolations Against Chinese Rule."
Tibetan monks and nuns are among the most active opponents of Chinese rule in the region and the strongest proponents of Tibet's independent identity, prompting the authorities to subject them to some of the harshest and most intrusive restrictions.
Those include the stationing of police and informers inside monasteries and a 2007 regulation stating that reincarnations of high-ranking lamas — a central feature of Tibet's unique tantric strain of Buddhism — must be subject to Communist Party approval.
Beijing blames the Dalai Lama and others for inciting the immolations.

The Dalai Lama says he opposes all violence but has neither publicly condemned nor encouraged the self-immolations.