Each crate held twenty-four kilos of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, fifty tons of it altogether in the ten trucks. The final, somewhat smaller truck carried a few bundles of bamboo strips for lashing the explosives together, and a pile of black plastic bags, which the miners knew held electronic detonators.

Liu Xin and Li Minsheng hopped down from the cab of one of the trucks and saw the newly appointed captain of the demolition squad, a muscular, bearded man, coming their way with a roll of charts.

“What are you making us do, Engineer Li?” the captain asked as he unrolled the paper.

Li Minsheng pointed to a spot on the chart, his finger trembling slightly. “Three blast lines, each thirty-five meters long. Detailed positions are on the chart underneath. One-hundred-fifty-millimeter and seventy-five-millimeter boreholes, filled with twenty-eight kilos and fourteen kilos of explosives, respectively, at a density of …”

“I’m asking, what are you trying to make us do?”

Li Minsheng went silent and bowed his head under the captain’s fiery stare.

The captain turned toward the crowd. “Brothers, they want us to blow up the tunnels!” he shouted. There was a moment of commotion among the miners, but a wall of armed police came forward in a semicircle to block the crowd from reaching the trucks. But the police line distorted under the pressure of the surging black human sea, until it was at the breaking point. All of this took place in a heavy silence, with the scuffle of footsteps and clack of gun bolts the only sounds. At the last moment, the crowd ceased its tumult as the director and mine head stepped up onto the bed of one of the trucks.

“I started work in this mine when I was fifteen. Are you just going to destroy it?” shouted one old miner. The wrinkles carved into his face were visible even beneath the thick cover of coal dust.

“What are we going to live on after it’s closed?”

“Why are you blowing it up?”

“Life in the mine was difficult enough without you all messing around.”

The crowd exploded, waves of anger surging ever fiercer over the sea of coal-blackened faces flashing white teeth. The director waited silently until the crowd’s anger turned to restless movement, then, when it was just about to get out of control, he spoke.

“Take a look in that direction,” he said, pointing to a small rise near the mine entrance. His voice was not loud, but it quieted the angry storm, and everyone looked where he was pointing.

“We all call that the old coal column, but do you realize that when it was erected, it wasn’t a column, but a huge cube of coal? That was in the Qing Dynasty, more than a hundred years ago, when Governor Zhang Zhidong erected it at the founding of the mine. A century of wind and rain have weathered it into a column. Our mine has weathered so much wind and rain during that century, so many difficulties and disasters, more than anyone can remember. That’s more than a brief moment, comrades. That’s four or five generations! If there’s nothing else we’ve learned or remembered over the past century, then we must remember this—”