The sign said farm tools.
Why rifles?

The full narration of the video.

In a mountain valley in Hebei stood a factory, and its sign read: Beijing No. 1 Farm Tools Factory. But it didn't make hoes. It made rifles. Over the years it turned out about 290,000 rifles. Its workers called it Factory 960.

Why would a Beijing factory hide in the hills of Hebei? And why would a rifle factory say it made farm tools? Go back to 1964. China feared war could break out at any moment. Picture this: you keep everything valuable you own on a window sill facing the street.

Factories back then were a lot like that. Most were packed into the coast and big cities, the first places bombs would fall. So the country was split into three lines: the coast and borders were the first, the middle the second. The mountains of the southwest and northwest were the third. Huge numbers of factories moved deep into those mountains. That was the Third Front.

But the third line was far away. If the roads were cut, who would the coastal provinces count on? The answer: each province hid a small rear base in its own nearby hills. Making its own guns and bullets, that was the Small Third Front. One of Beijing's rear bases was in Chicheng, Hebei. It sat only about fifteen kilometers past Beijing's border.

Choosing a site came down to three rules: against the mountains, spread out, hidden. So the workshops hugged the foot of the hills, and the name said farm tools. Letters went to nothing but a P.O. box number. Work began in April 1965, and in about six months the buildings and machines were ready. The first 670 workers came mostly from factories in Beijing.

At its peak it had more than 2,600 workers. With families, close to 5,000 people, as if a small town had grown in the valley. They made a semi-automatic rifle, and kept at it for seventeen years. Then the fear of war faded, and orders dried up. In 1979 the factory switched to air rifles for export.

It made more than 84,000 of them, but that lasted only a few years. In October 1988, the last workers left the valley for the city. So the farm tools sign was no joke. It was protection: if war came, the enemy couldn't find it, and the rear would still have guns. Luckily, that war never came. The factory was like a spare key: made, hidden, and never once used.

Today the old site is becoming a retirement town. And back then, provinces on the first and second lines all built rear bases like this. Near your hometown: was there an old factory known only by a number or a P.O. box?