Xi's Imprint on the Era | The Story of Making Fire

Fire is a symbol of human civilization.

But the process of making fire is full of hardships.

More than fifty years ago, a young Xi Jinping came to Liangjiahe on the Loess Plateau, a barren mountain village in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province. Due to the lack of vegetation, local people did not even have enough firewood for cooking.

After becoming the village’s Party secretary, Xi began thinking about ways to solve the villagers' difficulty in using fire.

Reading a report about the promotion of biogas utilization in southwest China’s Sichuan Province made him determined to help villagers in Liangjiahe use biogas for cooking and lighting.

To this end, he and his colleagues traveled thousands of miles to Sichuan to learn from their experience of using biogas.

After returning to Liangjiahe, Xi and the villagers started to build biogas digesters.

He led the villagers in digging sand and transporting cement, and produced lime by calcining limestone to build the first biogas digester in Shaanxi.

Biogas brought new hope. The first biogas lamp on the northern Shaanxi plateau was lit up in Liangjiahe, and the problem of burning firewood that had vexed the local people for so many years was solved.

Local newspaper "Yan'an Newsletter" reported the story with the headline "The Story of Making Fire".