TA-CH'ING

Pinyin Daqing, oil field in Heilungkiang province, China, one of the country's most important sources of oil. It is situated in the north of the Sungari-Liao River basin, between Tsitsihar and Harbin, in the general vicinity of An-ta, northwest of Harbin. The field was discovered in the late 1950s and drilling began in 1958, often in difficult conditions caused by the extreme winter cold and by deep permafrost in the soil. Large-scale development began in the early 1960s. A large refinery was built at the field in the 1960s, and by 1980 the field's refineries were producing 128,000 barrels a day. A number of subsidiary chemical plants using petroleum by-products and waste have also been installed. A crude-oil pipeline was built to the port city of Ch'in-huang-tao in 1973 and extended to the refineries of Peking in 1975; some of the crude oil continues by rail from Peking to other parts of the country. The Ta-ch'ing oil field produces two-fifths of China's total annual crude oil output. During the Cultural Revolution (196676) Ta-ch'ing was publicized as a model centre of a large industry organized on Maoist lines, being praised for the self-reliant, can-do attitude of its workers, whose improvised technical innovations helped them develop a new oil field using only primitive equipment. The growth of the oil industry in the locality was paralleled by the development of farms worked by the oil-workers' families.