Chapter 172: The Ten-Thousand-Person Stadium

Having understood the leader’s intentions, the people at the General Construction Company knew exactly where the focus of this project lay.

“In the end, this is a large assembly hall, not a stadium,” Mei Wan said, looking at the pile of drawings in front of him. These were drawings that his subordinates had spent several nights creating. In this time and place, there were no large-format printers; drawings had to be painstakingly drawn line by line on a drawing board.

“Do we need to build the running track?” asked Li Xiaolv, who was in charge of planning and design.

“The track still needs to be built. It’s for military parades and mass processions. We’ll use coal cinders for the material,” Mei Wan considered for a moment, stroking his chin. “The field can be paved with a mixture of sand, gravel, and lime, then rolled flat so that it doesn’t accumulate water when it rains. No other facilities are needed.”

Due to the scarcity of building materials, the large, tiered stands surrounding the stadium would not be built for now. The focus was on the main rostrum. According to Ma Qianzhu’s vision, this rostrum had to be grand and solid, inspiring awe at first sight.

“Majestic, spectacular, and it has to feel very stable, you understand? Stable, symbolizing the great power of our new regime, our prosperous future…” Ma Qianzhu gestured, unsure of what words to use to describe it.

“Like Tiananmen Square?”

“Yes, but don’t you go and replicate Tiananmen.”

“I couldn’t replicate it even if you asked me to,” Mei Wan grumbled. “Where would I get so many resources?”

“Do your best to create the effect. You can brainstorm, you know.”

So that evening, everyone began to brainstorm the structure of this large rostrum. The most common idea was, naturally, the typical design of a stadium rostrum: a high platform in the middle, with slightly lower, extended stands on both wings, and a projecting eave above the rostrum. It was traditional but quite practical. However, this design was too ordinary and clearly could not satisfy Ma Qianzhu’s vision.

However, after news of this construction project spread, many architecture enthusiasts came to the construction company to offer their ideas and suggestions. All sorts of design sketches emerged.

The design that was finally put into construction was a neoclassical building. A huge brick and stone staircase, 300 meters long and 12 meters high, with a colonnade running the entire length of the top step. In the center of the colonnade was a large screen wall—for hanging the symbols of the transmigrator regime, the national emblem, and so on. Evenly distributed along the colonnade were 12 smaller rectangular screen walls for hanging flags.

At both ends of the staircase, square platforms resembling beacon towers were to be built. According to the design, two huge torch cages would be installed here.

A model of this design was made and presented at the Executive Committee meeting. As soon as the plaster model was revealed, an awkward silence fell over the meeting—everyone present had seen films of the Nuremberg Rally and immediately recognized this structure as a replica of the grandstand at the Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, designed by Dr. Speer.

Everyone present carefully avoided mentioning the blueprint of this building. In fact, everyone loved the spectacular feeling of the Nuremberg Rally films, but they were afraid that once this was revealed, the “universal fig leaf” would force them to abandon it.

“Very spectacular,” Ma Qianzhu agreed. “But is the structure too large?”

“It’s acceptable. Given the scale of this stadium, we can design the staircase to be 24 meters high,” Mei Wan pointed to the design sketch hanging on the blackboard. “Right now, the staircase is only 12 meters high, half the size.”

Wen Desi also liked this design. It was indeed spectacular enough. He was already imagining himself reviewing troops and giving speeches from the rostrum. “In my opinion, 24 meters is better. This length with a height of 12 meters is a bit too short.”

“It’s mainly due to limited materials and labor, so we have to reduce the scale a bit,” Mei Wan said.

“I don’t think it matters. This is a project for the ages. A little more investment will be beneficial,” Wen Desi said.

“That’s right. Just increase the height,” Ma Qianzhu was quite generous on this issue. “What about the building materials? It looks like stone from the sketch. How many cubic meters of stone will that require?”

“This can’t be a pure stone building. We don’t have enough stonemasons. Although using black powder for quarrying is efficient, polishing and cutting also require manpower. So we plan to use a technically simpler rammed earth structure, similar to building a city wall, with a stone facing on the outside,” Mei Wan was prepared for this question.

“What about the color of the stone? Can we match it? It would be best to achieve a nearly white effect.”

“The stone quarried from Bairen Beach is bluish-gray, but we can whitewash it with lime. The effect should be acceptable.”

“Why whitewash it? The people of this era consider white to be an inauspicious color.”

“Should we paint it red like Tiananmen?”

“It doesn’t match this style. It would be hideously ugly.”

“I think painting it golden yellow would be best, shining and sacred, like a golden altar.”

“Golden yellow is open rebellion! Besides, what are you going to use to paint it golden yellow? If it’s not painted well, it will look like a temple. What’s so sacred about that?”

In the end, the approved design decided to use lime water for whitewashing. After all, ancient people also whitewashed their houses with lime water, and no one had heard of them considering it an inauspicious color.

In the official drawings, the colonnade on top of this large rostrum was removed. It was too difficult to mass-produce such Roman columns in Lingao. However, enough width was left during construction for future additions. The overall height of the building was also raised to 18 meters.

Although the colonnade on top was not built, the screen wall for hanging emblems still appeared in the official drawings. As for the screen walls for hanging flags, Mei Wan decided to temporarily use wooden frames instead. Each wooden frame was 12 meters high and used for hanging flags. Of course, this was only practical when the wind was relatively light, otherwise the flags would billow like sails.

Considering that there would be typhoons in late summer and early autumn, these wooden frames were designed to be detachable. When not in use, they could be dismantled and stored inside the building—although it had a rammed earth interior, some rooms and passages were also created within it.

After the design was approved, Mei Wan began construction. One of the advantages of a rammed earth structure is that the workers do not need much skill, and a large number of ordinary laborers can be used. The Hakka people from Fujian, who were accustomed to building earthen buildings, were more experienced. These people were used as foremen for the rammed earth work. Combined with farmers recruited from the commune and from outside, the project began with great fanfare. At its busiest, there were nearly a thousand civilian workers on the entire construction site. There were also over two hundred people quarrying and cutting stones in various quarries. Another hundred or so people were collecting oyster shells by the sea to burn lime.

To speed up the progress, Mei Wan also used construction machinery to assist. Digging, piling, and simple compaction were all done by machine, which greatly improved efficiency.

Due to the limitations of the stonemasons’ processing capabilities and technical skills, Mei Wan found that some large and complex components could not be processed by the stonemasons. The largest stone material the local stonemasons had ever processed was the stone arch beam for a bridge, and that had been many years ago.

“If only we had rebar, we could just make precast concrete components,” Mei Wan said with regret after returning from the material yard.

“Steel is so scarce right now, the metallurgy department is not willing to make rebar at all,” Yan Quezhi said.

“How about using bamboo?” said Mei Lin. He had started out as a junior construction worker. In the Lingao Construction Company, which was full of experts, he could only serve as a low-level engineering technician.

“Bamboo-reinforced concrete?” Mei Wan thought for a moment. He had indeed heard of this technology, using bamboo to replace steel in precast components. It was popular for a while in the 1930s and 1940s, and was also used in China during the Great Leap Forward to solve the problem of material scarcity.

“I don’t think so. The yield strength of bamboo is far inferior to steel,” Bingfeng said quickly. He himself had a background in steel frame structures and had of course heard of this unorthodox method. But it had been abandoned by the construction industry for a long time, which clearly meant it did not meet the requirements for use.

“How do we know if we don’t try?” Mei Wan thought that if the experiment was successful, it would be a major positive development for both the construction company and the transmigrators—they would no longer have to waste large amounts of wood to make beams, columns, and floors.

“Boss, precast concrete components can kill people if they collapse,” Bingfeng pleaded. “Haven’t we had enough of the ‘tofu-dreg’ projects in our previous lives? Are we going to start them again in this new world?”

“Technician Bing, looking at this problem from an overall perspective, blindly sticking to the safety standards of our previous time is not feasible,” Mei Lin said.

“What?! Are there modern and past safety standards?” Bingfeng was furious.

Mei Wan tried to calm him down. “Don’t be angry. This is a technical issue. We can discuss it.” He turned to ask Li Xiaolv, who was drawing the overall structural diagram on the side.

“This, you guys figure it out,” Li Xiaolv carefully drew the lines on the drawing. “I studied planning and environment, I don’t know anything about building structures.”

Yan Quezhi said from the side, “Boss, you have to be careful. Construction is a project for the ages. If something goes wrong, it will be a disgrace for a hundred years.”

Mei Lin was still calm. “The current problem is to solve the issue of having it or not having it, right? The Executive Committee has many projects to start next. It’s not a solution to always use wooden boards—Lingao doesn’t have that much wood. We will definitely have to use precast panels. Since it’s still unknown when the metallurgy department can produce enough rebar, it’s not a bad idea for us to try. If it’s successful, the following things will be much easier to handle.”

These words moved Mei Wan. The temptation was too great. He made up his mind.

“Alright, let’s give it a try. We’ll start with small components.”

Most of the people in the Lingao Construction Company had a background in construction and had some knowledge of bamboo-reinforced concrete. Bamboo as a substitute for steel has been a tempting topic for a long time. After all, bamboo grows fast, is cheap, and is easy to process. Using it can save a lot of cost.

However, bamboo has never been able to replace steel. The main reason is that its tensile strength is not as good as steel. The best bamboo material is only equivalent to 80% of the strength of steel, and most are only 50%. Moreover, the elastic modulus of bamboo is only one-tenth of that of steel. This is a very fatal flaw. In addition, bamboo-reinforced concrete also has problems with corrosion, insect infestation, and difficulty in bonding with the concrete material, so it is not as simple to use as it seems.

The first step was to find suitable bamboo for reinforcement. There are many types of bamboo, but the ones that can be used for bamboo-reinforced concrete are basically concentrated in bitter bamboo, moso bamboo, and pale bamboo. Among these three types of bamboo, bitter bamboo has the best tensile strength. The Japanese conducted a large number of bamboo-reinforced concrete tests during World War II and concluded that bitter bamboo was the most suitable material for bamboo reinforcement.

Bitter bamboo is widely distributed in China. Although it is not everywhere in Hainan, it is not difficult to find. A call was immediately made to the Forestry Department under the Ministry of Agriculture Committee.

“You want bitter bamboo? No problem, I’ll send people to harvest it tomorrow,” Wu Kuangming said on the phone.

“No, we will send the requirements for harvesting bamboo to your OA later. You must make it clear to the harvesting team that they must harvest it completely according to our requirements, otherwise it will be useless.”

The raw bamboo for bamboo reinforcement is very particular. First, it cannot come from overly fertile soil. Bamboo from overly fertile soil has thick walls, is soft, and lacks elasticity. The bamboo joints are prone to blackening and breaking after harvesting—and the bamboo joint is the part of the bamboo with the highest tensile strength.

According to Japanese experience, the best bamboo for reinforcement is harvested from mountains where it grows mixed with trees such as fir. The bamboo culms are tall and straight, with short joints, thin walls, and good elasticity. The harvesting time should be on a dry, moonless night, because bamboo harvested on a moonlit night contains more moisture, and the bamboo sap is sweet, which is prone to insect infestation.

The harvesting age of the bamboo is 5 to 6 years. If it is too young, it is too soft. If it is too old, it gradually loses its oiliness and lacks elasticity. Even the harvesting itself has certain technical requirements. Seeing the information that Luo Duo found from the Great Library, Mei Wan smiled wryly at Mei Lin and said, “This thing is not easy at all.”

Mei Lin was not sure in his heart. Seeing that this bamboo-reinforced concrete manual was so thick, he was a little scared, afraid that it would be too complicated and he would be the one who started it. But since the work had already begun, he couldn’t back down. He had to put on a confident look.

“The complicated procedures show that it is indeed effective. Otherwise, writing such a book would be meaningless. This is the accumulated experience of our predecessors in engineering and construction.”

Of the harvested bamboo, only the part from the 2nd to the 21st joint above the root can be used as bamboo reinforcement. It is required that the bamboo joints are dense and uniform, and there are no signs of decay or insect infestation. The harvested bamboo was sent to the wood processing plant in Bopu, where it was first moderately dried and dehydrated—it could not be too dry, a certain amount of moisture had to be retained. Then it was treated for anti-corrosion, waterproofing, and anti-alkali in the chemical plant in Bopu.

Due to the special properties of bamboo as a plant, it expands when it absorbs moisture during the pouring of concrete. As the concrete gradually dries, the bamboo shrinks and hardens due to the loss of moisture. Moreover, the shrinkage of bamboo is greater than that of concrete and the shrinkage speed is much faster. In this way, it doesn’t take long for the bamboo reinforcement to loosen and separate from the concrete, and the bond between the two is lost.

In addition to the problem of dehydration, bamboo reinforcement also faces alkali corrosion. Tests conducted by the Japanese before World War II showed that untreated bamboo reinforcement in concrete completely lost its strength after 6 months due to alkali corrosion.