Puyang
Home to China's oldest dragon iconography (6,400 years) and Sinopec's second-largest oilfield. Puyang built an entire petrochemical economy on Zhongyuan crude—now facing the resource city's classic question as the field depletes.
In 1987, archaeologists in Puyang unearthed a 6,400-year-old shell mosaic forming a dragon and tiger flanking a human burial—the oldest dragon iconography ever found in China, pushing the origin of the dragon symbol back 1,400 years. Puyang became the 'Hometown of Chinese Dragons,' a cultural claim that would mean nothing economically if Sinopec had not discovered the Zhongyuan Oilfield beneath the same soil in 1975.
Puyang sits on the northern bank of the Yellow River in northeastern Henan, at the junction of three provinces—Henan, Shandong, and Hebei. The Zhongyuan Oilfield, China's second-largest under Sinopec, reached 1.67 million tons of annual crude output by the early 1980s. The city's economy crystallized around petrochemicals: Zhongyuan Ethylene Corporation, Zhongyuan Petrochemical Corporation, and associated enterprises form a single-industry cluster that generates most of the city's industrial output. A carbon capture and storage project at the Zhongyuan refinery, operational since 2018, captures CO₂ from catalytic cracking units—one of China's earliest CCS-enhanced oil recovery pilots.
The city's population of 3.8 million also depends on agriculture: Puyang is a major commodity grain base, producing wheat, rice, corn, and peanuts. The dual economy—extraction below ground, cultivation above—creates a resource allocation pattern where fossil fuel revenue subsidizes agricultural infrastructure. The acrobatics tradition that earned Puyang its other title ('Hometown of China's Acrobatics') is the cultural residue of a society where entertainment had to be portable and low-capital—skills that could travel, unlike oil.
Puyang's GDP reflects the constraints of resource dependency on a depleting asset. The Zhongyuan Oilfield's best years are behind it; new exploration extends to Inner Mongolia and Sichuan's Puguang gas field, but the headquarters city retains the administrative infrastructure without guaranteed future production. Like organisms that thrived in one geological era and must adapt as conditions shift, Puyang faces the classic resource city question: can the institutional skeleton built around oil support a different economic metabolism?