Like many of the Middle Kingdom's myriads of settlements, Tangshan's history is a long and perplexing four thousand years. First a city in the outskirts of the Shang, this city passed hands among changing dynasties and often was the site of countless shifts in the Mandate of Heaven, situated in the north of China.

Its history is one of shifting livelihoods, though the city is likely most known in history as a mining site during first the Ming and later the Qing, who invested lavishly in bringing modernity to the neglected arts of engineering and industry in the empire, but perhaps the city did not truly show its face until the arrival of a new Mandate in China, bore not by the Manchus or even the ill-fated Republic, but by the Yamato under their new banner of 'Pan-Asianism'.

The former East Hebei Autonomous Government and North China Political Council, later folded into the new Republic of China born under the fires of Japan's Greater East Asian War, laid the foundations of the city becoming what it is today. An industrial behemoth adjacent to the Empire of Manchuria, Tangshan symbolizes the triumph of Japanese Pan-Asianism as one of the earliest cities to have fallen under Imperial jurisdiction. At the same time, it acts as a practical transportation hub between the resource-extracting region of Manchuria and refinement plants around North China.

Being one of the less devastated population centers for its strategic value to early mainland colonies, refugees from the southern provinces flood into Tangshan whenever possible, either to seek work at the many settlements in the metropolitan vicinity or to pass the bounds of Jinzhou, searching for tolerable conditions that so many have never experienced. This issue of illegal passage has become prohibited in recent years as border administrations become overwhelmed by strained enterprises that can barely support their current populations.

However, even as a policy of 'gun to the head' became commonplace, it failed to stop desperate folks across China from seeking the fabled holy grail just through this gateway to Manchuria. What it becomes next is anyone's guess, as the factions of the Kuomintang push and pull the destiny of the Middle Kingdom anywhere and everywhere.