About Ma'anshan Television

Ma'anshan Television

Overview

Ma'anshan Television is the prefecture-level television station of Ma'anshan in eastern Anhui, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now part of the Ma'anshan converged media centre. Its flagship channel broadcasts local news and community programming in Mandarin. Ma'anshan, on the Yangtze opposite Nanjing's orbit, is a steel city — the home of Magang — famed as the place where the Tang poet Li Bai spent his last years and died at Caishiji, giving the station a strong poetry-and-river cultural identity.

Two names organise this city's story: steel and Li Bai. One built the modern city in a generation; the other has drawn travellers to its riverside cliff for twelve centuries. Ma'anshan Television is the broadcaster of both — of rolling mills and of the Catching the Moon Terrace — and its schedule is the place where the prefecture's industrial present and poetic past meet each evening.

The city it serves

Ma'anshan is a prefecture-level city in eastern Anhui, on the south bank of the lower Yangtze, within easy reach of Nanjing — the Jiangsu capital lies some forty-five kilometres away — and inside the Yangtze River Delta's economic orbit. It administers Yushan, Huashan and Bowang districts together with Dangtu, Hanshan and Hexian counties, and its population is over two million. The city's name, Horse Saddle Mountain, is tied in legend to Xiang Yu, the Hegemon-King of Chu, whose horse is said to have died here after his defeat, leaving a saddle-shaped hill; the modern city, by contrast, is young — a creation of the steel age built around mines and mills on the river plain.

The prefecture's geography is riverine: the Yangtze bends past the city, joined by tributaries among lakes and wet lowlands, with Dangtu's farmland and Hanshan's and Hexian's hills behind. For the station, Ma'anshan is three territories in one — the steel city proper, the old county town of Dangtu with its Li Bai associations, and the rural counties across the river plain — all within a short reporting radius and all bound into one bulletin.

The steel city and Magang

Ma'anshan's growth accelerated in the twentieth century with the Ma'anshan Iron and Steel Company — Magang — which transformed an ore town into one of China's key steel cities. Iron mining around the city and steelworks along the river made Ma'anshan's name: it became known across China for its train wheels and tyres, its heavy sections and plate, and as a textbook example of a resource-based industrial city. Magang's fortunes, investments, product shifts and environmental retrofits remain the city's largest single economic story, and the steelworks' communities — their housing, schools, shift life and retirements — form a defined audience with its own news.

Industrial coverage in Ma'anshan is therefore livelihood coverage. The station follows the steel market that decides the city's income, the diversification into equipment manufacturing, new materials and port logistics along the Yangtze, and the deliberate greening of a steel city that has worked to present itself as clean and landscaped as it is industrial. Economic transformation — of pits, plants and riverfront land — is the standing development narrative into which daily business news fits.

Li Bai and Caishiji

The city's cultural soul belongs to Li Bai (701–762), the greatest poet of the Tang dynasty, who spent his final years in the Ma'anshan area, wrote many poems at Caishi, and died at Dangtu, where his tomb lies at the foot of Mount Qingshan southeast of the county town, in a three-hectare grove of pine and willow with its Taibai memorial hall and stele forest. The legend of his death — that the drunken poet plunged into the Yangtze at Caishiji trying to embrace the moon's reflection, from the terrace still called Catching the Moon Terrace — is among the most famous stories in Chinese literature, and Caishiji guards it.

Caishiji, or Caishi Rock, seven kilometres southwest of the city, is a precipice of coloured stone rising some fifty metres beside the river — by its older name Niuzhuji, Bull Islet Rock — counted one of the three famous river rocks of the Yangtze, alongside Chenglingji at Yueyang and Yanziji at Nanjing. On Green Snail Hill above it stand the Taibai Tower, the Li Bai Memorial Hall — among the largest dedicated to the poet in China — Sanyuan Cave and the Santai Pavilion. For the station, Caishiji is both beat and backdrop: poetry festivals, calligraphy gatherings, conservation and visitor news, and the city's annual commemorations of its adopted poet all pass through its cultural programming.

The Yangtze city

The river is Ma'anshan's frame and highway. The Yangtze here is a working waterway of barges and bulk cargo serving the steelworks and the delta, a flood-management responsibility, and increasingly a landscaped frontage of parks, wetlands and night-time riverfront developments that present the city to itself at leisure. Bridges tie Ma'anshan into the Nanjing metropolitan circle, and high-speed rail from Ma'anshan East puts the city within the delta's commuting web; regional integration — with Nanjing above all — is a constant theme of municipal policy and of the station's news.

River coverage takes the practical forms a Yangtze city requires: shipping and port operations, flood-season levels and embankment work, water ecology and the fishing-ban regime that has restored the river's fish stocks, and the tourism of the riverfront. In Ma'anshan the river also carries the poetry: the views Li Bai versified from Caishi are the same waters the evening bulletin reports, a continuity the station's features like to draw.

Dangtu, Hanshan and Hexian

The counties complete the prefecture's depth. Dangtu, one of the oldest county towns on the lower Yangtze, holds Li Bai's tomb and the Qingshan cultural landscape. Hanshan County holds the Lingjiatan site, a Neolithic settlement of some 5,300 years ago famous for its jade artefacts — including early jade dragons — now presented in its own site museum as a chapter of China's earliest jade civilisation, and Baochan Mountain, known through Wang Anshi's celebrated essay on its cave. Hexian is remembered as the home county of the Ming founding general's era figures and for the scholar-official tradition of the lower Yangtze, with its own old town fabric.

County reporting gives the station its range beyond steel and poetry: rice and aquaculture on the river plain — the counties farm the water network of ponds and paddies between Yangtze and Chao Lake — rural revitalisation, county-town construction and the heritage tourism growing around Lingjiatan and the Li Bai trail. The prefecture bulletin binds these quieter stories to the city's industrial news as one civic whole.

Community programming and culture

The flagship channel's recorded format — local news and community programming in Mandarin — fits a compact, urban prefecture. Community strands serve the steel neighbourhoods and new districts: property and services, schools and hospitals, traffic on the river bridges, consumer and market reporting, and the cultural calendar of a city that stages poetry recitals at Caishiji, museum exhibitions — the city museum presents Lingjiatan jades, Three Kingdoms material and the steel city's history — and riverfront festivals. Calligraphy is a local thread of its own: Lin Sanzhi, the master of cursive calligraphy celebrated as a sage of the art, is commemorated at Caishiji, where his art museum stands.

Food and festival life add colour the cameras return to: the river fish and farm produce of Dangtu, the crab and aquatic harvests of the plain, and the night economy of the Yangtze frontage. In the station's hands, community programming is the connective tissue between a heavy-industry economy and the households that staff it.

The converged media centre

Ma'anshan Television operates within the city's converged media centre, the integrated newsroom combining radio, television and new media under the city's radio and television broadcaster, in line with the national reform of prefecture broadcasting. In the Yangtze Delta's media environment — where Ma'anshan competes for attention with Nanjing's powerful outlets — convergence gives the local service its edge of proximity delivered at digital speed: river levels, bridge traffic, steel-city services and Caishiji events reach residents' phones from the same newsroom that fills the evening bulletin.

The centre's short-video output also serves the city's cultural branding, carrying Li Bai's cliff, the stele forest and the riverfront to national audiences — poetry tourism being one of the few markets in which a city of two million can out-shine its giant neighbour. The television flagship remains the service of record, the shared screen on which Ma'anshan's districts and counties are reported together.

Place in Anhui's media landscape

Ma'anshan Television is the prefecture voice of Anhui's Yangtze gateway, between the provincial media in Hefei — and the metropolitan media of Nanjing across the river in influence — and its own county services. Its distinction is the elegance of its double inheritance: a steel city that China knows by its mills, and a river cliff that China knows by its poet. To report both faithfully, in Mandarin, for the community that lives by the one and in the shadow of the other, is the station's continuing work — and the reason its cultural identity, as its catalogue description notes, is written in poetry and river.