Zhan Tianyou

Also known as Zi Juancheng

Zhan Tianyou, courtesy name Juancheng, was born in Nanhai, Guangdong, to a family from Wuyuan in Huizhou. He went to America in 1872 with the first group of Qing government students and finished a civil engineering course at Yale's Sheffield Scientific School before being recalled in 1881, when he was first sent to the Fuzhou naval school to learn navigation. He moved into railway work in 1888, helping build the Tianjin and Shanhaiguan lines. When the Qing court decided in 1905 to build the Beijing–Zhangjiakou railway without foreign engineers, he became its chief engineer, carrying the line up the Guangou pass with a zigzag switchback and boring the Badaling tunnel; it opened in 1909. In the early Republic he directed the Hankou–Guangdong–Sichuan railways and headed the Chinese Institute of Engineers, and he died in Hankou in April 1919. In 1982 his grave was moved beside Qinglongqiao station on the line he built.