There is a saying in the trade: for every three fireworks set off anywhere in the world, one comes from Liuyang. This Hunan town makes most of the planet's fireworks — and it is also where they were invented, some fourteen centuries ago. It taught the world to turn gunpowder into celebration.
Liuyang spreads across some five thousand square kilometres of eastern Hunan, under Changsha, and it dominates an industry almost completely. It accounts for roughly 60% of China's domestic fireworks and 70% of the country's exports — and since China makes the overwhelming majority of the world's pyrotechnics, the local boast holds up: of every three fireworks set off anywhere on Earth, about one was made here. The trade is worth on the order of fifty billion yuan a year, runs through more than a thousand firms employing some 300,000 people, and lights birthdays, weddings and national days in over a hundred countries.
The story starts about fourteen hundred years ago. A Liuyang native named Li Tian, in the Tang dynasty, is said to have packed sections of bamboo with an early gunpowder — charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter — and thrown them on a fire to drive away evil spirits. The bamboo burst with a great noise, and the world's first firecracker was born; the Chinese word, baozhu, means literally "exploding bamboo." The powder itself had been stumbled upon by Daoist alchemists hunting the elixir of immortality. In Dayao, the township where it began, a giant bronze statue of Li Tian still stands across from the town's fireworks museum.
This is the quiet remarkable thing about Liuyang: gunpowder was invented in China, and here it was first put to ritual and play rather than the battlefield. The aerial version even has a gentler name — yanhua, "smoke flowers." From Liuyang the practice spread across China, bursting at weddings, births, funerals and the New Year to scare off misfortune and welcome luck. The Qing court patronised the craft; a Liuyang brand took a prize at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair; and in 2007 the town's traditional fireworks techniques were written into China's first list of national intangible cultural heritage.
Liuyang lives on one of the strangest propositions in manufacturing: it sells something bought only to be set alight and gone in seconds — pure, deliberate, ephemeral spectacle. Much of it is still assembled by hand, through twelve stages and seventy-two procedures, a great deal of it by women, because the work resists full automation and because it is dangerous: the governing safety principle is to expose the fewest people to the smallest amount of explosive for the shortest possible time. The supply chain is dense and local — Dayao township alone makes around 70% of the raw materials that go into China's fireworks.
The modern threat came from home. As Chinese cities banned fireworks to fight pollution, Liuyang's domestic market thinned — until late 2023, when the national legislature ruled that blanket local bans were unlawful and cities like Changsha reopened their festival skies. Meanwhile the town reinvents the product: smokeless and cold-light fireworks, daytime displays, indoor and stage pyrotechnics, and fireworks tourism that drew millions of visitors to its shows. Set beside the other deep dives, Liuyang is the oldest cluster in the atlas — a town that invented its product fourteen centuries ago and still lights most of the world's celebrations.