On a quiet river in central China’s Anhui province, villagers in Hanshan county stopped to stare as a sleek black shape sliced through the water with a low mechanical growl.
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It was not a military test or an industrial prototype. It was a home-made submarine – designed, built, and piloted by Zhang Shengwu, a 60-year-old farmer with no engineering degree and no blueprint to follow.
“I’d watched boats all my life,” Zhang told Dawan News, a government-affiliated outlet, referring to the years he spent managing a tiny riverside dock in his village. “But I always felt something was missing.”
Fascinated by invention since childhood, he had often dreamed of building machines that were beyond the means of his rural life. But it was not until 2014, when a programme on state broadcaster CCTV featured a submarine slipping beneath the waves, that one idea took hold with irresistible force.
“I’d seen wooden boats and iron boats,” he said. “But never one that could go underwater.” Within days, he had scraped together 5,000 yuan (US$700), bought steel plates, a battery and an engine – and began building in secret while his wife was away caring for his mother-in-law.
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The first prototype emerged two months later. It was 6 metres long (19.6 feet), weighed 2 tonnes and was capable of diving 1 metre deep.