When you have spent years wandering around a Chinese city on an ebike, you actually miss things. It’s an experience and foot-on-the-ground thing. Ebikes are more localized due to the range of a battery’s charge, and cars cover a much longer distance. Scooters are better for cruising through alleys whereas a car can get stuck a complex u- and/or k-turn situations in profoundly weird rural situations on narrow roads. Trust me, I’ve been stuck there before.

There’s that, and then there’s the culture of gas stations. Normally, there isn’t a “culture of gas stations.” They usually tend to be sterile places where you fill your fuel tank and buy a cold drink and a snack before hitting the road again. Visiting the restroom for a poo or pee is just a given.

However, I have been on back roads in North Carolina and West Virginia. In Appalachia, I have seen gas stations that also sold liquor, ammo, shotguns, and pets. This was in wooded mountains, and it was deer season. Still, those gas stations had some very confused parrots and kittens in cages — while some dude with a greasy mullet intensely, and very loudly, negotiated the price of a box of buckshot.

To be clear, I haven’t seen anything like that in China. Yet, in Changzhou’s northern Xinbei district, I have found a gas station that is just patriotically weird. I have never seen anything like it elsewhere. And it’s highly militaristic with both painted propaganda and actual hardware laying around. I have yet to figure out why it’s there. Baidu Maps lists the location as only a gas station and not a museum or an army recruiting station. So, to that end, here are some pictures.