In 1964, Lei Yuqi, chief production controller of the Taiyuan Copper Corporation in Shanxi Province, came across an interesting item in Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News: the story was about the Shanghai Smelting Works retrieving cultural relics from scrap metal. "If they can discover cultural relics in scrap metal," he thought, "why not follow their example and examine our scrap metal before we smelt it?"

Thus, one day, he found a tiny bronze spade in a heap of unwanted metal. According to experts from the Shanxi Provincial Museum, it was a spade-shaped coin of the Western Zhou Dynasty (c. 1100-771 B.C.), considered a first-class cultural relic by national standards. Inspired by the discovery, he began to encourage the workers of the corporation to comb through the scrap metal they collected to look for objects of cultural and historical importance.

Over the past decades, more than 50 tons of cultural relics dating from between the Shang (c. 1600-c. 1100B.C.) and Qing (1644-1911) Dynasties have been gleaned from scrap metal at the Taiyuan Copper Corporation and thus saved from destruction. Among these, the largest is a bronze statue of Buddha two meters tall, and the smallest are objects such as coins, arrowheads, and gilded statuettes.

The first-class cultural relics discovered include a loop-handled pot belonging to Sufu Wu, a noted personage of the Shang Period; a spade-shaped coin of the Western Zhou Period; a dagger-ax manufactured under the supervision of Lu Buwei of the Qin Period (221-206 B.C.); and an elliptical measure of the Han Period (206 B.C.-A.D. 220). Second-class cultural relics number more than 200, including ding (cooking vessels with two loop handles and three or four legs), jue (wine vessels with three legs and a loop handle), hu (pots), dou (stemmed cups or bowls), dagger-axes, swords, halberds, buckles, mirrors, stoves, lamps, and seals. In addition, there are more than 3,000 third-class cultural relics. All these finds have been handed over to the Shanxi Provincial Museum for preservation and exhibition.