From the Coalface at 12 to a Doctorate in Engineering: The Extraordinary Journey of “Coal Miner No. 3”

At an age when most children are thinking about school, games, and the future in only the vaguest terms, one boy from a poor mountain village in China was already going underground.

He was 12 years old when he began following his father into small coal mines. The work was not a childhood adventure, nor was it something he had chosen because he dreamed of becoming a miner. His family needed money, and survival came before comfort.

Years later, that boy would become known online by the nickname “Coal Miner No. 3.” By then, however, the setting had changed completely. Instead of standing at the coalface, he was completing advanced research. Instead of measuring his days by shifts in mines and on construction sites, he was working toward a doctoral degree.

In June 2025, after a long and unconventional academic journey, he graduated from Beijing University of Technology with a doctorate in engineering. The university later confirmed that he had been a full-time doctoral student at its College of Architecture and Civil Engineering from September 2020 until June 2025.

His story attracted widespread attention in China after passages from the acknowledgments of his doctoral dissertation circulated online. What made the account powerful was not simply the dramatic contrast between a coal mine and a university campus. It was everything that happened between those two points: unsuccessful attempts, exhausting jobs, years of study, help from people who believed in him, and a refusal to treat a difficult beginning as a final verdict on his life.

China Daily reported that the graduate asked for his name not to be disclosed because he did not want public attention. He said he had shared his acknowledgments principally in the hope that his experiences might encourage other students.

That decision to remain largely anonymous makes his story unusual in an era dominated by personal branding and viral fame. The central figure is known less by his name than by the distance he traveled.

A Childhood Shaped by Work

According to reporting by China Daily and the South China Morning Post, as well as accounts published by Beijing University of Technology, he came from a small mountain village and left home at a young age to study martial arts. By the time he was 12, he was accompanying his father into coal mines while his mother held the household together.

Mining represented a world in which family income depended on demanding manual labor and where education could not simply be taken for granted.

Yet the boy continued studying.

That detail is crucial because stories of dramatic upward mobility are often compressed into a convenient formula: a poor child works hard, studies hard, and eventually succeeds.

His real path was far less straightforward.

He did not move seamlessly from poverty into a prestigious university. He worked, struggled, sat important examinations more than once, entered higher education through a vocational route, and then continued advancing one stage at a time.

He later wrote that after finishing high school, he did not want to place too much financial pressure on his parents.

The result was a working life that reads almost like a map of hard physical labor across China.

During school breaks, he took jobs on an electronics factory line in Shanghai. He worked at construction sites in Jiaozuo in Henan province, including tying steel reinforcement. He helped pave asphalt on highways in Handan, Hebei province. He returned to mining work, including jobs around blasting operations in Jincheng, Shanxi province, and excavation work at another coal mine.

He also worked in restaurants and food shops on campus, cooking, clearing tables and doing whatever ordinary work was available to help support himself.

None of those jobs looked like part of a conventional academic résumé.

But together they helped finance a life in which education remained possible.

Two Attempts at the Gaokao

One of the most important turning points came through the gaokao, China's national college entrance examination.

It is one of the country's most consequential academic examinations, and the scale of the competition is enormous. According to China's Ministry of Education, 13.35 million people registered for the gaokao in 2025 alone. Exam results play a major role in determining access to higher education and the institutions students can attend.

For the future doctoral graduate, success did not arrive on the first attempt.

He took the gaokao twice.

At 19, after his second attempt, he scored more than 500 points and gained admission to a vocational college.

That achievement may appear modest when viewed from the perspective of his eventual doctorate, but it was the foundation on which everything else was built.

He did not begin at the top of China's higher-education system.

He began with vocational education and kept moving forward.

He later progressed into undergraduate study in geological engineering, followed by postgraduate work related to mining engineering. Eventually, he would pursue doctoral research at Beijing University of Technology.

The sequence matters because it challenges the idea that an educational career must be perfectly linear in order to be successful.

His own recollections repeatedly emphasized that he often felt slower than other people.

He did not always have the same resources as his peers.

China Daily reported that he did not even own his first computer until the second year of his postgraduate studies. He also needed two attempts before finally securing the opportunity to pursue doctoral study.

Yet being slower did not mean standing still.

The Skills Learned Outside the Classroom

His years of manual work did more than pay bills.

They also gave him an unusually direct relationship with the industries he later studied academically.

A student can learn about mining and underground engineering from textbooks, diagrams, laboratories, models and simulations.