he dish is made from 4,450 triangular panels that have been painstakingly lowered into place.
While the structure in its entirety is too big to move, each of the panels can be adjusted. It means the telescope’s surface can be re-angled to allow scientists to study the parts of the sky they choose.
The man masterminding this ambitious project, Prof Nan Rendong of the National Astronomical Observatories at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the telescope has been the biggest challenge of his career.
“Guizhou is a developing province and our site is remote, in a poor area of countryside,” he explains.
All the heavy parts of the structure we had to transport from an industrial area, thousands of miles away, across these terrible winding roads.”
Sometimes the problems seemed to be insurmountable, he says, and at times, he wanted to give up. “In the end, though, we found a way.”
In ancient times, China was a world leader in science, famed for four great inventions - the compass, papermaking, printing and gunpowder. But over the centuries, as the ruling dynasties placed more focus on the arts, progress stagnated.
And in the 1960s, in the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, things got even worse. Many intellectuals and academics were forced to move to the countryside, and most scientific research came to a halt.
But projects like the Fast telescope are powerful symbols of a scientific renaissance. In 2013, China’s research and development spending overtook Europe’s and it is set to outstrip the US’s by 2020.
A recent assessment by the journal Nature revealed that in terms of the number of papers being published, China now ranks second in the world behind only the US.
“I think in China, there seems to be a sense of urgency. There’s a feeling that in the last 100 years, we lost a lot of opportunities because we weren’t doing research,” says Charlotte Liu, managing director in China for the science publisher, Springer Nature.