On paper the logic was sound. Vietnam imported most of its steel, Hà Tĩnh had a coast deep enough for ore carriers, and sixty kilometres north sat the Thạch Khê iron mine with reserves put at 544 million tonnes. In 2008 the Taiwanese conglomerate Formosa Plastics Group formed Hưng Nghiệp Formosa Hà Tĩnh Steel to build a mill against that geography, and in 2010 the province allocated it 3,300 hectares in Kỳ Anh district. The first cost estimate was fifteen billion dollars. By 2012 it was twenty-two.

Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng attended the groundbreaking on 2 December 2012. What rose alongside the mill was a whole industrial region: gigawatt-scale thermal power stations, and the Vũng Áng–Sơn Dương port dredged deep enough to berth ships of three hundred to five hundred thousand tonnes. Investors bought in. China Steel of Taiwan lifted its holding from five per cent to twenty-five in early 2015; Japan's JFE Steel took five per cent for $215.2 million. Late that year the plant produced the first hot-rolled coil ever made in Vietnam. The first blast furnace was fired in May 2017, the second in May 2018.

Then the fish began arriving dead.

They came ashore along four provinces of the north-central coast from April 2016 — more than a hundred tonnes of them, along with much of what they fed on. Divers found the reefs stripped: forty to sixty per cent damage across roughly 450 hectares of coral. Fishermen in Quảng Bình alone counted losses of $5.2 million, and tourist numbers fell by close to a third; nobody wanted the beaches or the seafood.

The mill was the obvious suspect and denied it. Early tests showed elevated phosphate and abnormal pH, and Vietnamese authorities said no link had been shown; the plant was ordered to dig up its waste pipe so inspectors could monitor it properly. On 30 June a government investigation concluded what the coast had assumed for two months. The discharge came from Formosa Hà Tĩnh. It contained phenol, cyanides and iron hydroxides, and it reached the sea when a power failure knocked out the waste treatment system during wet coke quenching. The company blamed subcontractor errors during trial operations, accepted responsibility, and agreed to pay $500 million. The Prime Minister called it the most serious environmental disaster Vietnam had ever faced.

Compensation is not the same as trust. From May 2016 into the following year Vietnamese took to the streets in numbers the country rarely permits, in a movement that came to be called the Fish Revolution, and the demonstrations spread to Vietnamese communities overseas.

The state's answer was to prosecute the people documenting it. Nguyễn Văn Hóa, a young journalist who covered the protests, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Lê Đình Lượng, an activist working on behalf of affected fishing families, received twenty years, with five further years of house arrest to follow.

The plant kept building. A further $350 million followed in 2017, part of it for coke dry quenching — the technology that takes the water out of the process that poisoned the sea.

Building the mill was dangerous work, and at times violent. During the anti-China riots of May 2014 the site was attacked and set alight; four Chinese workers were killed, three thousand more were evacuated out of the country, and construction stopped for ten weeks. Those four men had come to Hà Tĩnh for a wage and died in a quarrel between governments that was not theirs.

In March 2015 scaffolding at the construction site collapsed. Sixteen workers were killed; more than a hundred were injured or trapped in the wreckage.

On 30 May 2017, the day after test operations resumed following the fish kill, a lime kiln exploded; the cause was a blocked dust filter and nobody was hurt. On 26 August 2021 a gas leak inside the plant killed three workers.

The last cost never reached a balance sheet. Specialists who monitor human trafficking noted that as the fishery collapsed, the movement of young Vietnamese to Europe increased — people from a coastline with no work left, borrowing heavily against a promised job abroad.

On 23 October 2019, thirty-nine Vietnamese were found dead in a refrigerated lorry container in Essex, England: thirty-one men and eight women, ten of them teenagers, the two youngest fifteen-year-old boys. They had died of hypoxia and hyperthermia. Twenty came from Nghệ An and ten from Hà Tĩnh — the same two provinces whose beaches the fish had washed up on three years before.

No court has drawn a line from the steel plant to that container, and no honest account should claim one is proven. But the families who buried those children live within sight of the water, and they can tell you precisely when it stopped feeding them.