China launched Shenzhou 5 on October 15, 2003, from the Jiuquan launch centre in the Gobi desert, carrying its first astronaut, Yang Liwei, into orbit. It made China the third country to put a human in space entirely on its own, after the Soviet Union and the United States. Yang circled the earth fourteen times. Twenty-one hours up. He came down by parachute in Inner Mongolia. The whole country followed the flight from the moment the rocket lifted.
The programme had been building for a decade. The manned effort was approved in 1992 under the name Project 921. It ran in secrecy through the 1990s, developing the Shenzhou capsule, which was designed in China but followed the shape of the Russian Soyuz, and training a first group of astronauts from air force pilots. Four test flights without a crew went up between 1999 and 2002 before the crewed one was judged ready.
The gap between the firsts was the point. Gagarin went up in 1961. Shepard followed later. China's first came forty-two years after that, and the gap says how far the country had to travel, and how hard the technical base was to build without outside help. The capsule carried the instruments, the space food and the pressure suit, all of it made in China, and Yang's flight proved the whole chain worked end to end.
It was a first step, not an end. Further Shenzhou flights followed, and a small laboratory station, and then a permanent one, Tiangong, assembled in orbit from 2021, with Chinese astronauts living aboard on rotations. The programme has also sent robotic craft to the far side of the Moon and brought samples back, and Shenzhou 5 is now the date the rest of it is measured from.