Monument to Anti-Japanese Heroes and Martyrs

Monument to Anti-Japanese Heroes and Martyrs

The Monument to Anti-Japanese Heroes and Martyrs is a cultural tourism attraction and a classic red tourism site.

This monument is located in the Xin Tan Chang Coal Port in Pukou, Nanjing — the largest inland coal port in China.

After the Japanese invaders occupied Nanjing on December 13, 1937, this coal port became a wharf for the Japanese aggressors to plunder China’s resources. Adjacent to the wharf were two “prisoner-of-war camps” established by the Japanese army.

Before the Japanese occupation, the Pukou Xin Tan Chang area was home to an egg-breaking factory run by the British (specializing in egg whites). After the occupation, it became the Mitsui Wharf operated by the Japanese trading company Mitsui Bussan. To carry out their frenzied exploitation of China and suppress anti-Japanese forces, in early 1940, the Japanese invaders built two prisoner-of-war camps in the riverside area of the Mitsui Wharf, covering approximately three to four thousand acres. The camps were surrounded by water on three sides, with a heavily guarded entrance and exit on the fourth. Three layers of two-meter-high barbed wire fences (with an additional electrified wire in between) were erected around the perimeter. Inside the camps, there was a watchtower manned by a Japanese guard squad and an artillery unit — equivalent to a battalion’s strength — which jointly detained prisoners with the Japanese military police in Pukou Town.

Starting in 1941, the Japanese army transported over 5,000 captured New Fourth Army soldiers, guerrillas, and other anti-Japanese fighters to the Pukou POW camp in six separate batches from places such as Taiyuan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan. There were also a small number of civilians — including small vendors, children, and others — who had been arrested simply for not having a “residence certificate.”

Within the camps, prisoners became forced laborers for the Japanese at no cost. Every day, they were driven to the docks early in the morning to load Chinese ores and coal onto ships, which were then continuously shipped to Japan. They worked up to sixteen hours a day.

Prisoners endured inhumane torture in the camps. Their food consisted of moldy beans, dried sweet potatoes, rotten broad beans, or sorghum flour — and even that was insufficient. At first, they were not even given clothes. During the freezing cold winters, prisoners wrapped themselves in straw or made makeshift clothing by poking holes in burlap sacks. Living conditions were even worse — hundreds of people crammed into low wooden sheds with thatched roofs. When it rained, water leaked everywhere. Meanwhile, they frequently suffered brutal abuse from the Japanese. Beatings and curses were common, and any perceived disobedience could result in being bayoneted or thrown into the river. In the bitter cold, some prisoners were stripped naked, doused with water, and tied to trees to freeze to death like popsicles. Others were bound to trees, force-fed water until their stomachs swelled, and then beaten to death with heavy wooden sticks when their abdomens were split open. The atrocities committed by the Japanese are too numerous to list. The area around the dam and kiln of Xin Tan Chang in present-day Pukou was the mass grave where the Japanese buried Chinese prisoners. By August 15, 1945, when Japan surrendered, over 4,000 patriotic soldiers had been killed here. Only about 800 survived.

The brutality of the Japanese in the camp eventually provoked a collective uprising among the prisoners. Between May 1942 and April 1944, they organized four escape attempts, but only about a hundred managed to get away. Most were killed by Japanese gunfire or bayonets.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the Nationalist government and some soldiers voluntarily raised funds to erect a monument at the center of the site where the remains of the victims lay. Behind the monument, a memorial tower was built, inscribed with nine large characters: “Monument to Comrades Who Suffered for the Anti-Japanese Cause.” After the liberation, due to insufficient recognition of the sacrifices of these anti-Japanese heroes, both the tower and the monument were destroyed.

After the 1982 cultural relics survey in Nanjing, this site was designated as a district-level cultural heritage protection unit.

On the eve of National Day in 1989, with the support of the Pukou District People’s Government and the leadership of the Nanjing Port Authority, a new “Monument to Anti-Japanese Martyrs Who Suffered” was erected at the intersection of Minsheng Street in Xin Tan Chang. It has since been used to educate young people in Pukou, as well as local officials and the general public, about patriotism and revolutionary traditions.