Monument to Remember National Humiliation

Monument to Remember National Humiliation

The Monument to Remember National Humiliation is a cultural tourism attraction and a classic red tourism site.

The Jiangwan Chongshan "Monument to Remember National Humiliation" is located in Chongshan Village, Choujiang Subdistrict, Yiwu City. It was built by the people of Yiwu to commemorate the victims who died in the Japanese invasion’s bacteriological warfare. In 1996, it was designated by the Yiwu Municipal Committee as one of the city’s first patriotic education bases.

Background: On May 15, 1942, to neutralize the threat of U.S. air raids on mainland Japan, the Japanese military launched the Zhegan–Jiangxi Campaign. On May 21 of the same year, they occupied Yiwu County. On September 3, 1942, a Japanese aircraft flew low over Chongshan Village but instead of dropping bombs, released a long trail of smoke-like substance from its tail. Over ten days later, bloated and furry dead rats began appearing all around the village. From then on, the plague spread rapidly through Chongshan and neighboring areas. Within two months, 403 villagers died from the plague, 23 families were wiped out, and the death toll accounted for about one-third of the village's population.

During this period, Unit 731 of the Japanese army and the Nanjing-based Ryo No. 1644 Unit twice invaded Chongshan Village. They exhumed fresh graves of victims, removed limbs and livers from the corpses, and conducted live autopsies. The plague bacteria extracted from the villagers were named the “Matsuyama strain” and used as the parent strain for further cultivation. To destroy evidence of the bacteriological warfare, on November 18, 1942, the Japanese set fire to Chongshan Village, burning down 176 households and 421 houses, leaving more than 700 people homeless.

In 1999, through a combination of government funding and voluntary public donations, nearly two hundred thousand yuan was invested to construct the "Monument to Remember National Humiliation" and the "Calamity Pavilion" at Línshān Temple, the site where the Japanese military carried out bacteriological experiments.