Eastern "Ten Thousand People Pit"

Eastern "Ten Thousand People Pit"

On March 15, 1940, the Japanese army occupied Shilu. On April 7 of the same year, Japan’s "Shilu Survey Team" discovered an iron ore deposit near the Shilu Copper Mountain. News of the discovery of the Shilu iron mine quickly reached Japan. Due to wartime needs, developing iron ore resources became a top national policy for Japan. To sustain the war effort, the Japanese government determined to implement a development plan led by the navy, establishing the Nanyo Branch of the Japanese company headed by Yasuda Yutaka, which was specifically responsible for the development of the Shilu mines.

The four major projects undertaken by Japan in the development of the Shilu mines—the mining operation itself, the Shilu-to-Basuo railway project, the Basuo Port project, and the Eastern Hydropower Project—forcibly recruited or deceived tens of thousands of laborers from Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Macau, Taiwan, and Hainan Island. Most of these laborers came from Hong Kong, followed by Guangzhou, then Shanghai, Taiwan, and others. In addition, the Japanese military also pressed over a thousand British, Indian, and Canadian prisoners of war into forced labor.

Of the twenty thousand laborers conscripted by the Japanese to build Basuo Port, the majority were killed, crushed, drowned, starved, died of disease, or froze to death. By August 1945, when Japan surrendered, only about 2,000 of the more than 20,000 laborers at Basuo Port remained, with over 18,000 having perished. Initially, the dead were cremated on piles of firewood, their ashes placed in small wooden boxes and stored in the "People's Temple." Later, as the number of deaths increased and even firewood became scarce, the Japanese ordered corpse collection teams to dig a large pit on a sand dune about 1 kilometer south of Yulinzhou at the port. They would frequently dump several, a dozen, or even dozens of bodies there, then cover them with a thin layer of sand. Once the entire pit was filled and exposure from weathering left the remains visible, flocks of crows fought over the corpses, creating a scene of unspeakable horror—this eventually became known as the "Ten Thousand People Pit."

In 1988, the Hainan Provincial Department of Culture and Sports and the government of Dongfang County (now Dongfang City) erected the "Monument to the Laborers Who Died Under Japanese Occupation at Basuo during the Invasion of Hainan" on the site of the "Ten Thousand People Pit." It has since become a patriotic education base in Hainan Province.