Songshan

　　On a map depicting battles of World War II inside the China History Museum in Beijing, several striking red dots are scattered across the chart, one of which is labeled with two characters: Songshan.

　　In Japan, a man named Shinjino wrote a book neither thick nor thin: *Ghosts in a Foreign Land*. Almost every chapter, section, and page of that book revolves around two characters: Songshan.

　　This towering mountain stands majestically northeast of Longling, an important town on Yunnan’s border. Perched above the treacherous Nujiang River and guarding the critical passageway between Yunnan and Myanmar, it features deep valleys and high peaks, making it easy to defend but hard to attack. Over half a century ago, the Japanese army took advantage of the area's massive trees to construct an extensive network of fortifications across the rugged ridges and cliffs—riddled with trenches, tunnels, and bunkers. They arrogantly declared that Songshan was the “Maginot Line of the East.”

　　History ruthlessly shattered the Japanese army’s boasts. Songshan turned over three thousand Japanese soldiers into “ghosts in a foreign land.” On June 4, 1944, hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the 11th Army Group of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, under the command of generals such as Wei Lihuang and Song Xilian, crossed the blood-stained Nujiang River and launched a desperate assault on the entrenched Japanese forces at Songshan. After 95 days and nights of fierce fighting, by September 7, the gunshots finally ceased—all three thousand stubborn enemy troops were annihilated, with none surviving. Meanwhile, 6,763 soldiers from the 8th Army of the Expeditionary Force also shed their blood on Songshan, dying as martyrs. Today, the smoke of that brutal battle, once dubbed the “Gibraltar of the East,” has long since dissipated.

　　The once-charred mountaintop is now covered with young trees; the brave names engraved on stone tablets have faded over time, but the blood of the martyrs lives on in the rings of the pine trees. Towering, solemn pines stand like the undying spirits of the anti-Japanese soldiers atop Songshan, while the distinctive misty rain and sudden sunshine of the “Rain Screen of Western Yunnan” drift and swirl here from time to time, as if draping a grand white veil over the spirits of the fallen.