The Bridge Today: Memory, Museums and the Cost of the War

The shots fired near Wanping on the night of 7 July 1937 began eight years of war that killed somewhere between 14 and 20 million Chinese, by the most common Western estimates, and drove tens of millions from their homes. This last chapter follows the war from 1938 to the Japanese surrender at Nanjing in September 1945, sets out what it cost and why the numbers are still argued over, and then returns to the bridge: how China, Taiwan and Japan remember the war, how conservators have kept an 800-year-old stone bridge standing, and what a visitor finds there today.

Why it mattered

By the end of 1937 Japan held Beiping (Peking), Tianjin (Tientsin), Shanghai and the Nationalist capital at Nanjing (Nanking), as the earlier chapters of this collection describe. Tokyo expected the Chinese government to come to terms. It did not. Chiang Kai-shek’s government moved inland, first to Wuhan and then up the Yangtze to Chongqing (Chungking), and kept fighting. For the next seven and a half years China fought a war it could not win on its own against an enemy that could not finish it. For four of those years, until Pearl Harbor, China fought largely alone.

The price was enormous. Rana Mitter’s history of the war, Forgotten Ally, and the Oxford research project he led describe a war that killed up to 20 million people and created between 80 and 100 million refugees (Mitter, Forgotten Ally; History News Network interview, 2013). Diana Lary, who has written on the war’s social history, gives 20 to 30 million dead (Lary, Asia-Pacific Journal). Japan, too, lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in China, and the China war led directly to the decisions of 1940 and 1941 that brought Japan into war with the United States and Britain.

That is why the stone bridge over the Yongding River southwest of Beijing matters so much. In the People’s Republic it is where the national war of resistance began, and the national museum of that war stands inside the walls of Wanping at its eastern end. In Japan the same war was officially called an “incident” for four and a half years, and how it is taught and remembered is still a political question. In Taiwan, where many families had men serving on the Japanese side, the war is remembered in a third way. Historians, meanwhile, have argued over whether 7 July 1937 should be counted as the start of the Second World War itself.

1938: Taierzhuang, the dikes and Wuhan

Japan began 1938 trying to end the war by political means. On 16 January Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro announced that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang’s Nationalist government, a statement that closed the door on a negotiated peace for years. On the ground, the Japanese armies in North and Central China set out to join their two fronts by taking Xuzhou, the junction where the Tianjin–Pukou railway, running north and south, crossed the east–west Longhai line. Whoever held Xuzhou controlled movement across the North China plain.

North of Xuzhou, at the walled canal town of Taierzhuang in southern Shandong, Chinese forces under Li Zongren won their first large victory of the war. From 22 March to 7 April 1938, troops of Sun Lianzhong’s 2nd Army Group held the town in house-to-house fighting against the Seya detachment of Isogai Rensuke’s 10th Division, while Tang Enbo’s 20th Corps came in on the Japanese flank. Itagaki Seishiro’s 5th Division failed to break through to help. On 7 April the Japanese line collapsed and both divisions pulled back (van de Ven, China at War; Mitter, Forgotten Ally). Li later called it the first happy occasion since the war had begun.

How large a victory it was depends on whose numbers you use. Mitter, van de Ven and Richard Frank put the Japanese dead at about 8,000; Peter Harmsen gives about 20,000 killed and wounded. The Chinese historian Jiang Keshi, working from Japanese unit records, concluded that total Japanese casualties were under 2,500. Chinese losses were heavy, about 20,000 killed and wounded by Harmsen’s and Stephen MacKinnon’s estimates. The battle’s real effect was on morale, in China and abroad. It showed that the Chinese army could stand and win.

It did not save Xuzhou. Japan poured in reinforcements, and the city fell on 19 May. The next Japanese objective was Zhengzhou, where the Beiping–Hankou railway crossed the Longhai line, and beyond it Wuhan, the three-city complex on the middle Yangtze where the government had gone after Nanjing. To stop the advance, Chiang Kai-shek approved one of the most destructive decisions of the war: breaching the dikes of the Yellow River.

Nationalist troops first tried to blow the dike at Zhaokou on 4–6 June and failed. On 9 June 1938 they broke it at Huayuankou, north of Zhengzhou, digging by hand when explosives were not enough. The river poured southeast across the plain into the Huai River basin, and summer rains made the flood worse. A postwar survey by Han Qitong and Nan Zhongwan, published in 1948, counted 893,303 dead in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu, 3,911,354 people displaced, and nearly 20 million mu of farmland, about 35 percent of the cultivated land in 44 counties, under water (disasterhistory.org, after Han and Nan). Other historians, including Micah Muscolino and Diana Lary, give “more than half a million” dead (The China Project, 2023). The flood cut the railway and held up the Japanese drive on Zhengzhou, and the delay gave the government time to move industry and offices out of Wuhan. The river was not returned to its old course until 1947, with relief agency help.

Japan then turned up the Yangtze. The campaign for Wuhan lasted from June to October 1938 and was the largest of the war so far: more than a million Chinese troops against an attacking force of 350,000 to 400,000 men, supported by aircraft and river warships. Anqing fell on 15 June. The Japanese advanced along both banks of the river and through the hills to the north and south. On 21 October another Japanese force took Guangzhou (Canton), cutting the railway from Hong Kong. On 26 October Japanese troops entered Wuchang and Hankou, and Hanyang the next day. Chinese casualties are given in sources ranging from about 200,000 to 500,000 killed, wounded and missing. The Japanese 11th Army’s own count was 7,092 killed and 19,112 wounded, with more than 100,000 cases of illness (Wikipedia, “Battle of Wuhan,” summarizing Chinese and Japanese sources). Japan had won another campaign and taken another capital, and the war was no closer to an end.

Chongqing: the capital beyond the gorges

The Nationalist government had announced in November 1937 that it would move to Chongqing, a river port in Sichuan on a rocky peninsula where the Jialing River joins the Yangtze. Behind the Three Gorges, it could not easily be reached by a Japanese army. Factories, universities, archives and hundreds of thousands of refugees made the journey upriver by boat, by road and on foot. After Wuhan fell, Chongqing was the wartime capital of China until 1945.

What the Japanese army could not reach, Japanese aircraft could. From 18 February 1938 to 19 December 1944, Japanese army and navy bombers raided Chongqing 268 times by incomplete Chinese counts, with formations of a few dozen to more than 150 aircraft (Wikipedia, “Bombing of Chongqing”). The worst early raids came on 3 and 4 May 1939, when incendiary and high-explosive bombs set fire to the crowded old city. The first raid killed almost 700 people; the second killed more than 3,000 and left about 200,000 homeless. Mitter’s Forgotten Ally opens with these two days. On 5 June 1941 crowds sheltering in a tunnel under the city were suffocated during a long raid; Don Moser’s history gives about 4,000 dead, and other estimates vary widely. Chinese survivors and relatives later sued the Japanese government. In 2015 the Tokyo High Court upheld a lower court’s finding that the bombing had caused the damage they described, but ruled that they had no right to compensation.

Chongqing was also the political capital of a divided country. In March 1940 Wang Jingwei, once Chiang’s rival for the leadership of the Nationalist Party, set up a collaborationist government in Nanjing under Japanese protection. Much of eastern China, including all its great cities and most of its railways, was under Japanese or puppet control. In the north, the Communist Eighth Route Army built base areas behind Japanese lines in the mountains of Shanxi, Hebei and Shandong, not far from the plain where the war had begun. The second united front between Nationalists and Communists, formed after the Xi’an Incident of December 1936 and described in Chapter 1, held in name but grew steadily weaker.

Stalemate, 1939–1943

After Wuhan, neither side could force a decision. Japan held the cities, the coast and the railway lines, but not the countryside between them, and it did not have the troops to occupy the interior. China had lost its industrial base, its customs revenue and its best divisions, and had to rely on supply routes from abroad that grew longer and harder each year: through French Indochina until 1940, and over the Burma Road and later the air route over the Himalayas, “the Hump.” Japanese offensives against Changsha in Hunan in 1939, 1941 and early 1942 were turned back. In 1940 and 1941 the war was a matter of raids, blockades and attrition.

Behind the lines the war grew harsher. From August to December 1940 the Eighth Route Army attacked Japanese railways, blockhouses and mines across North China in what became known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive. Japan answered with sweeps through the Communist base areas in 1941 and 1942, remembered in China as the “Three Alls” policy (kill all, burn all, loot all), which devastated whole districts of Hebei and Shanxi (Mitter, Forgotten Ally). In January 1941 Nationalist troops attacked the headquarters of the Communist New Fourth Army in southern Anhui, and after that the united front was little more than a truce. Generals died in the field: Zhang Zizhong, who had commanded the 38th Division of the 29th Army in 1937 and was mayor of Tianjin when the war began, was killed leading the 33rd Army Group in Hubei on 16 May 1940, the most senior Chinese commander to die in the war.

The war widened in December 1941. After Pearl Harbor, the Nationalist government formally declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy on 9 December 1941, four and a half years after the fighting at the bridge. Until then neither China nor Japan had declared war; Japan had called the conflict the China Incident. China now had allies, and American advisers, aircraft and Lend-Lease supplies, a story told in Chapter 8. But Japan’s conquest of Burma in 1942 cut the Burma Road, and China’s war remained a war of endurance.

Endurance had its own terrible cost. In Henan, the province flooded in 1938 and fought over ever since, drought and failed harvests in 1942 were followed by famine in 1942–43, made worse by army grain levies and wartime hoarding. Estimates of the dead range from about 700,000 (Anthony Garnaut, 2013) to two or three million (Lloyd Eastman, Cambridge History of China); a Nationalist survey of 1943 counted 1,484,983, a figure Garnaut considers inflated by migration and lost births. Eastman wrote that another three million people fled the province. The Time correspondent Theodore White’s reports of the famine reached American readers in 1943.

Ichigo, 1944: Japan’s last offensive

In April 1944 Japan launched the largest land offensive in its history. Operation Ichigo (“Number One”) committed about 510,000 troops, 800 tanks and some 15,000 vehicles, by Japanese records, with two aims: to open a land corridor from North China to French Indochina, now that Allied submarines were sinking Japan’s shipping, and to overrun the American air bases in southern China from which the B-29s of XX Bomber Command could reach Japan and its sea lanes (Wikipedia, “Operation Ichi-Go,” citing Japanese and Chinese records).

The first phase opened on 17 April in central Henan, along the same Beiping–Hankou railway that ran past the Marco Polo Bridge. Luoyang fell on 25 May. The second phase drove south into Hunan; Changsha, which had held three times, fell on 18 June. At Hengyang, the Chinese 10th Army held the walled city for more than six weeks until 8 August. In the autumn the Japanese advanced into Guangxi and took Guilin, Liuzhou and Nanning, and by late November they were within about 300 miles of Chongqing before the offensive stalled. A Chinese Ministry of Military Affairs tally for 1944 counted 366,354 combat casualties; other estimates run to 500,000 or more, and one Western estimate to about 750,000 when soldiers who simply melted away are included.

Ichigo was Japan’s greatest victory of the war in China, and it changed little. The Americans moved their B-29s to the Mariana Islands. But the campaign damaged the Nationalist army, its finances and its standing at home and with Washington, and Hans van de Ven argues that it helped the Communists in the civil war that followed (van de Ven, China at War).

Surrender: Nanjing, 9 September 1945

Japan’s surrender was announced by Emperor Hirohito on 15 August 1945 and signed aboard USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on 2 September, where Gen. Xu Yongchang signed for China. The next day, 3 September, the Nationalist government ordered celebrations across the country, and Chiang led a victory meeting in Chongqing. That is the origin of 3 September as Victory Day.

The surrender of the Japanese forces in China itself took place in Nanjing, the city Japan had taken in December 1937. At 0900 on 9 September 1945, in the auditorium of the Central Military Academy, Gen. Okamura Yasuji, Commander in Chief of the China Expeditionary Army, signed the instrument of surrender and handed it to Gen. He Yingqin, the Chinese commander in chief. The time had been chosen with care: the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month, since the word for “nine” in Chinese sounds like the word for “long-lasting.” The ceremony took about 15 minutes. On 10 October the Japanese forces in North China surrendered in the Forbidden City in Beijing, a few miles from the bridge where the fighting had begun eight years earlier.

More than a million Japanese troops were still in China south of the Great Wall when the war ended, and another 900,000 or more men served in the collaborationist forces (Wikipedia, “Second Sino-Japanese War,” infobox). On 25 October 1945, Chen Yi accepted the surrender of the Japanese forces in Taiwan at what is now Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, ending fifty years of Japanese colonial rule there. Okamura was tried by a Nationalist military tribunal in Shanghai and acquitted in January 1949. By then China was deep in a renewed civil war.

The human cost

No one knows how many people died in China’s war with Japan, and the uncertainty is itself part of the story. Records burned with the cities. Most deaths were not from battle at all but from flood, famine, disease and flight. The figures that do exist were compiled by governments with political reasons to make them larger or smaller, and they count different things: soldiers or civilians, the dead or all casualties, the years from 1937 or from 1931, China south of the Great Wall or Manchuria too.

For the Chinese armies, the Nationalist government’s official tally was 1,319,958 killed, 1,761,335 wounded and 130,116 missing. Western estimates of Nationalist dead run higher, to two million or more. Communist sources give about 160,000 killed in their own forces. For all Chinese, soldiers and civilians together, Western historians most often give 14 to 20 million dead; Diana Lary gives 20 to 30 million. The People’s Republic’s official figure, repeated by Xi Jinping on 3 September 2015, is more than 35 million Chinese military and civilian casualties, a figure that counts the wounded as well as the dead and runs from 1931. The refugees numbered from about 20 million to nearly 100 million, depending on the estimate, close to a quarter of the population at the upper end (Lary; Mitter).

Japan’s own records are more complete but not simple either. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare counts 465,700 Japanese war dead in China proper, including about 23,500 lost at sea, and another 245,400 in Manchuria and at Nomonhan, most of them in the Soviet invasion of August 1945 and the internment that followed (MHLW, overseas war dead by region). Some reference works give a range of 455,700 to 700,000 Japanese military dead in the China war. The collaborationist armies lost somewhere between about 290,000 and 575,000 men.

By the numbers

Counting the dead: selected figures from the war in China

Thousands of deaths, as given by the source named; each bar is one count or estimate, not a total

Henan famine 1942–43 (Nationalist survey)1,485

Nationalist soldiers killed (official)1,320

Yellow River flood 1938 (Han and Nan)893

Henan famine (Garnaut estimate)700

Japanese war dead, China proper (MHLW)466

Japanese war dead, Manchuria (MHLW)245

Nanjing massacre (Tokyo tribunal, “more than”)200

Communist soldiers killed (CCP data)161

Remembering the war in the People’s Republic

For three decades after 1949 the People’s Republic remembered the war mainly as a Communist story, the heroism of the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army, while the Nationalist armies that did most of the fighting were left in the background. The date itself shifted: a 1949 holiday regulation marked victory on 15 August, and in August 1951 a notice from Premier Zhou Enlai moved the commemoration to 3 September, though not as a day off work. Mitter and other historians describe a change in the 1980s, when the war against Japan became a national story of shared Chinese suffering and resistance that included the Nationalists (Mitter, China’s Good War). The museum at Wanping is part of that change.

An organizing committee for a national war museum was formed in October 1984, with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the historian Liu Danian among its leading figures. Construction began in 1986 inside the walls of Wanping, a few hundred yards from the bridge. The Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese Aggression opened to the public on 7 July 1987, the 50th anniversary of the incident. A hall devoted to the incident itself opened a year later, a second phase was finished on 7 July 1997, and the largest renovation was completed in 2005 for the 60th anniversary of victory. The museum’s front steps come in two flights, of eight and fourteen steps, for the eight-year and the fourteen-year war. By its builder’s account it had received more than 37 million visitors by 2021, and it holds more than 25,000 objects (Wikipedia, museum article; China State Construction, via The Paper; Visit Beijing).

Japanese visitors came too. On 3 May 1995, in the year of the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi visited the bridge and the museum. He did not give the formal apology Beijing wanted, but he wrote in the visitors’ book a pledge to look directly at history and to preserve friendship and peace between Japan and China (Christian Science Monitor, 8 May 1995). His inscription is on display in the museum.

On 15 August 2000, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender announcement, the War of Resistance Sculpture Park opened just south of Wanping’s walls (Visit Beijing). Its centerpiece is a grid of 38 cast-bronze columns, each about 4.3 meters tall and 2 meters across, arranged in four groups whose themes run from Japanese aggression through national salvation and resistance to the victory of justice. A sculpted lion at the center, the “Awakened Lion of Lugou,” stands for a nation roused to resist, and inscribed stone drums are set around the grounds (Visit Beijing; Art@Site).

The anniversary of 7 July is marked at Wanping each year, and the national leadership attends on major anniversaries. On 7 July 2014, the 77th anniversary, Xi Jinping led other senior leaders to the bridge and the museum and said that no one could revise history and truth (China Digital Times, after Xinhua). On 7 July 2015 the museum opened a new permanent exhibition, “Great Victory and Historical Contribution,” for the 70th anniversary; Liu Yunshan, the Party’s propaganda chief, spoke at the opening (Macau Daily Times, after AP).

In 2014 the commemorations were written into national law. On 27 February 2014 the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress adopted two decisions: 3 September became the Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, and 13 December, the date Nanjing fell in 1937, became the national memorial day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre (Xinhua, via China Daily, 28 February 2014). Neither is a public holiday. On 1 September 2014 the Ministry of Civil Affairs published a first list of 300 famous anti-Japanese heroes and martyrs, nearly a third of them Nationalist officers, including the two 29th Army generals killed at Nanyuan on 28 July 1937, Tong Linge and Zhao Dengyu (Phoenix News, 1 September 2014). On 3 September 2015 China held its first military parade in Tiananmen Square for the anniversary of victory, and a second for the 80th anniversary on 3 September 2025. In January 2017 the Ministry of Education ordered school textbooks to describe a “fourteen-year” war beginning with the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931, in place of the eight-year war from 1937 (China Daily, 11 January 2017).

Posthumous honors

Gen. Tong Linge and Gen. Zhao Dengyu, 29th Army

Tong Linge, deputy commander of the 29th Army, and Zhao Dengyu, commander of its 132nd Division, were killed on 28 July 1937 during the Japanese attack on Nanyuan, south of Beiping (Chapter 5). The Nationalist government promoted both posthumously to the rank of full general, and streets in Beijing were renamed for them after the war. In the People’s Republic, Zhao’s martyr’s certificate was signed by Mao Zedong in 1952, his tomb near Wanping was rebuilt in 1980, and in September 2014 both men were named among the first 300 national anti-Japanese heroes and martyrs.

Xinhua profile of Zhao Dengyu →

Remembering the war in Taiwan

Taiwan’s memory of the war has two strands that do not fit easily together. In 1937 the island was a Japanese colony, as it had been since 1895. Japan’s health ministry records that 207,183 Taiwanese served in the Japanese armed forces in the Second World War and that 30,304 were killed or went missing; more than 27,000 are enshrined at Yasukuni (Wikipedia, “Taiwanese Imperial Japan Serviceman,” citing MHLW figures). For many Taiwanese families, the war was one in which their fathers and grandfathers wore Japanese uniforms.

The other strand came with the Nationalist government, which took over Taiwan in October 1945 and retreated there in 1949. For the Republic of China, the War of Resistance was its own war and its own victory, fought by its armies under Chiang Kai-shek. It was the ROC government that in April 1946 made 3 September Victory Day, and 3 September is still Armed Forces Day in Taiwan. On 3 September 2026 President Lai Ching-te led the autumn ceremony at the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei, which honors nearly half a million soldiers who died for the Republic of China, and paid tribute to the victory over Japan (Focus Taiwan, 3 September 2026). The ROC also stresses that it declared war on Japan on 9 December 1941 and accepted the Japanese surrender in China, and it cites the Cairo Declaration and the Nanjing surrender as part of the legal basis for its rule in Taiwan.

The holidays have shifted with politics. Taiwan Retrocession Day, 25 October, was dropped from the list of public holidays in December 2000. In May 2025 the Legislative Yuan restored it, combined with the anniversary of the 1949 Battle of Guningtou on Kinmen, as a public holiday from 2026 (Wikipedia, “Retrocession Day”). Beijing, for its part, presents the war as a common struggle of Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, and in October 2025 the NPC Standing Committee established its own commemoration day of Taiwan’s restoration. In Taiwan, the Marco Polo Bridge is remembered as the start of the Republic of China’s war, not as a site the government there can visit or claim.

Remembering the war in Japan

In Japan the war that began at the bridge was officially the North China Incident and then the China Incident until December 1941, when it was folded into what the government called the Greater East Asia War. After 1945 it became part of a long argument about how to teach and remember the whole period from 1931 to 1945.

Schoolbooks have been at the center of that argument. All Japanese school textbooks must be approved by the Ministry of Education. The historian Ienaga Saburo, whose high school history text had been rejected for dwelling on the “dark side” of the war, sued the government three times, beginning in 1965. The last case ended in 1997, when the Supreme Court upheld the screening system but told the government to intervene in content as little as possible, a partial victory for Ienaga. In 1982 reports that the ministry was pressing authors to describe Japan’s “aggression” in China as an “advance” brought protests from China and South Korea, and the ministry added a new standard calling for understanding and international harmony in textbook accounts of modern history involving neighboring Asian countries. In 2001 a nationalist New History Textbook passed screening, but almost no public school district adopted it that year (Stanford SPICE, “Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies”).

Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which lists about 2.47 million war dead, is the other flashpoint. On 17 October 1978 the shrine secretly enshrined fourteen men convicted or accused of Class A war crimes by the Tokyo tribunal, among them leaders responsible for the war in China; the enshrinement became public in 1979. Emperor Hirohito, who had last visited in November 1975, never went again, and no emperor has gone since. Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s official visit on 15 August 1985 drew the first strong protests from China. Koizumi Jun’ichiro visited six times between 2001 and 2006, and Abe Shinzo visited on 26 December 2013, each time drawing protests from Beijing and Seoul (Wikipedia, “Yasukuni Shrine”). The shrine’s museum, the Yushukan, presents the war of 1937–45 in terms most historians outside Japan reject.

Against that stands the statement Murayama issued on 15 August 1995, the 50th anniversary of the surrender, three months after his visit to Wanping. It became the standard formula of remorse that later Japanese governments reaffirmed. Abe’s statement for the 70th anniversary in 2015 referred back to the earlier apologies without repeating them in his own voice, and in his 15 August address of 2025 Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru used the word “remorse,” the first Japanese leader to do so in that speech since Abe dropped it (AP, October 2025). Murayama died in October 2025 at the age of 101.

In their words

Japan, following a mistaken national policy, … through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries.

Saving an 800-year-old bridge

The bridge at the center of all this is older than any of the countries that argue over it. Work began in 1189, under the Jin dynasty, and was finished in 1192. It is 266.5 meters long and 9.3 meters wide, with a roadway about 7.5 meters across, carried on eleven granite arches and ten piers. After flood damage it was rebuilt under the Kangxi Emperor in 1698, and a stele on a stone tortoise at the east end records the work. Another stele carries the Qianlong Emperor’s calligraphy, “Morning Moon over Lugou,” the name of one of the eight famous views of old Beijing (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge”; People’s Daily overseas edition, 14 August 2023). Ming and Qing records list six small repairs between 1412 and 1555 and seven rounds of work from 1662 to the end of the Qing, only two of them substantial.

The twentieth century was harder on it than the previous seven. After 1949 the bridge was paved with asphalt and carried motor traffic. In 1961 the bridge and the walled town of Wanping were placed on the first list of China’s national key cultural heritage sites. In August 1967 the walkways were widened on 59 concrete cantilever beams, and in the process 91 balustrade posts and nine panels were replaced and 164 new lions carved on the new posts. A new bridge about a kilometer to the south was completed in 1971 to take some of the traffic. In 1985, after the Beijing–Shijiazhuang expressway bridge opened nearby, the old bridge was closed to motor vehicles. In 1986 the Beijing municipal government set up a committee for its restoration, with a budget of 3.55 million yuan; the 1967 walkways and concrete beams were removed, the asphalt stripped off, and the old stone deck and appearance restored (Chinese encyclopedia entry for Lugouqiao; People’s Daily overseas edition, 2023). Another round of conservation followed in 2018–19.

Where did the Second World War begin?

For the incident itself, the conclusion most historians have reached since James Crowley’s study of 1963 is that the shooting near Wanping on the night of 7 July was not a plot planned in Tokyo, unlike the Mukden Incident of 1931 (Crowley, “A Reconsideration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” Journal of Asian Studies, 1963). Who fired the first shots has never been established, as Chapter 3 explains. What turned a local clash into a war were decisions made afterward: the Konoe cabinet’s decision on 11 July to send reinforcements to North China, Chiang Kai-shek’s declaration at Lushan on 17 July that China had reached the limit of concession, and the escalation that followed (Chapter 4).

Whether that war was the beginning of the Second World War is a separate question, and a question of definition. The conventional date in Europe and the United States is 1 September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. But by then China had been fighting Japan for more than two years and had already lost millions of its people. Mitter’s Forgotten Ally begins China’s world war in July 1937 and argues that the West has underestimated China’s part in it. Others push the start back further. The Danish historian Peter Harmsen, author of Shanghai 1937 and Nanjing 1937, has argued that dates are arbitrary and that 1931 has as good a claim as 1939, and has questioned the Western habit of fixing the war’s start in Europe (National Interest, January 2017). Since 2017 Chinese schoolbooks have dated the war from 18 September 1931. Still others hold that the regional wars in Asia and Europe became one world war only in December 1941, when Japan attacked the United States and Britain and China formally declared war.

Each date has a case. 1931 marks the start of Japanese aggression in China; 1937 the start of full-scale war between the two countries; 1939 the start of the war in Europe; 1941 the joining of the two. What none of them changes is that China’s war was long, that by its end it tied down more than a million Japanese soldiers who could have been used elsewhere, and that it began, in the form that lasted until 1945, at the Marco Polo Bridge.

Timeline

From the long war to the long memory, 1938–2026

1. 16 Jan 1938Konoe declares Japan will no longer deal with Chiang’s government.
2. 22 Mar–7 Apr 1938Chinese victory at Taierzhuang; Xuzhou falls on 19 May.
3. 9 Jun 1938Nationalist troops breach the Yellow River dike at Huayuankou.
4. 21–27 Oct 1938Japan takes Guangzhou and Wuhan; the government is at Chongqing.
5. 3–4 May 1939The worst early air raids on Chongqing.
6. 30 Mar 1940Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government set up at Nanjing.
7. Aug–Dec 1940The Communist Hundred Regiments Offensive in North China.
8. 5 Jun 1941Chongqing tunnel disaster during an air raid.
9. 9 Dec 1941China formally declares war on Japan, Germany and Italy.
10. 1942–43Famine in Henan.
11. Apr–Dec 1944Operation Ichigo: Luoyang, Changsha, Hengyang, Guilin fall.
12. 9 Sep 1945Okamura Yasuji surrenders at Nanjing, 0900.
13. 1961The bridge and Wanping placed on the first list of national heritage sites.
14. 1985–86The bridge closed to motor vehicles; restoration removes asphalt and concrete walkways.
15. 7 Jul 1987The war museum opens inside Wanping.
16. 3 May 1995Prime Minister Murayama visits the bridge and the museum.
17. 15 Aug 1995The Murayama Statement.
18. 15 Aug 2000The sculpture park opens beside Wanping.
19. 27 Feb 2014NPC Standing Committee makes 3 September Victory Day and 13 December the Nanjing memorial day.
20. 3 Sep 2015First Victory Day military parade in Beijing.
21. 2017Chinese textbooks adopt the “fourteen-year war” from 1931.
22. Jul–Aug 2023The bridge withstands Beijing’s heaviest rains on record.
23. 3 Sep 2025Parade for the 80th anniversary of victory.

People

Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975) led Nationalist China through the whole war, from Nanjing, Wuhan and Chongqing. His decision to fight on after 1938, and to breach the Yellow River dikes, shaped the war; the losses of Ichigo and the civil war that followed cost him the mainland, and he spent his last 26 years on Taiwan.

Li Zongren (1891–1969), the Guangxi general who commanded the Fifth War Zone, won the battle of Taierzhuang in 1938. He later served as vice president and acting president of the Republic of China, and returned to the mainland in 1965.

Konoe Fumimaro (1891–1945) was prime minister when the war began and again in 1940–41. His cabinet’s decision of 11 July 1937 to send troops to North China, and his statement of 16 January 1938 refusing to deal with Chiang, closed off the chances of an early peace. He took poison in December 1945 rather than face arrest as a war crimes suspect.

Okamura Yasuji (1884–1966), commander in chief of the China Expeditionary Army from November 1944, signed the surrender at Nanjing on 9 September 1945. A Nationalist tribunal in Shanghai acquitted him in January 1949.

He Yingqin (1890–1987), Chiang’s longtime war minister and in 1945 commander in chief of the Chinese army, accepted the Japanese surrender at Nanjing. In 1935 he had been the Chinese signatory of the He–Umezu agreement that weakened China’s hold on Hebei (Chapter 1).

Zhao Dengyu (1898–1937), commander of the 132nd Division of the 29th Army, was killed on 28 July 1937 when his column was ambushed after the fall of Nanyuan. He was 39. His remains were reburied near the bridge after the war, and his tomb stands just east of Wanping. Tong Linge (1892–1937), deputy commander of the 29th Army, died the same day.

Zhang Zizhong (1890–1940), commander of the 38th Division and mayor of Tianjin in July 1937, was criticized at first for staying behind to negotiate after the 29th Army withdrew. He redeemed his name in battle and was killed commanding the 33rd Army Group in Hubei on 16 May 1940.

Murayama Tomiichi (1924–2025), Socialist prime minister of Japan from 1994 to 1996, visited the Marco Polo Bridge and the Wanping museum on 3 May 1995 and issued the 1995 statement of remorse and apology that still sets the standard for official Japanese statements on the war.

Losses and uncertainty

The figures in this chapter differ for reasons that are worth spelling out, because they explain why the debate goes on.

What is counted. The PRC’s figure of more than 35 million is of casualties, killed and wounded together, and covers 1931–45. Western totals of 14 to 20 million, and Lary’s 20 to 30 million, are of deaths, mostly from 1937 to 1945. The Nationalist government’s 1,319,958 counts soldiers killed in action, not those who died of disease or hunger in the ranks or were conscripted and died before reaching a unit, which observers at the time believed were very many.

Who did the counting. The Nationalist and Communist armies kept separate books and each had reasons to stress its own sacrifice. Wartime surveys of floods and famines were compiled for relief and could include refugees and lost births among the “dead,” as Garnaut argues of the 1943 Henan survey. Japanese army records are fuller for Japan’s own losses than for the people it fought, and Japanese unit reports of enemy dead, like Chinese claims of Japanese dead, were often inflated.

Where the line is drawn. Japan’s health ministry separates China proper (465,700) from Manchuria (245,400), and the Manchurian figure is mostly from the Soviet war of August 1945, not from the war that began at the bridge. Totals that include Manchuria or Burma, or that count Japanese civilians, are larger. For battles, the gaps are wider still: Japanese losses at Taierzhuang are given as anything from under 2,500 to 20,000 casualties.

The table below gives the major events of 1938–45 covered in this chapter with the ranges the sources report.

Questions readers ask

Can you still walk across the Marco Polo Bridge?

Yes, on foot. The bridge has been closed to motor vehicles since 1985 and is now a ticketed heritage site; Beijing’s tourism office lists admission at 20 yuan and opening hours of 0700–1900 from April through October and 0800–1700 from November through March. The site can close in bad weather or floods, as it did in August 2023, so check before you go.

How many stone lions are on the bridge?

The official figure today is 501, on 281 posts. Historical records give 627, a 1962 survey counted 485, a 1979 recount 502, and other modern counts range from 482 to 501. The numbers differ because many small lions are carved on the heads, backs and paws of the larger ones and are easy to miss or count twice, and because posts and lions have been lost and replaced over the centuries.

How many people died in the Sino-Japanese War?

No exact figure exists. Western historians most often give 14 to 20 million Chinese dead from 1937 to 1945, mostly civilians; Diana Lary gives 20 to 30 million. The PRC’s official figure is more than 35 million Chinese casualties, killed and wounded, from 1931 to 1945. Japan’s health ministry counts 465,700 Japanese war dead in China proper and 245,400 in Manchuria.

Did the war start at the Marco Polo Bridge or in 1931?

Both answers are used. Full-scale war between China and Japan began with the incident at the bridge on 7 July 1937, and most Western histories date the Second Sino-Japanese War from then. Since 2017 Chinese textbooks have counted a fourteen-year war from the Mukden Incident of 18 September 1931, when Japan began its seizure of Manchuria. Some historians also argue that 1937, not 1939, should count as the start of the Second World War.

Why is the national war museum at Wanping?

Because the full-scale war began there. The Japanese demand to search Wanping for a missing soldier on the night of 7 July 1937, and the fighting around the town and the bridge the next morning, are the opening events of the war in Chinese memory. The museum opened inside the town’s walls on the 50th anniversary, 7 July 1987, and national ceremonies are held there on major anniversaries.

Has Japan apologized for the war in China?

Japanese prime ministers have expressed remorse and apology several times, most fully in the Murayama Statement of 15 August 1995, which spoke of “colonial rule and aggression” and offered a “heartfelt apology.” Later governments reaffirmed it, though Abe Shinzo’s 2015 statement referred to past apologies rather than repeating them. Many Chinese regard visits by Japanese leaders to Yasukuni Shrine and disputes over school textbooks as undercutting those apologies.

How it connects

This chapter closes the collection. The road to the bridge, from the Mukden Incident of 1931 to the Xi’an Incident of 1936, is told in Chapter 1: From Mukden to the Bridge, and the bridge, the town and the garrisons of 1937 in Chapter 2. The night of 7 July itself is in Chapter 3, the twenty days of talks and ultimatums that followed in Chapter 4, and the fall of Beiping and Tianjin, where Tong Linge and Zhao Dengyu died, in Chapter 5.

The war became national at Shanghai in 1937 (Chapter 6), and the fall of the capital and the massacre that followed, now marked every 13 December, are in Chapter 7: Nanjing, December 1937. The road from the China war to war with the United States, from the Panay to the oil embargo, is in Chapter 8, and continues in the Pearl Harbor and Wake Island collections. For short answers to common questions about the whole subject, see the Marco Polo Bridge FAQ; for the rest of the site’s World War II work, the World War II hub.

What happened afterward

The end of the war against Japan was not the end of China’s war. Fighting between the Nationalists and the Communists resumed within months of the surrender, and by 1949 the Communists held the mainland. Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing on 1 October 1949, and Chiang’s government moved to Taiwan. Beiping, renamed in 1928 when the capital moved to Nanjing, became Beijing again.

The two Chinese governments made separate peace with Japan. The Republic of China signed a peace treaty with Japan in Taipei in 1952. Japan and the People’s Republic normalized relations by a joint communiqué in 1972, in which Beijing gave up its claim to war reparations, and signed a Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1978. Japan later extended large development loans to China. The Tokyo tribunal of 1946–48 and the Nanjing war crimes trials, described in Chapter 7, tried some of the men responsible for the war.

The memory of the war has kept changing. In the decades since the museum opened at Wanping, commemorations of the war have become a larger part of national life in the People’s Republic, written into law in 2014 and marked with parades in 2015 and 2025. In Japan the arguments over textbooks and Yasukuni continue. In Taiwan, the state that fought the war and the island that was a Japanese colony during it have built a memory that holds both. The bridge, meanwhile, has carried no traffic for four decades. On the night of 7 July 1937 the soldiers on both sides were fighting over a river crossing; it is now a museum piece, watched over by surveyors’ instruments.

Walking the ground today

The bridge and Wanping are in Fengtai District, about 15 kilometers southwest of central Beijing. Beijing Subway Line 16 stops at Wanpingcheng station; buses also stop at the sculpture park. Allow at least half a day.

Start at the walls of Wanping. The town was built from 1638 to 1640, at the end of the Ming dynasty, as a fortress guarding the approach to the capital, and was called Gongji Cheng under the Qing; the Wanping county government moved in on 1 December 1928, nine years before the incident. It is small, about 640 meters east to west and 320 meters north to south, with gates at the east (Weiyan Gate) and west (Shunzhi Gate) ends. On the south wall a plaque marks damage from Japanese shells in July 1937, and a row of inscribed black stone drums along the foot of the wall tells the story of the war (Wikipedia, “Wanping Fortress”; Beijing Bendibao).

Inside the walls, along the main street, is the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance against Japanese Aggression (No. 101 Wanping Chengnei Street). Admission is free; the museum is open 0900–1630 and closed on Mondays except on legal holidays and major commemorative days (Visit Beijing). Bring a passport, and check whether advance booking is required on the day you plan to go. Allow two hours or more; the collection of objects from the July 1937 incident is the most relevant part for readers of this collection.

Leave by the west gate and you are at the east end of the Lugou Bridge. Look for the Kangxi stele of 1698 on its stone tortoise and the Qianlong Emperor’s “Morning Moon over Lugou” stele, then walk the length of the bridge and count lions. From the bridge you can see the railway bridge just upstream to the north, on the line that in 1937 was the Beiping–Hankou railway and is now the Beijing–Guangzhou line. The Japanese night-exercise ground and the Longwangmiao embankment, where the shooting began, lay north of Wanping on the same side of the river, though the ground has changed beyond recognition.

Just south and east of Wanping’s walls is the War of Resistance Sculpture Park, opened on 15 August 2000, with its 38 bronze columns, the “Awakened Lion” and the inscribed stone drums. A short distance east of the town, on the road toward Dawayao, is the tomb of Gen. Zhao Dengyu, rebuilt in 1980 and protected as a Beijing municipal revolutionary relic (Xinhua, 2025).

In central Beijing, Zhao Dengyu Road and Tong Linge Road in Xicheng District carry the names of the two generals killed at Nanyuan. Visitors with more time can see the other ends of the story: the Nanjing Massacre memorial hall in Nanjing, the Chongqing air-raid tunnel sites, the Taierzhuang memorial hall in Shandong, and in Taipei the Martyrs’ Shrine and Zhongshan Hall, where the Japanese surrender in Taiwan was accepted in 1945. Check opening times and any booking rules before you travel; they change, especially around 7 July, 3 September and 13 December.

Sources and further reading

• Books: Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; British edition China’s War with Japan 1937–1945) and China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism (Harvard, 2020); Hans van de Ven, China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China (Harvard, 2018); Mark Peattie, Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China: Essays on the Military History of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945 (Stanford, 2011); Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937 and Nanjing 1937 (Casemate, 2013 and 2015); Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo (Harvard, 2009); Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War (Cambridge, 2010); Micah Muscolino, The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938–1950 (Cambridge, 2015); Lloyd Eastman, in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13 (1986).
• James B. Crowley, “A Reconsideration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1963).
• Oxford University, “China’s War with Japan” research project; History News Network, “Oxford historian sheds light on China in WWII” (2013); Diana Lary, “China and Japan at War: Suffering and Survival, 1937–1945,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.
• Yellow River flood: “Yellow River flood, 1938–47,” disasterhistory.org (with the 1948 Han Qitong and Nan Zhongwan figures); The China Project, “Breaching the Yellow River and the horrors of war” (14 June 2023).
• Campaign and casualty summaries (Wikipedia, used for the Chinese and Japanese records they cite): “Second Sino-Japanese War”; “Battle of Taierzhuang”; “Battle of Wuhan”; “Bombing of Chongqing”; “Operation Ichi-Go”; “Chinese famine of 1942–1943”; “Surrender ceremony of the Second Sino-Japanese War.”
• Japan, Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, overseas war dead and remains recovery by region: China proper and Northeast China (Manchuria).
• The bridge: People’s Daily overseas edition, “卢沟桥经受强降雨考验” (The Lugou Bridge withstands the heavy rains), 14 August 2023; Chinese encyclopedia entry for 卢沟桥 (Lugouqiao); China News Service, report on the bridge and Wanping, 2 September 2025; Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge” and “Wanping Fortress.”
• The museum and memorials: Wikipedia, “Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression”; Visit Beijing, museum listing, Lugou Bridge listing and itinerary for the bridge, Wanping, museum and sculpture garden; The Paper (China State Construction account of the museum’s construction); Art@Site, sculpture park; Xinhua, “‘Big Sword General’ Zhao Dengyu” (23 June 2025).
• Commemoration in the PRC: China Daily/Xinhua, “China ratifies national days on anti-Japanese war victory, Nanjing Massacre” (28 February 2014); Wikipedia, “Victory over Japan Day (China)”; Phoenix News, first list of 300 anti-Japanese heroes (1 September 2014); China Digital Times, on the 7 July 2014 ceremony; Macau Daily Times, “Beijing opens exhibition to mark the war victory over Japan” (July 2015); China Daily, on the 2017 textbook revision.
• Taiwan: Focus Taiwan, Armed Forces Day and the autumn martyrs’ ceremony (3 September 2026); Wikipedia, “Retrocession Day” and “Taiwanese Imperial Japan Serviceman.”
• Japan: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, 15 August 1995; Christian Science Monitor, “Japan PM Tries to Mollify China Over War” (8 May 1995); Associated Press, obituary of Murayama Tomiichi (17 October 2025); Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, “Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies”; Wikipedia, “Yasukuni Shrine.”
• On the start date of the war: Michael Peck, “China Is Right to Backdate Its War With Japan to 1931 (But for the Wrong Reasons),” National Interest (January 2017), with comments by Peter Harmsen.

Photographs: Wikimedia Commons contributors Fanghong, Vmenkov, N509FZ and San Lie (CC BY-SA 3.0 and 4.0, as credited); wartime photographs public domain.