The Bridge, the Town and the Garrisons: Lugouqiao, Wanping and the Armies of 1937

The war between China and Japan began at a stone bridge that was already seven and a half centuries old. Before the shots of 7 July 1937, the Lugou Bridge was a monument, a toll crossing and a poem; the small walled town of Wanping at its eastern end was a county seat; and the two armies that faced each other across the fields were living side by side under a tangle of treaties, truces and threats. This chapter describes the ground and the soldiers as they stood on the eve of the incident.

Why it mattered

Wars are often named after places that would otherwise be footnotes. The Marco Polo Bridge is not one of them. It was famous for centuries before 1937: a Jin dynasty bridge of eleven granite arches, lined with carved stone lions, described by Marco Polo, painted and written about as one of the Eight Views of Yanjing, the old name for the Beijing region. Every traveler from the south and west who came to the capital by road crossed the Yongding River here, and in the twentieth century the main railway to central China crossed beside it.

That geography is the reason the incident happened where it did. By the summer of 1937 Japanese troops were stationed in Beiping itself, in Tianjin, along the railway to the sea, and at Fengtai, the junction just southwest of the city. Japan’s client regime in eastern Hebei lay to the east. The Lugou Bridge and Wanping guarded the one rail and road route from Beiping to the south that Chinese troops still held. A Japanese company exercising beside that crossing at night, in sight of a Chinese garrison under orders to resist, was a situation in which a small accident could become a large one.

The armies that faced each other there were not new to each other. The Japanese garrison owed its presence to the Boxer Protocol of 1901. The Chinese 29th Army had fought the Japanese along the Great Wall in 1933 and had governed the Beiping–Tianjin region since 1935 under a political compromise that both Nanjing (Nanking) and Tokyo distrusted. Understanding who these soldiers were, where they stood and why they were there is the first step to understanding the night of 7 July, told in Chapter 3.

A river that would not stay put

The Yongding River rises in the mountains of northern Shanxi, where it is called the Sanggan, and flows about 650 km through Inner Mongolia and Hebei before it breaks out of the Western Hills into the Beijing plain and runs on to join the Hai River near Tianjin (Wikipedia, “Yongding River,” citing Jiang et al., Journal of Hydrology, 2014). For most of its history it was a dangerous neighbor. It carried a heavy load of silt from the loess country, flooded suddenly in summer, and moved its bed more than once across the plain where Beijing now stands. Its old names reflect that temper: it was known as the Hun, the “muddy” river, and as the Wuding, the river with no fixed course.

The name it carries today was a hope rather than a description. In 1698 the Kangxi Emperor’s officials built new embankments to hold the river in its channel below the bridge, and the emperor renamed it Yongding, “forever stable” (Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China, 2007, pp. 41–43, as cited by Wikipedia). The river did not entirely cooperate. It still flooded in the Qing period and into the twentieth century. Since the Guanting Reservoir was built upstream in the 1950s and water was diverted for the growing city, the riverbed under the bridge has often been dry, and in recent years the Beijing government has spent heavily on restoring water and parkland along it. When it is full, though, it can still be violent: in the record rains of late July and early August 2023, floodwater on the Yongding damaged roads and bridges near the old crossing (People’s Daily overseas edition, 14 August 2023).

For anyone traveling to Beijing from the south or southwest, there was no way around this river. The road from Baoding, Shijiazhuang and the Yellow River plain came up the west side of the Yongding and had to cross it within a few miles of the capital. Ferries and pontoon bridges had served the crossing since ancient times. A permanent bridge here was both a convenience and a military asset, and whoever held it controlled one of the gates of the capital.

The Jin bridge, 1189–1192

In the twelfth century the Beijing region belonged not to a Chinese dynasty but to the Jurchen Jin, who had conquered northern China from the Song and in 1153 made the city they called Zhongdu, the “central capital,” their seat. Chinese accounts record that Emperor Shizong ordered a stone bridge over the Lugou River in 1188 but died before work began, and that his successor, Zhangzong, began construction in 1189, the 29th year of the Dading reign, and completed it in 1192, the third year of Mingchang (Chinese Wikipedia, “Lugouqiao,” citing Beijing heritage sources). It was first named Guangli Bridge, the bridge of “broad benefit,” but it soon took the name of the river and became the Lugou Bridge, Lugouqiao.

The finished bridge was built of granite: eleven arches carried on ten massive piers, rising slightly toward the center, with a roadway about 9.3 m wide. Its total length is usually given as 266.5 m (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge”; People’s Daily, 2023); Chinese surveys give the bridge proper as about 213 m, or about 268 m with its approaches. Along both sides runs a stone balustrade of carved panels and posts, and on top of each post sits a stone lion. The lions are what visitors remember. No two are exactly alike. Many carry smaller lions, cubs clinging to their backs, heads, bellies or paws, and the effort to count them became a Beijing proverb: the lions of Lugou cannot be counted.

The proverb is close to the truth. Surveys have produced totals from 482 to 501, and historical records claim there were once 627; one modern survey counts 281 large lions, 211 small ones and a few more on the columns and bridgeheads, for 498 in all (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge”; Chinese Wikipedia). The lions are also not all as old as the bridge. Most date from the Ming and Qing dynasties, some from the Yuan, and only a few from the Jin, because broken and worn lions were replaced during the many repairs of the following centuries (Beijing Tourism, “Marco Polo Bridge”).

The structural engineer Mao Yisheng, who built the Qiantang River Bridge in the 1930s and spent much of his later life writing about China’s historic bridges, called Lugou the most splendid of the country’s famous old bridges, setting it beside the Zhaozhou Bridge as the most ancient and the Five-Pavilion Bridge at Yangzhou as the most elegant (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge,” citing the Five-Pavilion Bridge site). Its survival through eight centuries of floods, ice, earthquakes, imperial armies, carts, trucks and, in 1937, shellfire is the subject of the Engineer’s eye below.

Marco Polo’s bridge and the Morning Moon

Less than a century after it was finished, the bridge acquired the European name it still carries. In the Mongol Yuan period the capital moved a short distance northeast, to the new city of Dadu, which the Venetian merchant Marco Polo knew as Cambaluc. Polo, who was in China from the mid-1270s to the early 1290s, described leaving the capital on an imperial errand to the west. Ten miles out, he wrote, the traveler came to a very large river called the Pulisanghin, crossed by a stone bridge. In the classic English translation by Henry Yule, the bridge is about 300 paces long and “a good eight paces of width,” with 24 arches and a marble parapet set with pairs of lions (Polo, The Travels, Book II, ch. XXXV, Yule translation).

Polo’s figures do not match the bridge exactly, and his account has the usual problems of a book dictated in prison years later to a writer of romances. The number of arches is wrong, and “Pulisanghin” is usually explained as a Persian rendering of “stone bridge” on the Sanggan, the upper Yongding. But the description of a long stone bridge with lions, ten miles from the capital on the road west, can only be Lugou, and Western writers have called it the Marco Polo Bridge since the nineteenth century. Chinese writers call it Lugouqiao, and Chinese histories call the 1937 clash the Lugouqiao Incident or the July 7 Incident.

In their words

Over this River there is a very fine stone bridge, so fine indeed, that it has very few equals

For Chinese readers the bridge had a different fame. Since the Jin period, scholars of the capital had listed eight famous scenes of the region, the Eight Views of Yanjing, and one of them was Lugou xiaoyue, “Morning Moon over Lugou”: the waning moon still hanging in the dawn sky over the bridge as travelers set out from the inns at its east end. The bridge was the last stop for people leaving the capital for the south, and the scene carried the feeling of partings and early departures. In 1751 the Qianlong Emperor, a prolific poet who wrote his own verses on all eight views, had the four characters Lugou xiaoyue carved in his calligraphy on a stele that still stands, under a pavilion, at the east end of the bridge (Chinese Wikipedia; Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge”).

Beside it stands an older stele on a stone turtle, recording repairs under Qianlong’s grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor. The date of that work is one of the small puzzles of the bridge’s history. English-language sources usually say that Kangxi rebuilt the bridge in 1698 after flood damage, which was the year his officials embanked the river and renamed it Yongding. Chinese sources record that a great flood in 1668 destroyed part of the bridge’s eastern end and that the repairs and the stele date from 1669, the eighth year of Kangxi; the sign at the stele itself gives the earlier date (Chinese Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons description of the stele). It is likely that the river works of 1698 and the bridge repairs of 1669 have been run together in later retellings. The Ming and Qing courts repaired the bridge at least a dozen times in all, including six recorded Ming repairs between 1412 and 1556 (Chinese Wikipedia).

Wanping: a fortress for a dying dynasty

For four and a half centuries the bridge had no fortress. That changed in the last years of the Ming dynasty, when the empire was failing on two fronts at once. The Manchus were raiding across the Great Wall from the northeast, and peasant rebel armies, the most dangerous of them led by Li Zicheng, were sweeping across the provinces of the north and west. In 1638, the eleventh year of the Chongzhen Emperor, work began on a small walled fort at the east end of the bridge to guard the crossing and the road to the capital. A eunuch official of the Imperial Horse Bureau, Wu Jun, supervised the work, which was completed in 1640 (Beijing Tourism, “Wanping City”; Wikipedia, “Wanping Fortress”).

The fort was called Gongji Cheng, a name that expressed its role as a guardian of the capital, and in the Qing period it was also known as Gongbei Cheng. It was laid out as a rectangle about 640 m from east to west and 320 m from north to south, enclosing about 20 hectares, so small that it was nicknamed the “dipper city.” Its brick walls stood on a stone base, and it had only two gates, one at each end of a single east-west street that ran straight from the road to Beiping to the head of the bridge. Each gate had a walled enclosure and a gate tower (Beijing Tourism). Sources disagree about which gate carried which name: one account puts the Shunzhi gate on the east and the Yongchang gate, later renamed Weiyan, on the west, and another reverses them.

The fortress did not save the dynasty. In April 1644 Li Zicheng’s army took Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on the hill behind the palace; within weeks the Manchus drove Li out and founded the Qing. Wanping’s little fort lived on as a garrison post and road station. Its modern name came from the administration of the capital. Wanping was the name of one of the two counties into which the city and its western suburbs had been divided since the Ming, and the county government sat inside Beijing. When the Nationalist government moved the national capital to Nanjing in 1928 and renamed Beijing as Beiping, “northern peace,” the Wanping county government moved out to the old fort by the bridge, on 1 December 1928, and the fort took the name Wanping Cheng, the town of Wanping (Beijing Tourism). In July 1937 its magistrate, Wang Lengzhai, would find himself negotiating between two armies at his gate.

Railways: Lugouqiao, Fengtai and the road to the south

In the 1890s the railway reached the bridge, and the bridge gave its name to one of China’s first trunk lines. The line from Tianjin to the capital reached Lugouqiao in 1897. The great north-south railway to the Yangtze, financed by a Belgian and French syndicate, was begun from the same point and was first known as the Lu–Han Railway, from Lugouqiao to Hankou; it was completed in 1905–06 and soon extended into the city as the Beijing–Hankou line, later the Ping–Han (Beiping–Hankou) Railway (Chinese Wikipedia, “Lugouqiao”). Its bridge over the Yongding stood a short distance upstream of the stone bridge. Together with the Tianjin–Pukou line to the east, the Ping–Han carried the traffic between North China and the Yangtze valley, and in a war it would carry armies.

The key junction was Fengtai, a market town and railway yard about 7 km east of the bridge and southwest of Beiping’s walls. At Fengtai the Beiping–Hankou line met the line that ran east to Tianjin, the sea at Tanggu, and on through Shanhaiguan to Manchuria. Trains to the south and west, and trains to the coast and the northeast, all passed through or near it. Whoever held Fengtai could watch, and if necessary cut, almost every rail link between Beiping and the rest of China.

By 1937 that mattered more than ever, because of what had happened to the country around Beiping in the previous four years, told in Chapter 1. The Tanggu Truce of May 1933 had created a demilitarized zone in eastern Hebei, between Beiping and the Great Wall. In November 1935 that zone became the East Hebei Autonomous Council, a Japanese client regime based at Tongzhou, just east of the city. Japanese troops guarded the railway from Beiping to Tianjin and the sea under the Boxer Protocol. To the north and northwest, Japanese-backed Mongol forces were active in Chahar. When Japanese troops settled at Fengtai in 1936, the routes in Chinese hands narrowed to one: the Ping–Han Railway and the road that ran beside it, across the Yongding at Lugouqiao. Chinese commanders understood what that meant. In June 1937 the 29th Army reinforced Wanping and the railway town of Changxindian, south of the bridge, and improved the field fortifications there (Wu Yuexing et al., 1987, as summarized by Arms of China).

The Boxer Protocol and the foreign garrisons

Japanese soldiers were in North China legally, and that legal basis is a large part of why the crisis of 1937 developed as it did. In the summer of 1900 the Boxer uprising besieged the foreign legations in Beijing, and an eight-nation relief force, with a large Japanese contingent, fought its way from the coast to relieve them. The settlement that followed, the Boxer Protocol, was signed in Beijing on 7 September 1901 by China and eleven foreign powers. Besides a huge indemnity, it gave the powers the right to keep permanent guards in a fortified Legation Quarter in the capital, required China to raze the Taku forts at the mouth of the Hai River, and listed twelve points along the railway from Beijing to the sea that the powers could occupy “for the maintenance of open communication between the capital and the sea” (Boxer Protocol, Article IX, text at USC US-China Institute).

The twelve points were Huangcun, Langfang, Yangcun, Tianjin, Junliangcheng, Tanggu, Lutai, Tangshan, Luanzhou, Changli, Qinhuangdao and Shanhaiguan. Fengtai was not among them, and neither was Lugouqiao (Boxer Protocol, Article IX). A supplementary agreement of 15 July 1902 allowed the foreign troops to hold field exercises and target practice without informing the Chinese authorities, except where live firing was involved (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident,” citing the IMTFE). Both points would matter in 1936 and 1937.

For a generation the foreign garrisons were small and mostly ceremonial. Japan’s force was created in 1901 from units of the 5th Division that had fought in the relief expedition and was called the Qing Empire Garrison Army; after the 1911 revolution it became the China Garrison Army, usually known as the Tianjin Garrison from its headquarters in the Japanese concession at Tianjin (Wikipedia and Japanese Wikipedia, “China Garrison Army”). The Americans kept the 15th Infantry at Tianjin and a Marine legation guard in Beiping; the British, French and Italians had their own detachments. A U.S. Army count for 1 September 1935 gave the foreign troops in the Beiping–Tianjin area as 1,838 Japanese, 1,763 French, 1,256 American, 1,004 British and 390 Italian, a total of 6,251 (GlobalSecurity.org, “Tientsin Garrison,” from U.S. Army records). In 1935 the Japanese force was still roughly the size of the French.

By the numbers

Foreign troops in the Beiping–Tianjin area

Men under arms by nationality, 1 September 1935, and the Japanese garrison after its 1936 enlargement

Japan, June 19365,774

Japan, 19351,838

France, 19351,763

United States, 19351,256

Britain, 19351,004

Italy, 1935390

The China Garrison Army enlarged, 1936

In the spring of 1936 Tokyo decided to make the Tianjin garrison a real army. The decision came out of the North China crisis of 1935, when Japanese officers had pressed for an autonomous North China and the Kwantung Army in Manchuria had shown an appetite for running North China policy itself. Strengthening the Tianjin garrison was meant in part to keep North China under the authority of the General Staff in Tokyo rather than the Kwantung Army, and in part to give Japan’s demands in Beiping more weight. On 18 April 1936 the army created a China Garrison Infantry Brigade; before that the garrison’s infantry had amounted to about ten companies. From 1 May 1936 the post of garrison commander became a lieutenant general’s command made by imperial appointment (Japanese Wikipedia, “China Garrison Army,” citing the Official Gazette of 28 April 1936).

The new commander was Lt. Gen. Tashiro Kanichiro, born in Saga Prefecture in 1881, a General Staff China specialist who had been chief of staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army in 1932 and had commanded the 11th Division (Wikipedia, “Kanichiro Tashiro”). The American embassy in Tokyo watched the reinforcement closely. On 23 May 1936 Ambassador Joseph Grew reported that the garrison would be increased to “about 4300 officers and men, or to 4675 if additional field artillery is to be sent,” and that Japanese officers denied any plan to form a full division in North China. On 24 June he reported that the movement was complete and that the garrison now numbered “slightly under 5,000 men of all branches of the army” (FRUS 1936, vol. IV, docs. 153 and 210). The Japanese official war history puts the strength at 5,774 on 10 June 1936 (Senshi Sōsho, vol. 86, p. 72, as summarized by Arms of China).

By the summer of 1937 the China Garrison Army was organized as follows (Japanese Wikipedia, “China Garrison Army”; Wikipedia, “Battle of Beiping–Tianjin order of battle”):

• Army headquarters, Tianjin: Lt. Gen. Tashiro Kanichiro, with Hashimoto Gun as chief of staff.
• China Garrison Infantry Brigade, Beiping: Maj. Gen. Kawabe Masakazu (his given name is also read Shōzō).
• 1st Infantry Regiment, Beiping: Col. Mutaguchi Renya. Its 3rd Battalion, under Maj. Ichiki Kiyonao, was stationed at Fengtai.
• 2nd Infantry Regiment, Tianjin: Col. Kayashima Takashi.
• Artillery regiment, Tianjin; a tank unit (Maj. Fukuda Mineo); a cavalry unit; and engineer, signal, military police, hospital and supply units.

Chinese accounts add detail on equipment: a tank unit of about two dozen light and medium tanks based at Fengtai, a field artillery regiment at Tianjin, mountain artillery detachments, a small air contingent of about 18 aircraft, and a motor transport unit of some 180 trucks (Wu Yuexing et al., 1987, and Qu Zi, 1998, as summarized by Arms of China). The infantry carried the 6.5 mm Arisaka Type 38 rifle and the light and heavy machine guns of a modern Japanese regiment. Man for man the garrison was far better armed and trained than the Chinese troops around it, and it could be reinforced from Manchuria and Korea by rail in days.

The 1st Regiment’s commander would leave a large mark on the war. Mutaguchi Renya, born in Saga in 1888, had served in the Siberian Intervention, as a military attaché in France and on the General Staff in Tokyo before taking the Beiping regiment in 1936 (Wikipedia, “Renya Mutaguchi”). It was Mutaguchi who authorized the attack on the Chinese positions early on 8 July (Kondo Masataka, Bunshun Online, 7 July 2017). Major Ichiki Kiyonao, born in Shizuoka in 1892, was an infantry tactics instructor who had taken command of the 3rd Battalion in 1936 (Wikipedia, “Kiyonao Ichiki”). Japanese official figures give his battalion as about 500 men (Japanese Defense Agency, Senshi Sōsho, as cited by Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”).

Song Zheyuan and the 29th Army

Facing the Japanese garrison was an army with a history of its own. The 29th Army came out of the Guominjun, the northwestern army of the warlord Feng Yuxiang, the “Christian General.” Song Zheyuan, born in 1885 in Laoling County, Shandong, had risen under Feng and governed Rehe (Jehol) for him in 1926. After Feng’s failed war against Chiang Kai-shek in 1930, Song’s troops went over to the Nationalist government and were renumbered the 29th Army (Wikipedia, “Song Zheyuan”). They kept their northwestern character: hard-marching infantry, poorly supplied, with officers loyal first to their own commanders and only second to Nanjing.

The army made its name in March 1933, when the Japanese pushed south from Rehe to the passes of the Great Wall. At Xifengkou the 29th Army’s troops fought at close quarters, at night, with grenades and the dadao, the broad-bladed two-handed sword that became the army’s emblem; Zhao Dengyu’s 109th Brigade led some of the best-known counterattacks (ChineseLongsword.com, “Dadao: Hero of the 29th Army”). The Chinese press celebrated the sword fighters. The army’s actual results are harder to measure, and the casualty figures claimed for Xifengkou are not reliable, but the fighting gave the 29th Army a reputation for courage and a symbol, and it added to Japanese officers’ wariness of it. In 1937, after the Marco Polo Bridge fighting, the composer Mai Xin wrote “The Sword March,” whose first line salutes the big sword, in honor of the 29th Army (Wikipedia, “The Sword March”).

Song became chairman of Chahar province, and in 1935 his army moved into the Beiping–Tianjin region as central government troops withdrew under the He–Umezu agreement. In December 1935 Nanjing created the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, with Song as chairman, to govern Hebei, Chahar, Beiping and Tianjin. It was a compromise: a regional government with enough autonomy to satisfy Japanese demands for a “special” North China, but still formally under Nanjing (Wikipedia, “Hebei–Chahar Political Council,” citing Dryburgh). Song spent the next eighteen months trying to keep both sides at arm’s length. He negotiated with Tashiro on economic cooperation in 1936, but stopped when Nanjing objected; he agreed in principle to joint anti-communist measures with the garrison; and during the Xi’an Incident of December 1936 he supported Chiang (Wikipedia, “Hebei–Chahar Political Council”).

By 1937 the 29th Army had grown to four infantry divisions, a cavalry division and a guard brigade, besides independent brigades and security units, roughly 100,000 men according to Chinese accounts (The Paper, Shanghai, on Feng Zhian). The Japanese official history estimated about 78,000 in Hebei and Chahar in early July 1937, giving each of the four divisions about 15,000 men (Senshi Sōsho, vol. 86, pp. 140–141, as summarized by Arms of China). The divisions were:

• 37th Division (Feng Zhian), the strongest, around Beiping: the western suburbs at Xiyuan and Babaoshan, the Lugou Bridge and Changxindian. Feng was also chairman of Hebei province.
• 38th Division (Zhang Zizhong), at Tianjin and in its region. Zhang was also mayor of Tianjin.
• 132nd Division (Zhao Dengyu), to the south in Hebei, with elements at Nanyuan, the army’s barracks and training base south of Beiping.
• 143rd Division (Liu Ruming), in Chahar.

The army’s second-in-command and political manager was Qin Dechun, born in Shandong in 1893, who had signed the Qin–Doihara agreement over Chahar in 1935 and was now mayor of Beiping and deputy commander of the army (Wikipedia, “Qin Dechun”). Tong Linge was the other deputy commander. Below Feng Zhian, the brigade nearest the bridge was the 110th, commanded by He Jifeng, a strongly anti-Japanese officer who, it later emerged, had secret contacts with the Communist Party. His 219th Regiment, under Col. Ji Xingwen, held the bridge sector, and the regiment’s 3rd Battalion, under Jin Zhenzhong, garrisoned Wanping itself (The Paper; Japanese Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”; Wikipedia, “Ji Xingwen”).

Equipment was the 29th Army’s weakness. Its rifles and machine guns came from Chinese arsenals and the import trade, a mixture of calibers and makes; it had a few batteries of artillery, almost no anti-aircraft or anti-tank guns, and no air force. Most soldiers carried a rifle and a dadao (Wikipedia, “The Sword March”; Arms of China). Photographs from 1937 show 29th Army machine gunners with water-cooled German-pattern heavy machine guns, the standard Chinese heavy weapon of the period. The army had begun to modernize its training. It ran a training corps for student volunteers at Nanyuan, drawing young men from Beiping, Tianjin, Baoding and the exiled Manchurian community (Wu Yuexing et al., 1987, as summarized by Arms of China), and those students would be thrown into the battle at Nanyuan on 28 July, described in Chapter 5.

Fengtai, 1935–36: two armies in one town

Japanese soldiers first appeared at Fengtai in late 1935. A Chinese account records that early on 28 November 1935, 67 Japanese soldiers arrived at Fengtai station, saying they had come to supervise railway cars, and after negotiation were given six rooms in a warehouse there (Renmin Zhengxie Bao, 10 July 2014). The real move came with the reinforcement of 1936. Between 21 and 30 June 1936 Japanese troops arrived at Fengtai in batches and began building barracks about 300 m from the 29th Army’s own garrison (Renmin Zhengxie Bao). The Chinese Foreign Ministry protested that Fengtai was not one of the points listed in the Boxer Protocol. On that point the Chinese were right: the Japanese army’s own later review conceded that the Fengtai garrison had no legal basis (Japanese Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”). The Japanese stayed anyway, citing the need to protect the railway.

Two garrisons a few hundred meters apart, each suspicious of the other, produced the first Fengtai incident within days. According to the same Chinese account, on 26 June 1936 a horse belonging to the Chinese troops strayed onto the Japanese construction site, and an argument broke out over its return. Officers of the 37th Division intervened to calm things down, but the next day Japanese soldiers entered the Chinese stables and a fight broke out in which men on both sides were hurt. The Japanese demanded an apology, compensation and the withdrawal of the 29th Army from Fengtai. Song apologized but refused to withdraw. He moved the troops involved away and sent part of a 37th Division brigade to Fengtai in their place (Renmin Zhengxie Bao).

The second incident was more serious. On 31 August a Japanese civilian was stabbed in a scuffle after entering a 29th Army barracks, and the Japanese again demanded a Chinese withdrawal. On the evening of 18 September 1936, the fifth anniversary of the Mukden Incident, a Japanese unit returning from maneuvers met a Chinese company on the road, and an altercation followed. The U.S. Embassy in Beiping reported the Japanese version: a Chinese sentry had made an insulting remark or gesture toward a Japanese officer, and the Japanese then surrounded the Chinese barracks, holding about 120 troops, through the night. No shots were fired. The cordon was lifted at 1000 on 19 September after negotiations (FRUS 1936, vol. IV, doc. 283). The Chinese account says the Japanese seized the Chinese company commander, that reinforcements under Mutaguchi came from Beiping, and that they cut telephone lines and occupied key points around the town (Renmin Zhengxie Bao).

The settlement, as the Americans heard it, required a public apology by the Chinese general in command to Colonel Mutaguchi “before troops of both countries,” the “immediate withdrawal of all Chinese troops in Fengtai to a point 2 miles south of railroad,” and the eventual withdrawal of all Chinese troops in the Fengtai area to Nanyuan or Xiyuan. Chinese officers told American informants that they could not resist “in view of General Sung Che Yuan’s standing instructions” not to fight (FRUS 1936, vol. IV, doc. 283). The Chinese account says Song agreed only to move his troops a short distance southeast of the town (Renmin Zhengxie Bao). Either way, the Chinese left Fengtai. Ichiki’s battalion moved into the old barracks, and the garrison’s tanks were based there (Wu Yuexing et al., 1987, as summarized by Arms of China).

The lesson each side drew from Fengtai helps explain July 1937. Japanese officers concluded that pressure worked: a firm stand had cleared the Chinese out of an important junction without a shot. In September 1936 the General Staff had instructed that incidents touching the army’s prestige should be dealt with firmly (Renmin Zhengxie Bao). Chinese officers, and especially the junior officers and men of the 37th Division, concluded that every retreat invited another demand. The next obvious position for the Japanese to want was the crossing a few miles west, and by 1937 the 29th Army’s commanders in the area had made up their minds not to give it up.

The tense spring of 1937

The winter of 1936–37 brought a lull. In Tokyo the Hayashi cabinet, with Sato Naotake as foreign minister, talked briefly of a more conciliatory China policy, and in China the Xi’an Incident ended with Chiang Kai-shek released and committed, in practice, to a united front against Japan. The American embassy in Beiping still reported uneasily on the Japanese garrison. A despatch of spring 1937 noted that Japanese officers had stated a strength of about 4,000 in May 1936 and then stopped commenting, that the American naval attaché put the garrison at 9,200, that a Chinese official expected it to become “a full division of 12,000 men,” and that “a serious incident in Hopei might bring on a major conflict,” though conflict was not thought imminent (FRUS 1937, vol. III, doc. 62).

Song Zheyuan tried to defuse the pressure by leaving. In May 1937, on the pretext of repairing his ancestral graves, he left Beiping for his home in Laoling, Shandong, and stayed there into July, leaving military affairs to Feng Zhian and negotiations with the Japanese to Qin Dechun (The Paper). His absence meant that when the crisis came, the men making decisions in Beiping were the deputy commander and the divisional commander, while the army’s chief was in Shandong. On the Japanese side, too, the commander was out of action. Tashiro had heart disease and by early July was confined to bed in Tianjin (Wikipedia, “Kanichiro Tashiro”; Iwatani, Hokudai Law Review, 2021). He was replaced by Lt. Gen. Katsuki Kiyoshi on 11 or 12 July and died in Tianjin on 16 July 1937. In the first critical days, the garrison’s decisions were made by his staff and by the officers in Beiping.

Meanwhile the soldiers around the bridge watched each other at close range. From the Fengtai barracks, the nearest open ground for exercises was the stretch of fields, riverbank and low hills between Fengtai and the Yongding, north of Wanping. The Japanese explained that it was the only training area available in summer, because the tall sorghum, the gaoliang of North China, covered every other field (Japanese Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”). Through late May, June and early July 1937 Japanese companies and battalions exercised there by day and by night, practicing attacks toward positions that the Chinese could only read as their own. The Chinese protested repeatedly that the troops trampled crops, demanded advance notice of night exercises, and complained of firing at night; the Japanese replied that they used blank ammunition and were entitled by the 1902 agreement to exercise without notice (Japanese Wikipedia; Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”).

Feng Zhian answered with exercises of his own. A Chinese account says that whenever the Japanese held a maneuver near the bridge, Feng ordered a Chinese exercise of the same size and content the next day (The Paper). Inside Wanping, Jin Zhenzhong’s battalion was put on alert. Jin later recalled watching from the wall on 6 July as Japanese infantry rehearsed an attack on the bridge, with artillery digging in and tanks audible behind them, and ordering his men to hold their fire (Jin Zhenzhong’s memoir, as summarized by Arms of China). The same day, He Jifeng ordered his brigade to watch the Japanese closely and to counterattack firmly if provoked, and Jin ordered that Japanese troops approaching within 100 m of Chinese positions were to be fired on (Japanese Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident,” citing Chinese records). Feng’s instruction, as later quoted in Chinese accounts, was that if the Japanese opened fire, the Chinese should strike back hard.

How large the Chinese garrison of Wanping was is itself disputed. Jin’s battalion was a full one, with four rifle companies, a heavy machine-gun company and mortar companies, about 1,400 men by his account (Wu Yuexing et al., 1987, as summarized by Arms of China). Japanese records describe the town as held by one infantry company and the battalion headquarters, with the regiment’s other two battalions at Changxindian to the south (Japanese Wikipedia). English-language accounts often repeat that about 100 Chinese soldiers held the bridge itself (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”). These figures can be reconciled if the battalion was spread between the town, the bridge, the railway bridge, the embankment at Longwangmiao and the surrounding villages, with only part of it at any one point.

On the afternoon of 7 July 1937, the 8th Company of Ichiki’s 3rd Battalion, under Capt. Shimizu Setsuro, marched out from Fengtai to the exercise ground near Longwangmiao. Its scenario, according to Chinese and Japanese accounts, was to approach the enemy’s main position at dusk and attack at dawn (Qu Zi, 1998, and Wu Yuexing et al., 1987, as summarized by Arms of China). The exercise began about 1930. What happened at about 2240 that night, and in the hours after, is the subject of Chapter 3.

Timeline

The bridge, the town and the garrisons

1. 1189–1192The Jin build the stone bridge over the Lugou (Yongding) River, first named Guangli Bridge.
2. c. 1275–1292Marco Polo in China; he later describes the stone bridge over the “Pulisanghin.”
3. 1638–1640The Ming build the walled fort of Gongji Cheng, later Wanping, at the east end of the bridge.
4. 1668–69Flood damages the eastern end; repairs under the Kangxi Emperor (often dated 1698 in English sources).
5. 1698The river is embanked and renamed Yongding, “forever stable.”
6. 1751Qianlong’s “Morning Moon over Lugou” stele erected.
7. 1897The railway from Tianjin reaches Lugouqiao.
8. 7 Sep 1901Boxer Protocol signed; Japan’s garrison in North China established.
9. 1905–06The Lu–Han (later Beiping–Hankou) Railway completed from Lugouqiao to Hankou.
10. 1 Dec 1928Wanping County moves its seat into the fort, renamed Wanping.
11. Mar 1933The 29th Army fights at Xifengkou on the Great Wall.
12. 18 Dec 1935Hebei–Chahar Political Council established under Song Zheyuan.
13. 18 Apr 1936China Garrison Infantry Brigade created; Tashiro takes command of the garrison army on 1 May.
14. 21–30 Jun 1936Japanese troops move into new barracks at Fengtai.
15. 26–27 Jun 1936First Fengtai incident.
16. 18–19 Sep 1936Second Fengtai incident; Chinese troops withdraw from Fengtai.
17. May 1937Song Zheyuan leaves Beiping for his home in Shandong.
18. Jun–Jul 1937Repeated Japanese day and night exercises near Wanping; the 29th Army reinforces Wanping and Changxindian.
19. 7 Jul 1937The 8th Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, marches from Fengtai to exercise near Longwangmiao.

People

Song Zheyuan (1885–1940), of Laoling, Shandong, rose in Feng Yuxiang’s Guominjun, led the 29th Army on the Great Wall in 1933 and governed the Beiping–Tianjin region as chairman of the Hebei–Chahar Political Council from December 1935. He tried for eighteen months to keep both Nanjing and the Japanese at bay, and his absence in Shandong in the summer of 1937 left the crisis to his subordinates. After the loss of Beiping he commanded in the north for a time; he fell ill and died in Sichuan in April 1940 (Wikipedia, “Song Zheyuan”).

Qin Dechun (1893–1963), Song’s deputy commander and mayor of Beiping, handled the negotiations with the Japanese in the first days of the incident. He later served as vice minister of national defense, went to Taiwan in 1949, and died in Taipei (Wikipedia, “Qin Dechun”).

Feng Zhian, commander of the 37th Division and chairman of Hebei, commanded the troops around Beiping and the bridge in Song’s absence and is remembered in Chinese accounts for his orders to resist. He died in Taiwan in 1954 (The Paper).

He Jifeng, commander of the 110th Brigade, gave the standing orders that Japanese troops were not to enter Wanping. His secret links with the Communist Party became public later, when he went over to the Communists in the civil war. Ji Xingwen (1907–1958), born in Henan, commanded the 219th Regiment. He became a lieutenant general in the Nationalist army and was mortally wounded by Communist artillery on Kinmen on 23 August 1958, dying three days later; he is commemorated in museums in both Taipei and Beijing (Wikipedia, “Ji Xingwen”). Jin Zhenzhong commanded the 3rd Battalion in Wanping and left a memoir of the incident that is one of the main Chinese sources for it.

Tashiro Kanichiro (1881–1937), commander of the China Garrison Army from May 1936, negotiated with Song through 1936. He was confined to bed with heart disease when the incident began and died in Tianjin on 16 July 1937 (Wikipedia, “Kanichiro Tashiro”).

Kawabe Masakazu (1886–1965), of Toyama, commanded the China Garrison Infantry Brigade at Beiping. He later commanded the Burma Area Army, backed Mutaguchi’s Imphal offensive of 1944 and was relieved after its failure (Wikipedia, “Masakazu Kawabe”).

Mutaguchi Renya (1888–1966), of Saga, commanded the 1st Infantry Regiment at Beiping from 1936 and authorized the first Japanese attack on 8 July. As commander of the Fifteenth Army in Burma he launched the Imphal offensive of 1944, in which about 55,000 of his 85,000 men became casualties, most from starvation and disease (Wikipedia, “Renya Mutaguchi”).

Ichiki Kiyonao (1892–1942), of Shizuoka, commanded the 3rd Battalion at Fengtai. Five years later he led the Ichiki Detachment in the first Japanese counterattack on Guadalcanal and died at the Battle of the Tenaru on 21 August 1942 (Wikipedia, “Kiyonao Ichiki”). Wang Lengzhai, the Wanping magistrate, was the civilian who negotiated at the town gate on the night of 7–8 July.

Losses and uncertainty

This chapter ends before the killing began, so its uncertainties are about numbers of soldiers rather than numbers of dead. The two Fengtai incidents of 1936 left men injured on both sides and one Japanese civilian stabbed, but the sources examined here record no deaths in them. The figures that matter are the strengths of the armies, and they vary widely.

The Japanese garrison. Before 1936 the figures are consistent: about 1,800 Japanese troops in the Beiping–Tianjin area in 1935. For the enlarged garrison, the Japanese official history gives 5,774 on 10 June 1936, and Japanese Wikipedia gives about 5,600 in 1937. The U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, relying on Japanese War Ministry sources, reported plans for 4,300 to 4,675 men in May 1936 and “slightly under 5,000” in June. The U.S. naval attaché in China estimated 9,200, and a Chinese official expected a division of 12,000 (FRUS 1936 and 1937). Chinese observers estimated 8,400 or more (Wu Yuexing et al., 1987). Wikipedia, citing the Tokyo tribunal, gives 7,000 to 15,000 by July 1937. The differences come from what is counted: the infantry brigade alone or every branch; the garrison in Hebei only or also detachments along the railway to Shanhaiguan; the planned strength or the strength present; and, for the higher figures, suspicion that Japan was concealing reinforcements. Most historians use a figure of about 5,000 to 6,000 for July 1937.

The 29th Army. Estimates run from about 75,000 (the infobox figure in Wikipedia’s article on the Beiping–Tianjin battle) through 78,000 (the Japanese official history) to about 100,000 (Chinese accounts) and higher for all the forces under the Hebei–Chahar Political Council, including provincial security troops. The higher figures include units in Chahar and southern Hebei that were far from Beiping. What is not disputed is the imbalance in quality: the Japanese garrison had tanks, modern artillery, aircraft and the rail link to the Kwantung Army, and the 29th Army had numbers.

The Wanping garrison. As noted above, figures range from “about 100” at the bridge to about 1,400 in Jin Zhenzhong’s battalion, and the size of the Japanese exercise force on 7 July is given as one company (Japanese records) or nearly 600 men (Wu Yuexing, cited by Arms of China). Chapter 3 returns to this question.

The bridge. Its length is given as 260 m (Structurae), 266.5 m (most sources) or 268 m with approaches (Chinese surveys); the lion count as anything from 482 to 501, with 627 claimed for the original; the Kangxi repairs as 1669 or 1698; and Wanping’s gate names in two different orders. None of these differences changes the story, but they are a reminder that even a famous monument is described inconsistently, and that this chapter gives both figures where the record conflicts.

Protected monument · 1961

The Lugou Bridge, a Major Historical and Cultural Site

In 1961 the State Council listed the Lugou Bridge among the first group of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level, China’s highest heritage designation (Chinese Wikipedia). The listing recognized both the Jin bridge and its place in the history of the war. Since 1985 the bridge has been closed to vehicles, and the restoration completed on 15 June 1987 removed the asphalt and restored the stone railings and posts.

Beijing Tourism: Marco Polo Bridge →

Questions readers ask

Why is it called the Marco Polo Bridge?

Because Marco Polo described it. In his account of travels in the Mongol empire he wrote of a “very fine stone bridge” over a large river ten miles from the capital on the road west, and European writers identified it with Lugouqiao. The Chinese name, Lugouqiao, means the bridge over the Lugou River, an old name for this stretch of the Yongding.

How old is the bridge, and is it the original?

It was built from 1189 to 1192 under the Jin dynasty. The arches and piers are substantially the Jin structure, but the bridge has been repaired many times, including at least a dozen times under the Ming and Qing and after a flood in 1668 that destroyed part of the eastern end. Most of the carved lions date from the Ming and Qing periods rather than the Jin.

Why were Japanese troops near Beijing at all?

The Boxer Protocol of 1901 allowed the powers to keep legation guards in Beijing and troops at twelve points on the railway to the sea. Japan, like Britain, France, the United States and Italy, kept a garrison under it. In 1936 Japan tripled its force to about 5,000–6,000 men and stationed a battalion at Fengtai, a junction the protocol did not list.

Why was Wanping so important?

Wanping guarded the east end of the Lugou Bridge and stood beside the bridge of the Beiping–Hankou railway. With Japanese troops at Fengtai, along the railway to Tianjin and in the client regime at Tongzhou, the road and railway across the Yongding at Lugouqiao were Beiping’s last link to central China under Chinese control. Whoever held the crossing could isolate the city.

Were the Japanese allowed to hold night exercises there?

Japan claimed the right under a 1902 agreement that let the protocol powers hold exercises without notifying the Chinese authorities. China protested that the troops were not at a protocol point, trampled crops and alarmed the garrison, and demanded advance notice of night exercises. The Japanese army’s own later review conceded that its garrison at Fengtai had no legal basis, which undermined the claim that exercises launched from there were protected by the protocol.

Did the 29th Army really fight with swords?

Yes, alongside rifles, machine guns and grenades. The dadao, a heavy two-handed broadsword, was carried by many 29th Army soldiers and was used in close-quarters night fighting on the Great Wall in 1933 and around Wanping in July 1937. It was a weapon of necessity in an army short of modern equipment, and it became a national symbol through “The Sword March.”

How it connects

The garrisons described here were put in place by the events of the previous six years, told in Chapter 1: From Mukden to the Bridge: the Mukden Incident and Manchukuo, the Great Wall fighting and the Tanggu Truce, and the North China agreements of 1935 that brought the 29th Army to Beiping and created the Hebei–Chahar Political Council. The next chapter, Chapter 3: The Night of 7 July 1937, follows Shimizu’s company onto the exercise ground and tells what happened when shots were heard at about 2240 and a soldier was reported missing.

The men introduced here reappear throughout the collection: Qin Dechun and Zhang Zizhong in the negotiations of Chapter 4, Tong Linge and Zhao Dengyu at Nanyuan in Chapter 5, and the railways described here as the routes of the Japanese advance south in the later chapters. The Boxer Protocol garrisons also explain why American soldiers and Marines were still in North China in 1937, part of the story of Chapter 8, and the long road that ended at Pearl Harbor.

What happened afterward

Within days of 7 July the ground described here became a battlefield. Japanese troops fought for the railway bridge and Longwangmiao on 8 July, Japanese artillery shelled Wanping and damaged its walls, and the 29th Army retook positions at night with rifles and swords (see Chapter 3 and Chapter 4). Tashiro died on 16 July. The China Garrison Army itself lasted only a few weeks longer: reinforced by divisions from Korea, Manchuria and Japan, it took Beiping and Tianjin at the end of July and was dissolved on 26 August 1937, its units absorbed into the new North China Area Army (Wikipedia, “Japanese China Garrison Army”). The 29th Army withdrew south along the very railway it had guarded, and Song’s troops were reorganized and much reduced.

The bridge and the town spent the next eight years under Japanese occupation. After 1945 the bridge went back to carrying traffic, eventually trucks and buses on an asphalt surface, until new bridges took over: the New Lugou Bridge about 1 km downstream in 1971–72 and the Yongning bridge on the Beijing–Shijiazhuang expressway in 1985. On 24 August 1985 the old bridge was closed to vehicles, and the restoration of 1986–87 removed the asphalt and returned it to its stone surface (Chinese Wikipedia; Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge”). The officers who faced each other in 1937 went on to very different ends: Mutaguchi and Kawabe to the disaster at Imphal, Ichiki to Guadalcanal, Song to an early death in 1940, Ji Xingwen to Kinmen.

Walking the ground today

The bridge and Wanping are in Beijing’s Fengtai District, about 15 km southwest of Tiananmen. The easiest way there is Beijing Subway Line 16 to Wanpingcheng station, which opened next to the old town (Wikipedia, “Wanping Fortress”). Enter Wanping by the east gate and walk the length of its single street, as the Japanese negotiators tried to do on the night of 7–8 July. The walls have been restored, and on the outer face of the walls a plaque marks damage from the shelling of 1937.

Most of the space inside the walls is taken up by the Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, opened in 1987 and enlarged since, with a plaza and sculpture park around it (Wikipedia, “Wanping Fortress”). It is China’s national museum of the war and the site of the main official commemorations each 7 July; it is described in Chapter 9.

Leave by the west gate and you are at the head of the Lugou Bridge, open to pedestrians for a small fee. At the east end stand the four ornamental columns, each 4.65 m high, and the steles: Qianlong’s “Morning Moon over Lugou” under its pavilion and the weathered Kangxi stele on its turtle (Wikipedia, “Marco Polo Bridge”; Beijing Tourism). Walk the length of the bridge and try to count the lions. From the middle you can see the modern railway bridge upstream, on roughly the line of the Beiping–Hankou crossing fought over on 8 July, and the riverbank to the north where Longwangmiao stood. The open ground where the Japanese exercised is now built over.

Fengtai, 7 km east, is now a busy district of Beijing with one of the city’s largest railway stations; nothing remains of the barracks of 1936. Check opening days and hours for the museum and the bridge before you go; the museum is usually closed on Mondays, and it is crowded around 7 July and on national holidays.

Sources and further reading

• James B. Crowley, “A Reconsideration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,” Journal of Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (May 1963): 277–291; and Japan’s Quest for Autonomy: National Security and Foreign Policy, 1930–1938 (Princeton University Press, 1966).
• U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1936, vol. IV, The Far East, doc. 153 (Grew, 23 May 1936), doc. 210 (Grew, 24 June 1936) and doc. 283 (Johnson, on the Fengtai incident, September 1936); 1937, vol. III, The Far East, doc. 62 (Lockhart, on the North China Garrison).
• Boxer Protocol (Peking, 7 September 1901), text at the USC US-China Institute.
• Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, vol. 2, trans. Henry Yule, rev. Henri Cordier (Project Gutenberg eBook no. 12410), Book II, ch. XXXV.
• Iwatani Masaru, “Local Negotiations in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Part II” (in Japanese), Hokudai Law Review 71, no. 6 (2021): 143–190.
• Renmin Zhengxie Bao (CPPCC News), article on the Fengtai incidents (10 July 2014, in Chinese); The Paper (Shanghai), article on Feng Zhian and the 37th Division (in Chinese); People’s Daily overseas edition, “Lugou Bridge withstands heavy rain” (14 August 2023, in Chinese).
• Arms of China, “The Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 7, 1937)”, which summarizes the Japanese official war history (Bōeichō Bōei Kenshūjo Senshishitsu, Senshi Sōsho, vol. 86), Wu Yuexing et al. (1987), Qu Zi (1998) and the memoir of Jin Zhenzhong; figures attributed to those works in this chapter are taken from that summary.
• Beijing Tourism (Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism): “Marco Polo Bridge”; article on Wanping City (in Chinese); “Wanping Fortress.”
• Wikipedia: “Marco Polo Bridge”, “Marco Polo Bridge incident”, “Wanping Fortress”, “Yongding River”, “Japanese China Garrison Army”, “Hebei–Chahar Political Council”, and biographies of Song Zheyuan, Qin Dechun, Ji Xingwen, Tashiro Kanichiro, Kawabe Masakazu, Mutaguchi Renya and Ichiki Kiyonao; Chinese Wikipedia, “Lugouqiao”; Japanese Wikipedia, “China Garrison Army” and “Marco Polo Bridge incident.”
• GlobalSecurity.org, “Tientsin Garrison” (foreign troop strengths, 1935); Structurae, “Marco Polo Bridge”.
• Books for further reading: Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; UK title China’s War with Japan 1937–1945); Hans van de Ven, China at War (Harvard University Press, 2018); Peter Harmsen, Shanghai 1937: Stalingrad on the Yangtze (Casemate, 2013); Mark Peattie, Edward Drea and Hans van de Ven, eds., The Battle for China (Stanford University Press, 2011); Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 1991); Marjorie Dryburgh, North China and Japanese Expansion, 1933–1937 (Curzon, 2000); Frank Dorn, The Sino-Japanese War, 1937–41 (Macmillan, 1974); Lillian M. Li, Fighting Famine in North China (Stanford University Press, 2007).

Photographs: Japanese army and Chinese press photographs of 1937, public domain; modern photographs by Vmenkov (CC BY-SA 3.0) and 三猎 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.