Remains of soldiers lost in WWII to return home
Print Edition
THE remains of 347 expeditionary soldiers discovered in neighboring Myanmar will be returned to China next week.
This is the largest collection of such remains ever to be returned. It will arrive in southwest China’s Yunnan Province on Thursday, Sun Chunlong, chair of Longyue Charity Foundation, told a press conference yesterday.
They were found in the northern suburb of Myitkyina, during a search initiated by the Chinese charity in April.
In 1942, China sent 100,000 expeditionary soldiers to Myanmar and India to fight the Japanese forces with the Allies. Nearly half of them were killed or injured.
“A general left the injured to guard tombs, with the promise he would come back and get them after the war,” Sun said.
Civil war in China made this plan all but impossible.
Liu Qiuda, son of the director of the managing bureau for the cemetery of expeditionary soldiers No. 1 Army, helped locate it. On the site where the remains were found is now a house and a middle school.
Residents told Sun that when they were building the house in the 1970s they found bones, as well as bullet casings.
“We found badges belonging to expeditionary soldiers on the first day, and later recovered buttons, bottles, photo frames, pens and even a lipstick.” said Chen Liang, associate professor with the School of Cultural Heritage at Northwest University, who headed the excavation.
Veteran You Guangcai, 96, cried when he saw the photographs of the excavation at a press conference yesterday.
“Today is the hardest day for me, but worth remembering,” he said.
Li Wenguang, head of Yunnan’s Shidian County, said that a 67-hectare plot had been earmarked as a cemetery.
“The burials will be done by the end of next year,” he said.
A memorial hall will also be built near Huitong Bridge in Shidian, along which the soldiers left China, he said.
Dental samples showed that half the soldiers were aged 20 to 25, while genetic methods found that 37 percent were from southwest China, and 22 percent from the northwest.
“This could help us locate where the dead were from, so that we will be able to find their relatives,” said Li Hui, professor with the School of Life Sciences in Fudan University.
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