6. August 13 and the Lone Garrison of Sihang Warehouse (1932–1945)

Five years later, the same ground, a bigger war

On 13 August 1937 the Battle of Shanghai broke out.

Its scale was an order of magnitude beyond that of five years earlier. Japanese forces landed and attacked Shanghai from two directions, the mouth of the Yangtze and Hangzhou Bay; over three months China's soldiers and civilians suffered terrible casualties, and the area north of Suzhou Creek became for a time a "meat grinder".

And Zhabei, once again, took the first blow.

The Gazetteer of Zhabei District is direct:

In the twenty-sixth year of the Republic, when the August 13 battle in Shanghai broke out, the Chinese-administered area of Zhabei again took the first blow: the invading Japanese army once more started its assault at Zhabei, and wrought an even more cruel and destructive devastation. While bombing the area around the North Station indiscriminately, the invaders shifted their main effort to the area west of North Xizang Road (today's Xizang North Road) and Song Garden Road.

Zhabei burned for three days and nights

This passage is hard to read, but it must be read:

• On 28 October Japanese aircraft dropped incendiary bombs around the North Station, setting Zhabei alight for three days. "Looking north from the city centre, black smoke rolled by day; at night the flames leapt to the sky."
• The North Station, the Magen Road Station and the Commercial Press were bombed repeatedly again, and whole stretches of housing, factories and shops were destroyed;
• Japanese troops burned, killed, looted and raped wherever they went, and massacred civilians wholesale.

The Gazetteer of Zhabei District records that across the three months of the 1937 battle, the invading Japanese army ran amok in Zhabei for 80 days.

Sihang Warehouse: the most famous four days

By late October 1937, with the battle at its height, the main body of the Chinese army began to pull back west. A rearguard was needed to stay in Zhabei, tie down the Japanese and cover the main force's withdrawal — and there was a political calculation as well: the Nine-Power Treaty conference was about to open in Brussels, and China hoped that a tragic last stand by a cut-off force would win international support.

The task fell to the 524th Regiment, 262nd Brigade, 88th Division.

Who was holding it

Xie Jinyuan, a native of Jiankeng village, Xinpu market, Jiaoling county, Guangdong, born in April 1905, a graduate of the fourth class of the Whampoa Military Academy, was at the time deputy commander of the 524th Regiment. On 26 October he was ordered to hold Zhabei with more than 420 officers and men. Before dawn on 27 October they moved into Sihang Warehouse on the north bank of Suzhou Creek.

His superior's parting words were: "You are a lone force. There will be no relief!" Xie Jinyuan's answer was: "Understood!" He led his officers and men in an oath: "Sihang Warehouse shall be our burial place!"

To deceive the enemy, the defenders claimed to number eight hundred, and the outside world respectfully called them the "Eight Hundred Heroes". (The actual force was chiefly 420-odd men; accounts range between 414 and 450, and this book follows the "more than 420" figure used by China Military Online and Xinhua.)

What sort of place Sihang Warehouse was

Sihang Warehouse was built with the joint money of four banks — Yanye, Jincheng, Zhongnan and Dalu — and that is where the name "Sihang" comes from: "four banks". It stands where Guangfu Road meets Jinyuan Road, on the north bank of Suzhou Creek, separated from the British concession by nothing but a river (and the width of one warehouse).

Today it is a remarkably well-preserved site of the war of resistance in Shanghai, its west wall still carrying the bullet holes and shell scars of those years.

Four days and nights

In four days and nights they beat back more than ten furious assaults and killed or wounded more than 200 Japanese soldiers.

That flag, and 298 last letters

Shanghai citizens and foreign correspondents watching from across the creek noticed two details, and both went into the history books:

(1) A flag. The girl guide Yang Huimin risked her life, under fire, to put a Chinese national flag into Xie Jinyuan's hands. When the flag rose above Sihang Warehouse, the cries of "Long live the Chinese nation!" and "The war of resistance will be won!" rang out along the banks of Suzhou Creek.

(2) 298 last letters. Between bouts of fighting, the "Eight Hundred Heroes" wrote 298 letters of farewell in the cold, dark warehouse — to wives and children, to parents. Chen Shusheng wrote in blood on a white undershirt, for his aged mother far away in the Daba Mountains of Sichuan:

"To die for righteousness: that is what your son wishes!"

Xie Jinyuan himself had written to his wife before the fighting began:

My beloved wife Qiaoying: within days I shall lead my troops into the fighting at Shanghai. I write this brief note to set your distant worries at rest. Half our land is being eaten away by the Japanese day by day; the disaster of national extinction may come from others, but whether we avert it lies with us. A moment's carelessness, and our descendants will be wiped out. To kill the enemy for one's country is the long-held resolve of a revolutionary soldier...

The Times wrote: "The 'Eight Hundred Heroes' have won glory for the Chinese soldier, have defended Chinese sovereignty for ever, have struggled for the survival of their nation; they fight for humanity, for civilisation, for peace."

The ending: a tragedy betrayed

But the political ending of the story is cold. The Chinese delegation had hoped that the last stand of this lone force would win Western support; what it got in the end was a Western "recommendation" that the Chinese delegation withdraw from the Nine-Power conference. China's interests were once again ignored, and sold.

On 24 April 1941 Xie Jinyuan was stabbed to death by soldiers bought by the Wang Jingwei puppet government. He was 37. In May of that year the Chinese government ordered him posthumously promoted to major general of infantry.

In 2014 "Xie Jinyuan and the Eight Hundred Heroes" were placed on the Ministry of Civil Affairs' first list of 300 famous martyrs and heroic groups of the war of resistance.

How he is remembered today

After the victory in the war of resistance, in memory of Xie Jinyuan:

• the street running from the North Railway Station to Sihang Warehouse was renamed "Jinyuan Road" — the former "Manzhou Road";
• Jiaozhou Park, separated from the lone garrison's camp by a single wall, was renamed Jinyuan Park, and Xie Jinyuan's tomb was built inside it (moved in 1983 to the celebrity section of the International Cemetery);
• today, beneath the west wall of Sihang Warehouse, visitors lay flowers, cakes, or a flask of wine or a cigarette the year round.

(See Part Three · Sihang Warehouse and Part Four · Xie Jinyuan.)

Occupation: Zhabei becomes the "stripped-bare district"

After Shanghai fell in November 1937, Zhabei entered its darkest eight years.

Destruction in numbers

The post-war reckoning recorded in the Gazetteer of Zhabei District:

"In the Chinese-administered area of Zhabei the life-force was all but exhausted; its former bustle was gone, and it became one of the poorest parts of Shanghai."

From "the main base of Chinese-owned industry" to "one of the poorest parts of Shanghai" — between the two lie the two wars of 1932 and 1937.

Three words: chiboqu, xiazhijiao, gundilong

These three expressions in Shanghai speech all describe Zhabei in this period:

• chiboqu, the stripped-bare district — burned out, with nothing left, like a man stripped of his clothes;
• xiazhijiao, the low quarter — as against shangzhijiao, the respectable districts of the concessions;
• gundilong, the rolling dragons — the makeshift shelters refugees put up, built of bamboo, rice straw, reed matting and yellow clay, less than a man's height, joined shoulder to shoulder so that from a distance they looked like dragons lying flat: hence the name.

Daily life under occupation

• more than 1,300 mu of land were enclosed by the invading Japanese army for military use;
• every trade declined and prices soared; "many residents were starving, and not a few fell dead by the roadside, so that at times even charitable bodies such as the Pushan Cemetery could not collect and bury them in time, and the bodies were left lying in the street";
• the ruins of war gradually became shantytowns where disaster victims and refugees crowded together;
• the Wang Jingwei puppet regime conscripted men aged 20 to 40 into labour battalions, and the Japanese army sent press-gangs out at dawn to drag young men away to forced military labour. The Shenbao called the northern district — Zhabei — a world of terror.

But Zhabei did not stop

Even under occupation the underground organs of the Communist Party went on leading workers and ordinary people in Zhabei in their resistance, right up to the victory.

1945–1949: a blueprint never honoured

After the victory there was a brief recovery in Zhabei:

• the hardware and steel, bamboo and timber markets along North Suzhou Road and Guangfu Road, and the trade and catering around the North Station, recovered to a degree;
• the Shanghai municipal government drew up a "Plan for the Reconstruction of Western Zhabei".

But the blueprint was never honoured. The Gazetteer of Zhabei District is blunt:

Because the Kuomintang was politically corrupt and busy with civil war, it became a dead letter.

On the eve of liberation in 1949 the Zhabei and Beizhan districts together covered 7.319 km² and held 548,400 people — but:

One Zhabei resident in four lived in a shack. That was Zhabei's starting line in 1949.

In short

The January 28 Incident and August 13 beat Zhabei from the most respectable part of Shanghai's Chinese-administered city into the poorest. And everything done over the seventy years that followed was, in essence, the paying off of that account.