Monument to the Victims of the Japanese Bombing of Lishui

What it commemorates and the erection of the monument

The Monument to the Victims of the Japanese Bombing of Lishui stands in Lishui District and commemorates the civilians killed when Japanese aircraft bombed the county town on 29 November 1937.

According to the Party History Office of the CPC Nanjing Municipal Committee, in 1997 the county party committee and government decided to erect a monument, and on 29 November of that year it was unveiled in the street park at the South Gate Square of the county town. It has three parts: the shaft, 3.2 metres high, 1 metre wide and 0.4 metres thick, with "Monument to the Victims" carved on the front and an inscription of 348 characters on the back; a base 1 metre high, square in plan, with three steps on each side and a corner pier at each corner; and a crowning fist raised in the air. It is of granite throughout. That source gives the year of erection and the form only, and records no later removal or repair.

The bombing and the losses

According to the Party History Office of the CPC Nanjing Municipal Committee, Japanese aircraft bombed the Lishui county town on 29 November 1937, destroying more than 5,000 houses by blast or fire.

According to the gazetteer authorities and the press, this was an air raid, not ground fighting: Xinhua Daily reports that, on the evidence of declassified Japanese records, Japanese aircraft made three sorties with 37 aircraft and dropped 27 bombs of 250 kilograms and 128 bombs of 60 kilograms, and records that "there were no troops in the city"; the newspaper article of 1938 quoted in that report records that the deepest crater in the city was "more than two zhang and two chi" deep. A project account of the China Local Gazetteers Office, on the other hand, says the raid of 29 November 1937 killed more than 1,200 people and was the single air raid causing the most civilian deaths in the Nanjing area, and that the case is included in the Party History Research Centre's Major Massacres Nationwide during the War of Resistance.

Dead and missing

The available sources set three figures side by side. First, the Nanjing party history office gives more than 1,200 civilians killed. Second, according to Xinhua Daily, an article "Wild Beasts in Jiangnan" in the Shanghai Frontline Daily of 3 November 1938 cites the count of Chen Gongli, then district head of Lishui: "the remains collected came to 1,798", the article adding that those burned or buried under rubble in cellars "are not included". Third, the party history source also records a figure of 1,798 based on the newspapers and survivors of the time. The three rest on different scopes and methods of counting. This entry sets them side by side, neither merging nor averaging them, nor choosing between them.

Building up the record

The Lishui District local gazetteer office compiled Ironclad Evidence: A Record of the Japanese Bombing of Lishui (Nanjing Press, 277,000 characters) from Chinese and Japanese sources, and produced a two-part film gazetteer, The Great Bombing of Lishui, first shown on 29 November 2020.

Uncertainties

First, the figure of more than 5,000 houses is the party history office's; it is set beside the phrase "houses destroyed by blast or fire", and no finer breakdown is given. Second, the available sources do not fully state the scope and origin of each of the three figures for the dead. Third, no protected status in the cultural-relic lists, and no civil-affairs registration, could be found for the monument, nor any record of its being moved or repaired.