Wǎnpíng Chéng 宛平城
丰台区西五环
Part of A Better Guide to Běijīng’s coverage of Běijīng Suburbs and Beyond
The little town of Wǎnpíng, built under another name in 1644 at the east end of the Marco Polo Bridge, has now outgrown its city walls, but they remain largely intact. Their layout is not typical of small towns, having no north or south gate and no central drum or bell tower.
Passing under the double west gate to enter the town, turn left to find the ticket office and stairs up to the top. A pleasant 30 minutes’ walk will give you roofscapes of the older interior hútòng and more modern exterior ones, and bring you back the same point having made a complete circuit. Stone bases indicate that there were once other towers at the corners and north and south sides. You will very likely see no other foreigners. Noodle restaurants in the town can restore you before you return to Běijīng.
Museum of the Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese War 中国人民抗日战争纪念馆
Head straight through the city gate nearest the Marco Polo Bridge and the museum is a long grey frontage a few minutes’ walk straight ahead on the left-hand side.
The Marco Polo Bridge’s significance to modern history is as the site for what might be described as the opening battle of World War Two. The peace protocol at the end of the Boxer Rebellion entitled the Japanese to station 1350 troops in the area of Běijīng and Tiānjīn to ensure that the route to the sea, which had been blocked during the Rebellion, was kept open. By July 1937 Japan had more than five times the permitted number of soldiers in the area, was conducting manoeuvres beyond the agreed territorial limits, and was looking for an excuse to take control of the lines issuing from the Fēngtái railway junction, one of which almost touches the northeast corner of Wǎnpíng’s walls.
On 7 July the Japanese used the excuse of a missing soldier to bombard Wǎnpíng, and on 9 July attacked it but without success. The Nationalist government sent troops north from Nánjīng, but the Japanese sent reinforcements and by the end of July occupied both Běijīng and Tiānjīn. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident marked the beginning of the war known in China as the Anti-Japanese War of 1937–45.
The music of the Chinese national anthem is written out for you in gold. This is not, as is often imagined, The East is Red, but the theme tune from a popular 1935 propaganda film called The March of the Volunteers, lauding those who volunteered to fight against the Japanese invasion in the 1930s. The anthem is like the Marseillaise but less bloody.
Almost all Chinese museums have a political message to deliver, and this one gives a view of the Japanese occupation to Chinese who are growing up, and to Japanese visitors who’ve already grown up with history books distinctly light on details of this period, although very few are likely to make it here. The presentation has a powerful single-mindedness, and some of its contents are gory.
The first exhibition hall is on the left, and a succession of rooms contains maps and charts of troop movements, period photographs of Wǎnpíng and Lúgōu Qiáo, dioramas of the battlefield with recreations of shell-fire, copies of propaganda magazines, some video footage. Maps with dates trace Japan’s steady expansion into China following the end of the World War One, when the Treaty of Versailles handed it control of much of the territory in China formerly controlled by Germany.
There’s a copy of the later agreement between Roosevelt, Chiang Kai-shek, and Churchill, dated November 1943, on reclaiming from Japan all territory occupied since 1914, and a copy of the Japanese instrument of surrender dated nearly two years later.
One hall has bombs hanging from the ceiling and nothing else but photographs and projected slides of Chinese deaths at Japanese hands. These include images of some of the hundreds of thousands of executions, beheadings, sessions of torture, and scientific experiments carried out on Chinese, with a background of tragic music and the sounds of bombing.
Horrifyingly, the hundreds of thousands killed by the Japanese represent only a fraction of what the current regime has achieved since 1949 — a regime that still routinely uses torture and arbitrary imprisonment. You can be quite sure the Japanese didn’t eat the Chinese, whereas they’ve since been driven to eat each other either from starvation caused by their own government’s policies as during the Great Leap Forward, or in revenge during maniacal political campaigns such as the Cultural Revolution. There is, sadly, no museum marking the demonic behaviour of the Chinese towards each other, or the responsibility of the Party for tens of millions of deaths, and those who try to research such matters are likely to find themselves imprisoned for revealing state secrets.
This does not excuse the truly horrific behaviour of the Japanese military in the 1930s and ’40s, but nevertheless museums like this need to be viewed with caution. Their message is in no way humanitarian. It’s simply pro-Chinese.
▶ Wǎnpíng Chéng, 8am–4.30pm; 4pm winter. ¥3 (may rise to ¥12 when renovations complete).
Zhōngguó Rénmín Kàng Rì Zhànzhēng Jìniànguǎn, t 8389 2355, 9am–4pm, Tue–Sun. Free (passport req.)
m Wǎnpíng Chéng (Line 16). b to 卢沟新桥: 309, 329, 339, 339区间, 458 (from m Běijīng South Railway Station, north side), 459, 624, 661, 662, 952, 952区间, 979.
Underground tunnels used in resistance to the Japanese occupation may be visited at Jiāozhuānghù Tunnel Warfare Site.
Next in Museums and Other Sights: Sōng Shān Ancient Cave Dwellings
Previously: Was Polo Here?
Main Index of A Better Guide to Beijing.
For discussion of China travel, see The Oriental-List.
