In November 1937, the Japanese army attacked Nanjing with a large number of 200,000 people. At that time, the teaching corps fought fiercely with the Japanese army in the area of Guanghua Gate, when the Japanese army broke through the city wall and sneaked into the city. In order to avoid the total annihilation of the army, the various units under its jurisdiction began to break through to the outside of the Rujiang Gate. At that time, Niu Xianming was the commander of the engineer battalion, and after the whole army collapsed, he also followed the troops to break through.
At that time, the city of Nanjing was already in chaos, and the soldiers did not know the soldiers, the soldiers did not know the generals, and a large number of defeated soldiers mixed with countless refugees poured into the river. But by this time most of the boats along the river had been ordered to burn, and it was difficult to find a boat to cross the river when they reached the river. Countless refugees and soldiers scurried along the river, and their appearance was rather miserable. Niu Xianming initially grabbed a bamboo raft, but because the people behind rushed to the bamboo raft, and finally caused the bamboo raft to overturn, Niu Xianming was squeezed into the river, and was forced to swim back to the river bank again.
There was no hope of crossing the river, and Niu Xianming had to go down the river, and he walked all the way to the vicinity of the Shangyuan Gate. At Shangyuan Gate, Niu Xianming found that all the houses along the river had been burned down, and only a small temple called Yongqing Temple remained. Yongqing Temple covers an area of about 6 acres, and the temple has three small rooms. Niu Xianming had nowhere to go, so he had to run there. Niu Xianming was taken in by the monks of the temple, and the monks in the temple were three monks and two laymen, two monks were about 70 years old, one monk was an apprentice of about 30 years old, one of the two monks was a benefactor of about 70 years old, and the other was an old farmer in his 70s.
At three o'clock in the afternoon of December 13, the Japanese soldiers chased after the Shangyuan Gate, and the ghosts killed many Nationalist troops along the river, and several Japanese soldiers sneaked outside the temple and killed people when they saw them. In the temple's six-acre pomegranate garden, 46 corpses of Nationalist soldiers were left behind. At that time, in order to avoid the Japanese army's search, Niu Xianming shaved off his hair and changed into a monk's robe, and he hid in the firewood room with the monks to avoid the Japanese army.
The devilish soldiers raised three or eight bayonets and entered the firewood room, and after seeing Niu Xianming and the others, the Japanese soldiers did not shoot, but asked for two quintals of dry firewood, and specified that Niu Xianming and the old farmer should send it, and Niu Xianming and the old farmer carried the firewood and followed the devilish soldiers into the city. In the city, Niu Xianming saw 20,000 or 30,000 captured Chinese soldiers, holding their heads in their hands, huddled on the uneven ground. A small number of Chinese cooks were cooking on fire, as if they wanted to provide a full meal for the captives, so they needed a considerable amount of firewood. After Niu Xianming and the old farmer put down the firewood, they were not embarrassed by the Japanese army, and at dusk they returned to the broken temple.
Two days later, the Japanese conducted dozens of more searches, finding and killing several soldiers and civilians who were hiding outside the temple. Niu Xianming and the others, who were hiding in the broken temple, barely survived the first hurdle, lying on the straw of the firewood room, waiting for the long night to pass. In the evening of the third day, dozens of Japanese soldiers came to the temple, and the Japanese soldiers did not enter the temple, but cut off all the branches in the pomegranate garden, and Niu Xianming and others hid in the firewood room, not understanding what the real intention of the devils was.
Every night after that, the footsteps of the devils marching on the road 50 meters away from the broken temple were often heard, and the leather shoes with iron nails on the soles of the Japanese soldiers stepped on the road surface, making a crisp sound. About an hour later, in the distance came the sound of machine guns, and the sound of machine guns was very dense, like a series of wild sweeps. Niu Xianming and the monks hid in the temple and wondered, it was reasonable to say that the fighting had stopped and there could be no fierce fighting, what was the Japanese army doing? And what did they do with the pomegranate trees they cut down the other day? Niu Xianming and others couldn't figure it out, and they didn't dare to go out to see it, so they speculated randomly all night.
From the fourth day to the next few days, Japanese soldiers passing by in pairs of threes and threes searched the temple from time to time, and during the search, the Japanese army snatched 108 silver dollars and several sweaters and sweater vests that could withstand the cold. After a period of observation, Niu Xianming and others found that more than a kilometer upstream of the temple, there was a place named Dawanzi, which was the curved part of the Yangtze River, and on a small piece of beach near the water, there were countless dead bodies lying in the river, half soaked in the river water.
The old monk's apprentice, whose name was Erkong, boldly ran to see it a few times before discovering the truth. It turned out that the crowd and the continuous sound of machine guns in the middle of the night before were the ghosts who slaughtered the captured Chinese soldiers in a large bay. At this time, Niu Xianming and others understood. The reason why the devils cut down the pomegranate tree was to use it as a large fork, pushing the bodies of batches of slaughtered people into the river so that they could rush down the river. The idea of the Japanese army was to flow the corpses into the Yangtze River to destroy the corpses, but it was winter, the water flow of the curved part of the Yangtze River was not smooth, and there were too many corpses to be washed away, so a large number of corpses were piled up on the beach.
After the weather gradually warmed up, the large body on the beach gradually decayed, and a strong smell of corpses blew into the small temple with the wind. A few days later, a group of Chinese and several Japanese officers, including a Japanese monk accompanying the army, suddenly arrived. The Japanese monks, armed with ritual instruments and chanting mantras with banging and singing, came to the temple and demanded that Niu Xianming and the Erkong monk follow him to dispose of the corpses. The corpses piled up on the beach, due to the tidal rush of the river, made the corpses half wet and half dry soaked in shallow water, decayed due to the gradual warming of the weather, and the hands, feet and faces exposed outside the military uniform were rotten into a half-skull shape.
After Niu Xianming and the others saw the pile of corpses, their bodies were numb and itchy, and they were simply frightened and unbearable to see. After a while, many ordinary people from the countryside came. These ordinary people were obviously recruited by the Japanese army, and thousands of ordinary people cleaned up for an afternoon before they cleaned up all the bodies on the beach. Later, it was learned that there were more than 20,000 bodies cleaned up that day, many of which were captured soldiers of the Teaching Corps, the 66th and 83rd Armies of the Guangdong Army, the 71st Army and the 74th Army, and this did not include those who were washed away by the water.