In the early forties of the last century, the world anti-fascist war entered a major turning point. China has signed international conventions with 26 countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, and agreed to watch over and help each other with other countries to jointly attack Japan, Germany, Italy and other countries.
In February 1942, the Japanese army invaded Burma, Rangoon was in a hurry, and the British urgently asked China to send troops to support. In order to abide by the covenant and to ensure the safety and smoothness of the Burma Road, China sent three armies to Burma to fight in Burma from three directions.
After the failure of the first invasion of Burma, in 1943, China sent troops to Burma for the second time. On the previous two occasions, China has sent more than 400,000 enthusiastic young people to Myanmar. In the end, after fierce fighting, the expedition was won.
However, the soldiers who went to Burma to fight were six out of ten, and most of them were buried elsewhere. However, what was unexpected was that the Chinese Expeditionary Force sacrificed its life and death to help the Burmese people drive out the Japanese invaders, but it did not win the favor of the Burmese.
Because in the 1950s, the Burmese government ordered that the graves of tens of thousands of Chinese expeditionary forces be razed to the ground in order to build high-rise buildings.
Seeing this, many people can't help but ask: What is the purpose of a country that has always had a Buddhist belief in taking revenge? All of this, let's start at the beginning.
Chinese Expeditionary Force
Myanmar and China are close neighbors, and its northern part is connected to China's Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau. From the map, China and Myanmar are dependent on each other by mountains and rivers, but in fact, there are roads and mountains in the middle.
Therefore, since ancient times, the two countries have not been very closely linked. Moreover, during the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, there was often friction between China and Burma, especially during the Yuan Dynasty.
In the twentieth year of Kublai Khan's reign, the Yuan Dynasty sent troops to destroy the Bagan Dynasty in burma and turn it into a province of the Yuan Dynasty. As a result, due to road obstruction and inconvenience to manage, it was directly abandoned.
In 1441, Burma went to war with the Ming Dynasty, and was finally defeated, but only formally recognized the status of the Ming Dynasty as a suzerainty. In 1762, the Burmese War broke out. At that time, Burma invaded Pu'er, Yunnan, China, and the Qing army launched a counterattack in self-defense.
During the battle, the Qing army suffered heavy losses from the beginning. The commander of the Qing army, Ming Rui, led 10,000 troops to go deep alone, surrounded by 50,000 Burmese troops in the mountains, and could only take advantage of the night to take a small road to retreat, and many generals and hundreds of eight banner soldiers were killed.
Later, Qianlong again sent 18,000 heavy troops to exchange fire with the 30,000 Burmese and French troops, and finally won a fierce victory. Looking at the three dynasties of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, except for the Yuan Dynasty, China fought with the Burmese side during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and did not take a big advantage.
On the one hand, this situation occurred because of military command problems, and on the other hand, because in mountain warfare, Burma had the advantage of home field, and the armies of the Ming and Qing dynasties were not so good at mountain warfare.
At the same time, Myanmar is a very strange country, they are known as the "country of a thousand countries", they have been very belligerent in history, and they have also wanted to capture Thailand. By the time the Chinese Expeditionary Force arrived in World War II, Burma had been colonized by the British for more than half a century.
At that time, in order to enter Burma, Japan sent a large number of spies to publicize that they, like the Burmese, believed in Buddhism, wore clogs, and had the same ancestry, so that the Burmese felt that the Japanese were going to rescue them.
The Burmese hated the British invaders and instead regarded the Japanese invaders as their kind. Chinese since they were allies of the British, they could not be heroes for the Burmese, but something else.
In 1948, Burma broke away from Britain. From the establishment of Myanmar's independence to the razor of tens of thousands of Chinese Expeditionary Force martyrs in the 1950s, the time has not been in the past few years. So it's not surprising that Burmese people would do such a thing.
In addition to unfriendly historical grievances, rumors spread by Japanese agents, and the local people's misconceptions about the Allies in the Declaration of the Twenty-Six Powers, there are actually some other accounts of the destruction of the expeditionary army cemetery.
In 2018, someone interviewed a Burmese overseas Chinese, Duan Baochang, who was a witness to the incident that year. The reporter asked Duan Baochang why the locals wanted to eradicate the graves of the expeditionary forces, and Duan Baochang said: It was blown up.
Why blow it up, at that time, it was said that it was to build a high-rise building, but it was not directly blown up, but first two miles away from the original site, a new grave was built, and the bones were moved before it was blown up.
If you just do this, it is completely understandable. After all, many countries will also be forced to demolish some thousand-year-old monuments in order to implement large-scale projects.
But Duan Baochang went on to say: Later, Burma blew up the reconstructed place. Demolished and built, built and demolished, this is puzzling.
Other locals say that in the 1950s, remnants of a Kuomintang reactionary force in Yunnan fled to Burma. The local government did not want to take them in, so there was an armed conflict between the two.
As a result, tens of thousands of troops sent by the Burmese government were actually defeated. So the locals were angry and shoveled the graves of the expeditionary army to vent their anger.
But from either angle, it can be seen that the locals of Myanmar will certainly not regard these fighters as heroes, let alone benefactors, as we Chinese.
In fact, the final result of these claims is the same, that is, the Burmese government destroyed the graves of tens of thousands of martyrs of the Chinese Expeditionary Force who had been blessed with them in order to build high-rise buildings.
Today, only two remnants of the graves of these expeditionary martyrs remain in Burma. Some domestic friends do not understand the situation, always feel that the Burmese people are ungrateful, so they feel very resentful. In fact, if you understand the causes and consequences, you will find that you don't have to be angry.
At that time, the Chinese Expeditionary Force, with the division of justice, went on an expedition to a foreign country, in order not to gain the admiration of the Burmese people. The sacrifice of the Chinese Expeditionary Force was to defend our motherland and win the final victory in the world anti-fascist campaign.
Today, more than 70 years have passed since the victory of this war. Even if it is buried elsewhere, it is also relieved to believe that heroes have a soul in heaven and see our country strong and prosperous and national rejuvenation.
epilogue
Tang Shi Youyun: Wen Dao Yumen is still covered, and his life should be driven away. Good boys go to the battlefield for nature and justice, throw their heads and spill their blood for the country. Even if you are crushed to pieces, you should not give up.
However, it is sad that because of the persistence of the War of Resistance for many years, many young and middle-aged people in the country had already died in battle, so the vast majority of these fighters sent by the Nationalist government to Burma were minors.
The average age of the Chinese Expeditionary Force is said to be only 15 years old. The youngest is only 13 years old. After the expedition, the Chinese expeditionary force of about 100,000 people was buried in Burma.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the situation in Myanmar was complex, with the graves of tens of thousands of expeditionees blown up for unknown reasons. The remains of the poor expeditionary soldiers had long since been reduced to exotic mud and could never return to their homeland.