"An old man from the Qing Dynasty, with superb martial arts, bravely killed the enemy to resist the Japanese, but there was no place to bury him after his death. - Remembering the anti-Japanese hero Li Sheng
Old hero Li Sheng
In the memories of Li Min, the heroine of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Army, there is a legendary anti-Japanese old hero, his name is Li Sheng. Li Min recalled him more than once, recalling this amazing senior.
In the sixth year of Tongzhi in the Qing Dynasty (1867), a boy was born in a family surnamed Li on Tuqiao Street, Dezhou, Shandong Province. Parents named their child Li Sheng, which means that they hope that he can rise step by step and live a prosperous and happy life.
The Li family made a living by working in the city, and their lives were extremely miserable. When Li Sheng was ten years old, the outspoken father Li offended the rich man who was rich and unkind. The Li family could not live in the city, so they had to move to the countryside and become tenants.
Miserable child
In those years, the life of the tenants was even worse. Natural disasters occur every year, the only harvest is snatched away by soldiers and bandits, the crops are in dire straits, and people die of starvation often occur. The landlord eats people and does not spit out bones, does not care about the life or death of the hired peasants, and urges the renters to take people's lives.
Less than three years after living in the countryside, Li Sheng's parents and uncle were forced to death by the landlord. Li Sheng went to the Taoist temple to learn art, learned martial arts to practice chivalry and righteousness, killed all the landlords and corrupt officials in the world, avenged his relatives, and sought justice for the poor.
Li Sheng studied in Taoism for five or six years, and his master was an old boxer who was good at fists, feet, sticks, and sticks. It is rumored that the old boxer was the leader of the Twist Army uprising, and later after the defeat of the Taiping Army and the Twist Army, he was disheartened and entered the Taoist Temple incognito and became a Taoist priest who did not ask about the world.
Old Taoist
The old Taoist master taught him fists, feet, sticks and spearmanship, and also taught him the kung fu of jumping very high and walking very fast, which is called "light gong" among the people. Li Sheng's ability to walk like a fly on the rugged mountain is because he practiced this kung fu.
Li Sheng practiced a martial arts, bid farewell to his master and went down the mountain to eliminate evil, he taught the landlord who forced his parents and uncle to death, and let out a vicious breath. However, the landlords and the government would not let him go, pursued and rounded him up, and forbade him to do business.
Li Sheng has a lot of kung fu, he can defeat a few bandits by himself, but he can't resist the foreign guns and cannons of the government. He can dodge the pursuit of the landlord's armed forces with flying feet, but he can't avoid the distress of being hungry and having no food to eat.
A master of martial arts
As the old saying goes: a man who beats with iron also eats. Li Sheng offended the landlord and the government in his hometown, forcing him to leave his hometown and go to the eastern part of the country. When Li Sheng came to Jilin Province, he was already a 28-year-old young man.
Life in the Northeast was not satisfactory, he could only rely on his strength to eat, go down to the mine as a miner, carry large bags and pull carts, he did all these extremely hard errands. Later, he caught up with Shangzheng County to open up wasteland, and he went to open up a few acres of wasteland, and since then he has a place to eat and settle.
Because he has been in poverty, Li Sheng did not marry his wife until he was 42 years old, but fortunately, his wife was angry and gave birth to two sons. Li Sheng is finally no longer alone, but the life of the family of four people is overwhelming.
Poor peasants and children
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the northeast became the territory of the Feng warlords, and Li Sheng cut off the braids that hung on the back of his head. At that time, the Russians were building a large railway in Siberia, and Li Sheng rushed to Siberia with many Chinese laborers to work.
While working in Siberia, the overseers made things difficult for them at every turn, withholding their hard-earned money. Li Sheng hated the Russian overseer to the core, and finally fought back and knocked the Russian overseer to the ground. In the prime of life, he had a lot of strength, and he beat the overseer to the point of vomiting blood with one punch. The Russian overseer was afraid that he would give him a second punch and give him his life in vain, so he obediently returned the money he had withheld.
At this time, it was already the winter of 1917, and the spring breeze of the October Revolution in Russia was blowing all over Russia and also on the land of China. Li Sheng had never read and did not understand what communism was, but he was very much in favor of the poor people's practice of overthrowing the reactionaries and becoming masters of their own affairs.
The Japanese army invaded the northeast
In the winter of 1919, Li Sheng and his convoy fought with the Japanese in an attempt to recapture the railroad that had been taken by the Japanese army. Due to a fatal mistake in command, the battle ended in defeat, and Li Sheng and numerous Chinese workers were forced to return to the northeast. Li Sheng became a postman incognito, helping people deliver mail everywhere.
In the blink of an eye, in 1931, the Japanese invaders launched the "918" incident, the Japanese Kwantung Army forcibly occupied the Northeast, hundreds of thousands of Northeast Army did not actively resist, all retreated to the Guannai, and a large area of fertile land in the Northeast fell into the hands of the enemy.
Under the iron hooves of the Japanese invaders, the people of the Northeast lived the life of slaves in exile, and Li Sheng saw the crimes of the Japanese invaders in his eyes and hated them in his heart. He often lamented that he had no kung fu, but he couldn't destroy these thieves with his own hands.
Atrocities of the Japanese army
Finally, the opportunity came, and this time he was going to kill the killer.
One day in the autumn of 1932, Li Sheng went to Jiamusi to deliver mail, but the mail truck was hijacked on the way. The hijackers were a group of puppet soldiers, who dropped mail on the side of the road, loaded a large amount of weapons and ammunition onto the mail truck, and forced Li Sheng to deliver weapons to them.
Li Sheng was forced by the guns of the puppet army to pull arms for them, and the puppet army sent a soldier to escort the weapons in the car. When arriving at the riverside, Li Sheng deliberately said that the car was broken down and he had to stop and check it.
The large army of the puppet army walked forward, leaving only the puppet soldier who was watching him. The puppet soldier was very impatient, standing next to the car and smoking, urging him to repair the car quickly, and he would not be able to catch up with the large army when it was too late.
Li Sheng saw the opportunity, picked up a stick and hit it, this stick hit the head, and the puppet army who was fighting for the tiger was killed on the spot. Li Sheng threw the weapons and the corpses of the puppet soldiers into the river, and then sold the carriage and horses and left Fangzheng County.
The car drove into the river
Because of the killing of a puppet army, Li Sheng was afraid of affecting his family, so he came to live alone in No. 7 Tun on the south bank of the Heli River. He made a living here by cutting rice and working part-time jobs, and his life was very hard, but fortunately, there was no Japanese puppet army to chase and kill him.
No. 7 Tun was an anti-Japanese underground organization, and the Manchuria Provincial Party Committee led by Feng Zhongyun was located in this village. Li Sheng soon became acquainted with them, and under their leadership, he gradually moved closer to the organization and became an underground traffic officer.
Li Sheng went deep into the local masses many times, propagated the anti-Japanese ideas of the organization, resolved the local ethnic contradictions, and led the peasants to resist the rents of the reactionaries. Li Sheng finally found what he wanted to do and found his dream.
The Japanese army investigates the scene
Soon after, the Yubara Anti-Japanese Guerrillas were formed. Li Sheng became a member of the guerrillas, he had superb martial arts, as well as experience in fighting the Japanese army, he taught kung fu to the guerrilla fighters, teaching them combat experience.
In the guerrilla attack on the Japanese army, the 60-year-old Li Sheng also personally fought the Japanese puppet army with his soldiers.
Li Sheng's outstanding performance passed the test of the organization, and he joined the organization in 1933 through Feng Zhongyun's introduction. Li Sheng went from an old man in the Qing Dynasty to an advanced veteran.
oath
Li Sheng's heroic killing of the enemy immediately attracted the attention of the Japanese army. After the Japanese captured Fangzheng County, they burned down Li Sheng's house and brutally killed his wife and two sons. Li Shengsheng lost all his relatives for the anti-Japanese resistance, he became a loner, and his hatred for the Japanese army deepened.
In the next few years, Li Sheng disguised himself as the image of his old father, covering the important leaders of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Allied Army many times, and passing through dangerous hurdles again and again. Zhao Yiman once pretended to be his daughter, and he took Zhao Yiman to escape the pursuit of the Japanese army. The comrades affectionately called him "the father of the Anti-Japanese Federation".
Feng Zhongyun once recalled: When Li Sheng was in his 60s, he was still walking like a fly. There was once a strong young man who competed with Li Sheng to test his physical strength, and each of them carried dozens of catties of rice on their backs and walked twenty-five miles. Who knew that Li Sheng finished the journey easily, and his face was not red or panting. The young man was so tired that he was sweating profusely, and he couldn't breathe.
Torture by the Japanese army
At the beginning of 1940, Li Sheng returned from Changbai Mountain to find the First Route Army, and when he walked to the territory of Yilan County, he was informant by a traitor and was arrested. The Japanese tortured him in various ways, put him in an iron cage covered with iron thorns, and then rolled the iron cage.
Li Sheng was pierced all over his body covered in blood, but he never gave in to the Japanese army and did not reveal the slightest secret of the anti-Japanese coalition forces. The Japanese sentenced him to 10 years in prison and imprisoned him in a Japanese prison cell. When the Japanese surrendered in 1945, Li Shengcai came out of prison and regained his freedom.
Li Sheng lived until his death in 1962, an old man from the Qing Dynasty who lived to be 95 years old. But it wasn't long before his tomb was torn down, and I don't know who did it.
A group photo of Li Sheng and Feng Zhongyun's family
Decades later, when people remembered Li Sheng, they couldn't find where his grave was. Even Zhao Junqing, Li Yunqiao and others, experts in the study of the Anti-Japanese Federation, do not know the specific whereabouts, only that they were buried in the second crematorium that year.
In July 2012, enthusiastic people again approached the veteran soldier Li Min and learned from her mouth that after Li Sheng's grave was knocked down, the ashes were dug up and placed in Xiangyangshan Cemetery. When the enthusiastic people accompanied Li Min to Xiangyang Mountain to look for it, they finally found Li Sheng's ashes.
His ashes and numerous urns were placed on the shelves of the rest hall, and Li Min presented a bouquet of flowers to Li Sheng's urn, recalling the past when Li Sheng's grandfather carried her into the secret camp of the Anti-Japanese Union 70 years ago.
Li Min, a female soldier of the Anti-Japanese Union
"The huge martyr's cemetery should have a burial place for the old hero, and a monument should be erected for him so that future generations can understand his heroic deeds. Now there is only a small urn, a simple dormition hall, which is really sad to see.
Later, it was said that the dormition hall would also be converted into a tourist area, and the urn in the dormition hall would also be moved, and it was even more difficult to know where it would be moved. Now, another 10 years have passed, and it is impossible to know whether the ashes of the old hero are still there, and whether he has a place to be buried. ”
——Quoted from pages 67-68 of "The Most Dangerous Moment: A Historical Examination of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Federation", edited by the Center for the Chinese Memory Project of the National Library of China
The anti-union fighters in the wind and snow have not been easy to come all the way
Li Sheng is an old man from the Qing Dynasty, he is an extraordinary old man, he is a real anti-Japanese hero, his deeds are awe-inspiring, but what happened to him after his death is painful.
We should remember his name and let his story be passed on to future generations. Even if there is no place to be buried, we can keep him in our hearts forever......
Fumishi Ichika
April 20, 2024
Written in Guilin