A noble quest
One man stumbles across an abandoned graveyard for soldiers of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army and dedicates his life to finding their families, Wang Qian reports.
History sometimes has a way of changing the course of someone’s life. Something can emerge from the past and crash into the present.
So it was for Yu Fahai, a 70-year-old retired police officer. A discovery on a desolate hillside changed his life. For the past 15 years, he has been dealing with the consequences of finding 142 graves of heroes.
Located on mountainside in Chibi, a city in Central China’s Hubei province, the graves are the resting place of 142 soldiers who fought in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53). They had almost been forgotten until Yu located and identified them in 2005.
He himself was not in prime physical health. Having had a kidney transplant only two years earlier, he was then a 54-year-old police officer at the local public security department.
Good at writing, Yu was asked to help local authorities collect and investigate the revolutionary history of the nation’s heroes in Chibi.
His task was to locate and identify these graves.
“It was a wild and bleak hillside with no road or village nearby. The broken gravestones emerged from the bending grass when the wind blew. It reminded me of soldiers in an ambush,” Yu says, recalling the first time he visited the site after several failed attempts to locate it.
Removing the moss, Yu read the blurred inscriptions on the headstones: name, regiment, hometown, age and death date. It took him several days to write down all the information of the deceased, who came from 24 provinces, and were aged 18 to 52.
To reveal the stories behind the fallen, Yu researched and checked various sources.
He found that a temporary field hospital was recorded in Yangloudong, an ancient town in Hubei, to treat the wounded in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea.
The hospital saved more than 2,800 soldiers of the 3,100 admitted, according to local chronicles. Before the hospital finished its mission in 1956, 142 soldiers who died there, were honored as martyrs.
Buried in the mountain, their graves had lain forgotten and their stories had been overlooked for decades. In a cruel and unjustified twist of fate, some locals even questioned whether they were martyrs or deserters.
“Although they cannot speak for themselves, I shall find out their stories and let their families know where they are buried and that they are martyrs, not deserters,” Yu says.
Root-seeking journey
In the first year, based on headstone information, Yu sent more than 100 letters, looking for clues about the martyrs’ families.
However, 40 were undelivered due to the recipients’ incorrect information.
“It has been much more difficult than I expected, because there were many mistakes in inscriptions, such as the wrong spelling of names due to dialects and the administrative division change as time goes by,” Yu says.
He corrected about 70 mistakes in the martyrs’ information list.
It was a difficult time but he was determined to push through. After all, these men had given everything.
The turning point came some months later, when he got a letter from a young man named Liu Yao from Henan province, who told him that he was the son of Liu Yizhai, one of the 142 martyrs.
“My father began serving in the army when I was 4, and he died when I was 7 or 8. Years later, my mother also passed away,” Liu wrote in his letter.
He told Yu that his uncle, also a soldier, came to Yangloudong looking for his father, but returned in vain.
Before his uncle’s death, he asked Liu to leave a spot for his father in the family grave.
The letter encouraged Yu to keep searching for the martyrs’ families.
That year, he received letters from relatives of eight martyrs. Some told him that they suffered a lot during the “cultural revolution” (1966-76), because some of the fallen soldiers were believed to be deserters.
Since 2006, Yu visited more than 15 provinces and regions to find the relatives.
Before every trip, he always carried his medical records in his suitcase, in case he fell ill on the long journey.
To cover the increasing fees on the road, Yu even sold his house for 44,500 yuan ($6,805).
In 2007, Yu took a train and traveled for more than 20 hours to get to Taiyuan, Shanxi province, and meet the relatives of martyr Wen Bingren.
Checking one house after another, Yu finally met the martyr’s younger brother, Wen Binggen, who was then 74. He told Yu that their grandparents and parents had been waiting for his brother to appear.
“My parents cried many times for my missing elder brother. I didn’t even know where Hubei is, the place you said where my brother is buried,” he told Yu.
In the past 15 years, Yu helped 117 martyrs find their relatives and among them, 67 families of these soldiers have visited the cemetery to pay homage to those who bravely sacrificed their lives for the sake of the homeland.
Saluting martyrs
Yu’s journey has also hit national headlines, which has increased the possibilities of finding more families. College students, volunteers and people unknown to Yu have contacted him for support.
In 2008, he was honored during China Central Television’s annual Touching China awards.
A film company plans to make a documentary based on Yu’s story. He is also writing a book to commemorate the fallen heroes.
No longer abandoned or bleak, the cemetery has been renovated by the local government.
An access road has been built and trees and flowers have been planted.
The names of the fallen soldiers were inscribed on a memorial wall in the graveyard. A 14.2-meter-high monument was built to mark the gravesite.
There is also a museum exhibiting photos, letters and cultural relics found in the graves or restored by their families.
In the past 10 years, nearly 1 million visitors have paid homage to the deceased soldiers in the graveyard, Zhang Jianping, head of Chibi’s martyrs’ cemetery, told The Beijing News recently.
It is one of the three biggest cemeteries for soldiers of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army who died in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. The other two are located in Shenyang and Dandong in Liaoning province.
On Oct 19, 1950, the Chinese People’s Volunteer forces, under a request made by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, crossed the Yalu River to aid the DPRK’s fight there until a truce was signed in 1953. A total of 2.9 million CPV soldiers entered the battlefield, and 197,653 of them sacrificed their lives in the war.
“These fallen heroes should never be forgotten by the Chinese people,” Yu says.
He adds that there are still 22 deceased soldiers whose families he has yet to find and three graves remain unidentified.
“I do not have much time left and maybe there will be a regret deep in my heart forever, but I will keep trying,” Yu say.
Although they cannot speak for themselves, I shall find out their stories and let their families know where they are buried and that they are martyrs, not deserters.”
Yu Fahai, retired police officer trying to contact the families of 142 martyrs who fought in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53)
My parents cried many times for my missing elder brother. I didn’t even know where Hubei is, the place you said where my brother is buried.”
Wen Binggen, brother of martyr Wen Bingren