BEIJING, July 7 (Xinhua) -- Zhang Chengwang, 92, slowly climbs to the top of Dongliang Mountain, northern China's Yanqing district, and gazes at the statue of the general, remembering the days he cared for the great man's horses.
"It is no use thinking of him now," Zhang says. "I will never see him again."
The general was Bai Yihua, an excellent commander who bravely fought the Japanese, but was killed by a sniper in Beijing in 1941. He was just 30 years old. Bai was one of the 35 million Chinese killed or wounded by Japanese troops in the invasion that lasted until 1945.
BLOOD AND BODIES
Eighty years ago on July 7, Japanese soldiers attacked Chinese forces at Lugou Bridge in suburban Beijing. The incident had been recognized as the start of the war against Japanese invasion, until earlier this year when textbooks were revised to adopt the phrase "14-year Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression," effectively extending the official length of the war.
Many still remember the atrocities caused by Japanese troops and the fighting surrounding the Lugou Bridge incident.
Liu Qingsheng, an 83-year-old from Yanqing, told Xinhua about the two massacres caused by Japanese soldiers in Chaoguan village in April 1933.
"Mom told me that the Japanese ran into my home and stabbed my grandparents and brother, before setting the entire house on fire," he says.
A total of 83 villagers were killed, while 360 houses were torched. "Almost all families had members killed," Liu says. "Only those who hid themselves in the mountains like my parents survived."
Guo Shenghe, a local historian, told Xinhua that Chinese soldiers in Beijing began fighting the Japanese in 1933 at Gubeikou.
"In the battle, more than 40,000 Chinese soldiers fought, and more than 10,000 of them were killed or wounded," he says.
On the Gubeikou section of the Great Wall, people can still see the craters. The diameter of the biggest is more than one meter.h "There were blood and bodies everywhere," says Zhang Yushan, 68, who learned the story from his parents.
"They told me that the battle lasted for more than two months," he says. "Villagers nearby risked their lives to collect the bodies of Chinese soldiers and buried them at the foot of the Great Wall."
"Bodies on reed mats, mats on bodies, we called it the tomb of flesh," he says.
"The peace we enjoy today was gained by hundreds of thousands of heroes at the price of their blood and lives," says Gao Deqiang, 61, former head of a memorial park for war heroes. He has spent 20 years visiting local residents and collecting stories from that time.
RACING AGAINST TIME
More than 70 years have passed since the war and the number of veterans still alive is dropping fast. Like Gao, many experts in China have gathered oral histories.
Over the past 11 years, Wu Xianbin and his team have traveled to more than 20 provinces and regions across country, recording the stories of about 1,000 veterans.
"Time presses us to run faster," says Wu, curator of a private anti-Japanese war museum in Nanjing, eastern China's Jiangsu Province.
In the last ten years, he has interviewed 700 veterans. But he thinks the progress has been too slow.
"It is a race against the clock before they are all gone," he says.
In a rush to record as many stories as possible, Wu raised more funds and hired more staff, interviewing more than 300 veterans in 2016 alone.
"My original goal was to record the stories of 10,000 veterans, but considering the current conditions it will be difficult to finish," he says.
For each veteran, Wu's team shoots a video at least four hours long and keeps an 8,000-character written record, according to Xue Gang, a key member of Wu's team.
Xue has just completed a two-month trip to central China's Hunan Province. In his notebook he recorded the story of Ouyang Quan, 97, a former guard of Dai Anlan, a Chinese general who died in Myanmar in a battle against the Japanese in 1942.
"We found the cleanest waterproof cloth to wrap up the urn holding his ashes and bound it with electric wire. We put it in a white medicine cabinet," according to Ouyang.
"Every time we hear these details, we are excited but very careful. I called Dai's son immediately to confirm the details with him," Xue says.
As veterans are very old and cannot remember things clearly, experts need to carefully verify if the stories are true.
"The account of each veteran soldier is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle," Xue says. "By putting them together, we can find the true facts of history."
Despite difficulties, Wu is determined to continue his program.
On Tuesday, he sent a camera crew to south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, where they plan to interview 40 veterans in one month.
Another team started interviewing 15 veterans in Nanjing on Wednesday.
"What has encouraged me to go forward is not ideals but rationality," Wu says.
Whenever he wants to give up, Wu recalls a sentence common among veterans: "It is really good for you to live in the era without war."
Like Wu, an increasing number of volunteer organizations have started recording stories of veterans in recent years across the country.
