Blood Banner of Northern Sichuan

In the autumn of 1937, the Sichuan Army’s Twenty-Second Group Army was ordered to leave Sichuan and fight the Japanese. Among these troops, derided as an “irregular army,” was a “Company of the Doomed,” made up of men from northern Sichuan. Wearing straw sandals, carrying old rifles and sabers on their backs, they marched out of the Daba Mountains. From Niangziguan in Shanxi to Tengxian in Shandong, from Taierzhuang to the Battle of Wuhan, this company used their own bodies to hold back the Japanese steel tide. Shunned by the Central Army and short of supplies, they nonetheless fought to the death and never retreated, even in the direst circumstances. Over three years, the 150-man company was replenished nine times. In the end, every man perished far from home, and not one lived to see the night rain in the Bashan Mountains. This is a sorrowful ballad of straw sandals trampling across the land, and a portrait of the 300,000 Sichuan Army souls who gave their lives.