The Hanyang Rifle in the Frozen Soil

In the autumn of 1937, Chang Tieshan, a hard-bitten veteran of the Sichuan Army, lost his entire company at Niangziguan. He fled into the Taihang Mountains with his sole surviving recruit, where he crossed paths by chance with a wounded Eighth Route Army political commissar named Lu, a famine refugee, and an orphaned hunter. The five beggars had just seven bullets between them.

Faced with the Japanese army’s brutal, suffocating blockade, Chang Tieshan and Commissar Lu pushed the rules of survival to their limits. Using the hunter’s folk methods, they crept out at night to attack blockhouses; they held a pistol to a puppet army commander’s kidneys to pull off a “rob the robbers” scheme; and they amassed supplies through underground deals with puppet troops who fired their guns harmlessly into the sky. Against all odds, they built the Taihang Independent Regiment amid frozen soil and barren mountains! They fought bloody battles at Ping’anling and launched a coordinated infantry-and-artillery assault on the Jincheng fortress. After eight years of carnage, the seven brothers who had faced life and death together welcomed the great victory of 1945!