Three Thousand Roads: the Journey of Changsha Temporary University to the West

In February 1938, Nanjing fell. 267 College students walked 3,500 miles from Changsha to Kunming. This team included Tu Shou'e, the poet Mu Dan, and the philosopher Ren Jiyu who later became the founders of the two bombs and one star. Wen Yiduo wore out twelve pairs of straw sandals and sketched along the way; six students fell ill and left the team, and each managed to walk for nine days to recover the team; more than two hundred teachers and students waded waist-deep across the glacier with books on their heads and barefoot. The bandits watched on the bank for a long time, carried a few bags of coarse grains and said: "Robbing the rich and robbing the officials, not the scholars. Even if the sky falls, we must leave some fire for the country." Zhang Zhizhong sent an open letter to seventeen hills, and the bandit leader replied: "Although it is a green forest, it is also Yanhuang." From then on, the bandits in western Hunan made way for this group of scholars, escorted them, and sent food. In the heavy snow in Yuanling, Shen Congwen held a banquet in Yunlu, and at the same time gathered local figures in western Hunan to discuss anti-Japanese support. Thirty-five hundred miles, 267 people set out and 253 people completed the journey. In a nation's darkest night, a group of scholars lit a fire with their feet.