Eric's Beijing Diary

Yesterday I climbed the hill across from the youth hostel and found a bunch of fake tanks. But when I got back the folks at the youth hostel insisted that three of them were real. So I went back up today and found the rest of them. Apparantly they are from the Sino-Japanese War. I'm guessing that the dummy tanks were put there to fake out the enemy pilots flying overhead.

Click for slideshow.
During that part of the Sino-Japanese War, it would have been the KMT (Chiang Kai-shek's army) that held this part of China, which is referred to in the west as "Manchuria." Remember, the Sino-Japanese War and the Civil War between the Nationalists (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists were taking place at the same time. The KMT and the Communists alternately fought the Japanese (sometimes together) and also fought each other.

Manchuria literally means "Home of the Manchu." The Manchus were from what is now referred to as Northeast China. That includes the three provinces in the northeast (Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning). But it also includes the northeast corner of Inner Mongolia, which is designated by the People's Republic as "Hulunbuir" a city (actually a district) in the extreme northeast of Inner Mongolia. The native people of Inner Mongolia are Mongols, not Manchus. But Hulunbuir borders the Manchu area, so it is often included in what is called "Manchuria."

Labels: Second Sino-Japanese War, Travel Hulunbuir