At the summit of Huayuanshan, inside the grounds of the Wuhan Children's Welfare Institute, stands a five-meter-tall, cone-shaped stone monument. Facing east, this structure is known colloquially as the White Bone Tower. It marks a mass grave from late 1951, containing the remains of over sixteen thousand infants recovered from the hillside.

In 1928, Bishop Sylvester Joseph Espelage established the Huayuanshan Infant Asylum here. A German laywoman, Maria Heitmeier, managed it initially, before transferring control to the Sisters of Saint Joseph in 1929. Behind closed doors, infants entered through a tiny, one-foot-square opening in the wall. Parents received a cold paper receipt stating that they had surrendered all rights to inquire about life or death. Inside, the reality was grim. Surviving records show a mortality rate exceeding ninety-eight percent. Between 1928 and 1938, out of 7,813 admitted infants, only 130 survived.

The daily routine was quietly devastating. Blind and mute teenage girls fed the infants, smearing sour rice paste onto their lips. Sickly infants lay in a drafty wooden room known as the "waiting-to-die room," where their cries faded into the damp air. Those who died were buried on the slopes, turning the hill into a silent repository of bones.

When the Wuhan Municipal Government took over the facility in April 1951, they found thirty-five infants and forty-eight young girls. All of them suffered from severe malnutrition and skin infections. In May 1951, authorities arrested Bishop Rembert Kowalski and Vice Bishop Xu Laide, who were imprisoned and deported in 1953.

Workers gathered the scattered remains from the hillside, placing them in five large coffins beneath this stone tower. Today, visitors can see the rough, hand-carved calligraphic inscriptions on the sides of the monument, written by early 1950s local officials including Mayor Wu Defeng and Secretary Zhang Pinghua. The front of the tower bears a stark dedication, reminding passersby of the lives lost on this hill. Designated as a Municipal Cultural Relics Protection Unit in 1983, the monument sits within the Tanhualin Historical and Cultural Block. Nearby, red plum blossoms bloom in the spring breeze beside the heavy stone.