Qiqihar Martyrs Monument

In the center of the Qiqihar Railway South Garden stands a stone marker that interrupts the everyday geometry of a residential neighborhood. The Martyrs Monument anchors a quiet, local square. It sits exactly where it belongs: among the homes of the railway workers whose predecessors fought and died to keep the trains moving during the chaotic winter of 1945.

To understand the weight of this structure, one must trace the railway lines outward from Qiqihar to a desolate stretch of track called Bielonggouzi. On the night of December 15, 1945, a military train lumbered through the darkness carrying a precise and heavy cargo: 2,000 rifles and 200 boxes of ammunition transferred by Soviet forces. Inside the cars, railway director and military commander Guo Weicheng led a small escort. The crew believed their route was secure. They were unaware that a mole inside the Qiqihar Railway Bureau, Lin Fengsheng, had already sold their coordinates to opposition forces. Ahead of them, the steel rails had been deliberately severed.

At 9:00 PM, the train derailed into an ambush. The monument memorializes the frantic, bloody hours that followed. In the pitch blackness, surrounded by hostile troops of the Guangfu Army, the defenders faced a desperate calculation. Deputy Commander Rao Minfu and a Russian translator, Jiang Tong, broke through the encirclement with sixty men to find reinforcements. Five kilometers into their sprint for survival, a former puppet-army platoon leader named Gu Tian'en mutinied. Rao and Jiang were killed in the chaos. The stone memorial absorbs these ugly realities of war—espionage, betrayal, and defection—holding them alongside acts of profound courage.

When dawn approached, Combat Section Chief Yao Yuting walked directly into the enemy camp with just four soldiers to negotiate a delay. The talks collapsed, and Yao was gunned down. His sacrifice bought the exact hours needed. By morning, a relief force of three hundred cavalrymen arrived, scattering the ambushers and securing the intact armaments. Thirty-six defenders died in the snow; more than thirty were wounded.

Two years later, in 1947, Commander Guo Weicheng erected this monument. As the earliest memorial dedicated to the railway protection forces, it roots the abstract concepts of victory and sacrifice in physical space. The stone serves as a permanent anchor in a transient world of locomotives and shifting borders. It transforms a neighborhood garden into a site of public memory.

Today, the stone quietly shares space with the sounds of the modern city and the distant rumble of the rail yards. It asks those who pass by to consider the fragile line between destruction and survival, and the heavy price paid for the ground beneath their feet.