Mount Langya () is a mountain located in
Yi County,
Hebei
Hebei is a Provinces of China, province in North China. It is China's List of Chinese administrative divisions by population, sixth-most populous province, with a population of over 75 million people. Shijiazhuang is the capital city. It bor ...
province about southwest of Beijing.
Five heroes of Mount Langya
According to the mythology of the
Chinese Communist Party
The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the founding and One-party state, sole ruling party of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Founded in 1921, the CCP emerged victorious in the ...
, the "five heroes of Mount Langya" () were five men who fought the
Imperial Japanese Army
The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA; , ''Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun'', "Army of the Greater Japanese Empire") was the principal ground force of the Empire of Japan from 1871 to 1945. It played a central role in Japan’s rapid modernization during th ...
atop Mount Langya during the
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was fought between the Republic of China (1912–1949), Republic of China and the Empire of Japan between 1937 and 1945, following a period of war localized to Manchuria that started in 1931. It is considered part ...
. They supposedly killed dozens and then committed suicide by throwing themselves off the top of the mountain to escape capture by the Japanese. Two of the Chinese soldiers survived, but all others perished. The story is celebrated in China; a Chinese court has written that the heroes and their story reflect "the national sentiments, historical memories and the national spirit" and are important "sources and components of modern China’s
socialist core values".
The story has been made into a movie.
Myth disputed
Hong Zhenkuai, a Chinese historian, has disputed the myth, saying that the five men had slipped rather than jumped, and that they had not in fact killed any Japanese soldiers. Jiang Keshi, a professor at
Okayama University in
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
, found in a search of Japanese military records that no soldiers had died in their encounter with the five on Langya.
Publishing doubts about the historicity of the official account of the story has been implicated in the closure of the magazine ''
Yanhuang Chunqiu'' in 2016.
A court decided in 2016 that the historian behind the article, Hong Zhenkuai, had defamed the heroes and was ordered to publicly apologize.
Gallery
See also
*
Mount Langya (Anhui)
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Langyashan
Mountains of Hebei
Baoding
Propaganda in China