The “Tengchong Resist Japan Museum” in western Yunnan, China, commemorates the 1944 battle to retake Tengchong while highlighting the sacrifices and cooperation between Chinese and U.S. forces. A famous photograph of a Chinese civilian and an American soldier sharing a cigarette symbolizes the enduring human connection and solidarity forged through wartime collaboration.
On October 14, 1944, the Allies and the Chinese Expeditionary Force recaptured the Japanese occupied Yunnan Tengchong. On the street after the battle, a young American soldier borrowed fire from local people to light cigarettes.
Located in China’s western Yunnan Province lies the old trading town of Tenchong, home to a war museum that brings attention to an almost forgotten chapter of history that needs remembering perhaps now more than ever.
My lasting impression from several hours well spent touring the “Tengchong Resist Japan Museum” is twofold. It’s a well-designed museum packed with interesting artifacts and a capacity for handling crowds—it managed to absorb bus-after-bus of tourist hordes without a hitch, in a rational and orderly fashion.
The second lasting impression derives from the chance viewing of a single mounted photograph (among hundreds) in the capacious and comprehensive exhibit, namely an old black and white photo of two men smoking cigarettes.
The vintage photo features two men closely facing one another: one American, the other Chinese, eye-to-eye in a moment of fraternal solidarity.
The young man on the left wears a rumpled military cap and matching shirt with U.S. army insignia on his rolled-up sleeves. The older man on the right wears a wool cap and a homespun Chinese-collared shirt neatly secured with cloth buttons.
The American soldier is clean-shaven. The Chinese civilian has a mustache and a wisp of a beard.
Their faces are alike in being sober, tired and slightly sad. They both have cigarettes dangling from their lips. They lean in close, their foreheads just inches apart. The American’s outstretched hand reaches close to the other perhaps to cup the wind, as he presses his unlit cigarette against the glowing tip of the other man’s smoke.
The enlarged black-and-white portrait hanging on the museum wall in a collection of reproduced old photos is accompanied by a simple caption–jie huo–which means “borrowing a light.”
Sharing a light, enjoying a smoke in close proximity—it’s an everyday act with no particular meaning. The battle retaking Tengchong from the Japanese invaders had just ended and things were in the mopping up stage. The town was gutted; damaged buildings and wreckage can be seen in the background in the narrow space between the two men.
The American’s shirt sports a pocket, on his exposed arm a bracelet, on his right hand a ring. The Chinese man has crow’s feet around his eyes, eyes which gaze intently at his counterpart, a man from the other side of the world standing close, just inches away. There is a warm, slightly bemused smile on the older man’s face as he holds still to let the other man “steal” a light.
Sharing a light, it’s just a small gesture, an ordinary, minuscule act against the background of an incomprehensibly vast and terrible war. On the surface, a banal moment of exchange, but multiply it by tens of thousands of similar, trivial forgettable moments of quiet concord, and you have one of the high points of all time in the history of U.S.-China exchange.
The power of this single image endures. It may even be said to be propaganda, in the best sense of the word, bringing attention to magazine readers in the U.S. where it was first published of an otherwise unknown war in unknown parts, a region so far from the centers of power that it remains isolated and exotic even today.
The photo has been a symbol of U.S.-China cooperation for eighty years now, and will continue to function as such as long as we can have empathy for two men in a very different time and place, themselves from different generations and different places, joined as one in a transcendent moment of unity.
The image packs such symbolic power that even a dedicated anti-smoking activist can find beauty in the simple drama of two tired, war-weary men getting ready to take a puff.
The battle to retake Tengchong was an extended nightmare that ended in September 1944, around the time the photo was taken. I have not seen it credited to anyone, but chances are it was captured by an American army photographer. Whoever it was, he had an excellent eye and hit the shutter at just the right time.
It took 108 days of bitterly contested house-to-house fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops, producing casualties of 9,000 Chinese and 6,000 Japanese. The U.S. provided air support with B24 bombing missions, aiming at Japanese bunkers and troop concentrations. Nineteen Americans were killed fighting on the ground, mostly signalmen and commandos, including a handful of spirited fighters known as Merrill’s Marauders. The American lives lost are also remembered in the cemetery behind the Tengchong museum.
Winning back Tengchong, a strategically located town in Western Yunnan not far from the Burma border, was an essential element of U.S. General Joe Stilwell’s effort to keep the flow of people and materiel between India and China via north Burma, especially along the strategic stretch known as the Burma Road.
Much of Tengchong’s downtown area was destroyed in the battle, and though it’s since been rebuilt, few of the old buildings and little of the old town’s layout remains intact. But a vivid sense of what life was like on the old "Tea Horse Road" – in the days when horse caravans carrying bags of tea known as cha-ma-bang slowly, patiently and frugally traversed the hills of Western Yunnan carrying tea across steep hills and perilous river ravines – can be appreciated by a visit to today’s hamlet of Heshun, which is located a short distance from Tengchong city on the other side of a forested hill.
Heshun is a remarkably well-preserved village of old merchant mansions, a large Buddhist temple and numerous ancestral halls for clans prominent in the area. Its narrow winding streets are decked with ceremonial gates at every turn. Many of the old buildings have been repurposed as guesthouses, and the old shopping street now boasts numerous coffee shops, coffee wholesalers, jade shops, convenience stores and many, many restaurants. There are stretches that are outright touristy, but the physical plant is well-maintained with sensible zoning that restricts the height and style of new buildings to conform with the older ones, some of which are old indeed.
Several of the well-preserved old courtyard homes date back one hundred, or even two hundred years, constructed in part or entirely of durable wood. The town is ringed by rice fields, wetlands and the Daying river on one side, the forested hills on the other.
When touring the area’s beautiful, abundant land, replete with conical volcanoes, natural hot springs and fertile stream-fed fields, it’s hard to believe this corner of paradise was once hell on earth as the site of one of the most grueling but critical battles of the Second World War.
The Tengchong museum catalogues the war’s toll in death, destruction and damage to the environment as surely as it valorizes the ultimate victory obtained through great sacrifice. There are dioramas and paintings, heroic statuary in the socialist realism style, old newsreel footage, period weapons, uniforms, communication kits and other artifacts of war from the battle of Tengchong.
There is much to ponder here in this day and age in light of contemporary conflicts—I was immediately reminded of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the brave resistance in reaction to that invasion and the criticality of supplies and supply lines in determining the outcome of battle.
Other museum goers will surely find other comparisons to make, but it is hard to leave such an exhibit without an appreciation for the sacrifices of earlier generations and the terrible price that independence and sovereignty sometimes demands.
