Part VII
The bridge at Luding in Sichuan is
perhaps most remembered as the site of a “decisive” conflict between China’s
rival Communist and Nationalist forces in 1935 during the famous ‘Long March’.
For many years the political rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party has
memorialised this battle in heroic terms which border on the almost mythical,
yet in recent years the veracity of some of the finer details of this historic
event have been brought into question. One writer (Jung Chang) has even gone so
far as to suggest the battle never even took place.[1]
Another commentator (Zbigniew Brzezinski)
has quoted Chinese Premier, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) as saying of the
battle: “Well, that’s the way it’s
presented in our propaganda. We needed that to express the fighting spirit of
our forces. In fact, it was a very easy military operation. There wasn’t really
much to it. The other side were just some troops of the warlord who were armed
with old muskets and it really wasn’t that much of a feat, but we felt we had
to dramatize it.”[2]
I have to admit, the ‘Long March’ and the history of the Communist rise and
defeat of the Nationalist Government are a little later than (and so is not really) my
direct area of study, but from what I know of the rag-tag political rivalries
between the various Republican era Warlords in Sichuan (of which I have read
quite a bit) I think there is perhaps more than a grain of truth in this official CCP account when describing the Red Army’s presence at Luding in 1935, it
states: “Probably never before had the
Sichuanese seen fighters like these – men for whom soldiering was not just a
rice bowl, and youths ready to commit suicide to win.”
And I am sure most of today’s visitors to this chain link bridge, which is said to have originally been built in 1706, will certainly have the heroic story of the Red Army’s
exploits in mind as they stand and pose to have their photographs taken on its
gently swaying span – with the tumultuous noise of the Dadu River still roaring
unceasing and timeless beneath it. Yet, when I visited the bridge in 2010 and posed for
my own picture, I had a very different historical episode in mind. A far less
well known stand off which happened almost exactly twenty years before the
‘Long March’ reached Luding.
In 1915, during the constantly
shifting turmoil of the Warlord era, Kangding 康定, or Tachienlu as it was then
better known (དར་རྩེ་མདོ། Dartsendo, in Tibetan), was endangered by rebel Chinese soldiers.
Discontent at harsh conditions and a lack of pay had driven this group of
soldiers to mutiny, and, having killed their Commanding Officer, they were now
a band of outlaws marauding the countryside, robbing and looting as they went.
Eventually they arrived at Tachienlu and laid siege to the unfortunate town.
At the request of General Ch’en
Hsia-ling, who was then the appointed Chinese Border Commissioner of the
region, Louis King, along with two missionaries, Theo Sørensen and Père Francis Goré, and five delegates of the local Chamber of Commerce, set out as a
peacemaking deputation. They were met by the mutinous soldiers and in a heated
interview with the rebel leader, Ch’en Pu-san and his men, they established
that the rebels would surrender under terms of an unconditional pardon,
re-instatement, and the full payment of arrears of pay. The peacemaking
delegation thus returned to the town only to be fired upon by the
understandably skittish soldiers who were very vigilantly on guard at its gates. Fortunately no
one was hurt.
The Commissioner was surprisingly
amenable to the rebel’s terms, but, he said, the final decision was ultimately beyond
his local power. The matter would have to be referred to a higher authority in
Chengdu. Louis King and the two missionaries set out the following morning to
meet the rebels once more. Hearing of the Commissioner’s positive response Ch’en
Pu-san decided to act immediately and told the peace delegation that he
intended to enter the town with his men. Louis cautioned the rebel leader that
this would be taken as an act of open hostility and warned that they would be
fired upon by the Commissioner’s soldiers as soon as they were in sight of the
town. Not – if they were in the company
of the British Consul, Ch’en replied! And so, Louis and the two
missionaries were taken hostage by the rebels.
A fierce battle duly ensued and
eventually under the cover of nightfall the Commissioner and his soldiers withdrew
from the town. Tachienlu fell to the rebels, who commenced upon looting the
town. Seeing that the rebels were moving further away from their real aim of a
pardon, King attempted to reason with Ch’en Pu-san. He proposed that if Ch’en
were to maintain order in the town so that it could be handed back to the
Chinese authorities intact it would go some way towards vindicating them,
demonstrating their repentance and good intentions towards their re-instatement.
Ch’en apparently saw the sense in this suggestion and immediately ordered his
men to cease looting. He then released Louis and asked him to go to the
Commissioner once more to renew the rebels’ petition for pardon and
re-instatement. King rode out of Tachienlu and caught up with the Commissioner
at the town of Luding, where he found the General and his soldiers consolidating
their position. Reinforcements having just arrived from Chengdu. 
Luding Bridge, photo by Ernest Henry Wilson, 1908
Luding Bridge, 2010
The Commissioner was apparently still
willing to seek a pardon for the rebels and he telegraphed his superiors in
Chengdu to this effect, but, unbeknownst to either side of this stand-off, a
second garrison under the command of another General, who was unaware of these
negotiations, was at that moment descending on the rebels from the opposite
flank. In an early morning attack this force routed the band of rebels
completely and those rebels who did not fall in the fight fled. The rebels
disbursed as best they could, some even continued in their lawlessness, but
there was nowhere for them to hide. One by one they were eventually picked off
or rounded up, and those who had tried to go incognito and disappear were
eventually caught too and were later brought to justice. Ch’en Pu-san was
executed along with his men. “The last I
saw of him,” Louis recounts, “was his
head only, brought back and paraded in the town he had taken, and spared.”[3]
To be continued ... Part VIII
[1] See,
Jung Chang & Jon Halliday, Mao: The
Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005)
[2] Zbigniew Brzezinski, America and the New Asia (Transcription
of the Michel Oksenberg Lecture, March 9th 2005, Asia-Pacific
Research Center, Stanford Institute for International Studies), p. 3
