A foreign doctor operates in Guiyang during the war. (Photo Provided to China Daily)
Young and idealistic
Chinese casualties are estimated to have accounted for 90 percent of all casualties in the Pacific theater of WWII, so there was no shortage of work for the medics of Guiyang, and many sick and wounded were brought there, according to Yang Yongxuan, 65.
Her father, Yang Xishou, was one of more than 3,000 Chinese doctors the foreigners trained and who were deployed all across the country to save lives.
When she was young, Yang said, her father told her stories of the foreign men and women who came to help China. Mostly young and idealistic, they typically worked 10 hours a day treating patients at the hospital, or even longer on the many forays they made with Chinese medical teams to the front lines.
He told her of Lanto Kaneti, 29, a Bulgarian doctor, who fell in love with a Chinese nurse named Zhang Sunfen, how they later married and went to live in Europe after the war.
"Once they came back and visited," Yang said.
He told her of the day in 1941 when the Japanese bombed the hospital, killing five patients and a Chinese nurse.
He mentioned an Austrian doctor who died on a medical mission to Chongqing in 1945.
He talked about how, even though they were faced with the horrors of war every day, the foreigners would still throw parties and sing and dance with the locals late into the night.
But the story that stuck with Yang most was that of a young British female doctor, Guy Courtney.
The site where the hospital once stood is now a popular recreation area - Senlin Forest Park. Walking down its shaded paths, Yang passed wild monkeys cavorting in cherry blossom trees and men and women of Zuo's age doing their morning calisthenics.
At the center of the grounds she paused in front of a memorial built to honor the wartime service of the doctors, Chinese and foreign, before she moved on to a small shrine of remembrance bearing an inscription in English that reads: "Dr Courtney died at her post in 1942 while working to prevent and cure the disease caused by the germ warfare waged by the Japanese."
Yang said the young doctor was the victim of a germ bomb dropped by Japanese aircraft.
"She was trying to find a cure," Yang said.
As the morning grew older, a crowd gathered at the memorial. Speeches were made; wreaths were laid; old patriotic songs rang out; Red Cross uniforms abounded.
The locals had come, as they frequently do, to honor the memory of the doctors.
Yao Renli, 89, was among them.
"I didn't know the doctors," he said. "I just come here to pay my respects."
Du Yang, the park's deputy director, said many thousands of patients were admitted to the hospital every year between 1939 and 1945.
He gestured down the mountainside toward the modern city silhouetted against the sky.
"The wounded were brought up here on stretchers or by horse," he said.
A sacred duty
Du said the local government is now trying to raise 15 million yuan ($2.4 million) to build a replica of the original hospital.
"We must not let this story be forgotten. It's our duty to pass it down to the next generation," Du said.
The crowd began to disperse. As they have done for decades, many will come again on Tomb Sweeping Day, the traditional Chinese festival to honor the dead. They will lay offerings of food and drink before the memorial, a practice usually reserved for honored ancestors.
As the last of the visitors drifted away, Meng Guangquan, 46, one of the park caretakers, moved in. She takes special care to make sure Courtney's memorial is cleared of leaves and litter. It is something she tries to do every day.
"These doctors came to China to help us," she said. "We should take care of their memory, too."
