Marco Polo Bridge incident

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Marco Polo Bridge incident began at approximately 23:00 on the night of the 7th of July 1937, with an exchange of gunfire between Japanese and Chinese forces outside a walled town called Wanping, 16.4 km southwest of Beijing. One missing soldier set off a chain of events that neither side could reverse. What started as a disputed search request would grow into a three-day battle, and then into something far larger. How did a single absent soldier become the trigger for a major war? And who actually fired the first shot?

• 2. The Bridge and Its Name

  ›

  The Marco Polo Bridge is an eleven-arch granite structure, first erected under the Jin dynasty and later restored in 1698 under the Kangxi Emperor of the Qing dynasty. Its Western name comes from the Italian text Il Milione, Marco Polo's account of his travels, in which the bridge appears. In Japan the incident is known as the Rokokyo Jiken, meaning the Lugou Bridge incident, and that name is drawn from an older name of the Yongding River, which the bridge crosses. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean accounts most often use that local river-derived name rather than the Western one. The bridge's own history, stretching back through multiple dynasties and multiple restorations, is woven into the event's meaning for the countries involved.

• 3. The Powder Keg Before July

  ›

  Japan had been extending its reach into northern China since the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and by 1932 had established the puppet state of Manchukuo, placing Puyi, the deposed Qing emperor, at its head. The League of Nations' Lytton Report criticized Japan's conduct, and Japan's response was to quit the League entirely. China's Kuomintang government refused to recognize Manchukuo but signed the Tanggu Truce in 1933, and the years that followed saw repeated small armed clashes that each time settled back into an uneasy quiet. By July 1937, Japan had stationed an estimated 7,000 to 15,000 troops in China, a force several times the size of the European detachments and well beyond the limits set by the Boxer Protocol of the 7th of September 1901. Under that same protocol, Japan held the legal right to conduct military maneuvers without notifying the Chinese authorities, a provision that would prove critical when the night exercises began on the 7th of July. The Imperial Japanese Army had already surrounded both Beijing and Tianjin by this point.

• 4. One Night, One Soldier

  ›

  Private Shimura Kikujiro's absence from his post on the night of the 7th of July set the sequence in motion. Japanese garrison troops had crossed the border into Chinese territory for exercises near Wanping, and when Shimura failed to return, his commanders sent a demand to Chinese regimental colonel Ji Xingwen, asking permission to enter Wanping and search the town. Ji Xingwen, commanding the 219th Regiment of the 37th Division of the 29th Army, refused. Shimura had already returned to his unit by the time negotiations were still underway; he claimed he had become lost in the dark after seeking relief for a stomach ache. Historian Peter Harmsen records that Shimura had visited a brothel. A Japanese infantry unit attempted to breach Wanping's walled defenses that same night and was repulsed. At 02:00 on the 8th of July, acting 29th Army commander Qin Dechun sent Wanping's mayor, Wang Lengzhai, alone to the Japanese camp to negotiate. At 04:45, Wang returned and reported seeing Japanese troops massing around the town. Within five minutes of his return, a shot was fired, and full-scale firing began at 04:50 on the 8th of July 1937.

• 5. Holding the Bridge

  ›

  Colonel Ji Xingwen led roughly 100 men in the defense of the bridge, under orders to hold it at all costs. The Chinese garrison was outnumbered and outgunned; most soldiers carried only a rifle and a dao, a single-edged sword comparable to a machete. Ji's men held with the help of arriving reinforcements but suffered what the sources describe as tremendous losses. While the fighting continued, Japanese military officers and members of the Japanese Foreign Service entered negotiations with the Chinese Nationalist government in Beijing. A verbal agreement was reached: China would apologize, punish those responsible, transfer control of Wanping to the Hebei civilian constabulary rather than the 219th Regiment, and take steps against communist activity in the area. Japanese General Masakazu Kawabe, commanding the China Garrison Infantry Brigade, initially rejected the truce against his superiors' orders and continued to shell Wanping for three more hours before finally being prevailed upon to stop and withdraw his forces to the northeast.

• 6. Escalation and Collapse

  ›

  The ceasefire did not hold. General Kawabe ordered Wanping shelled again on the 9th of July, and the following day Japanese armored units joined the assault. On the 11th of July, in accordance with the Goso conference, the Imperial Japanese Army General Staff authorized sending an infantry division from the Chosen Army, two combined brigades from the Kwantung Army, and an air regiment of 18 squadrons as reinforcements to northern China. By the 20th of July, total Japanese military strength in the Beiping-Tianjin area exceeded 180,000 personnel. General Song Zheyuan launched a bitter attack on Japanese lines on the 27th of July and was defeated, forced behind the Yongding River by the following day. The Chinese 29th Army withdrew after 24 days of combat. Japan captured Beiping and the Taku Forts at Tianjin on 29 and the 30th of July respectively. Despite orders not to advance beyond the Yongding River, and despite the Konoe government's foreign minister opening talks with Chiang Kai-shek's government in Nanjing and stating that Japan wanted cooperation rather than territory, negotiations collapsed. On the 9th of August 1937, a Japanese naval officer was shot in Shanghai, and the broader war could no longer be contained.

• 7. Who Fired First

  ›

  Historians have argued over whether the incident was deliberately staged, as the Mukden incident of 1931 had been. According to Jim Huffman, that theory has been widely rejected, partly because Japan at the time was more focused on the threat posed by the Soviet Union and would have been unlikely to choose this moment for a manufactured confrontation. Ikuhiko Hata, a controversial conservative Japanese historian, has proposed that the Chinese Communist Party may have provoked the clash in hopes of drawing Japan and the Kuomintang into a war of attrition against each other. Hata himself considers this less likely than what he calls the accidental shot hypothesis: that a low-ranking Chinese soldier fired in an unplanned moment of fear. The exact cause remains unresolved, and the debate over that single shot has persisted for decades alongside the broader question of responsibility for the war that followed.

• 8. Ripples Beyond the Bridge

  ›

  Muslim General Ma Bufang of the Ma clique notified the Chinese government in 1937 that he was ready to fight the Japanese, and immediately after the Marco Polo Bridge incident he arranged for a cavalry division under General Ma Biao to be sent east. The Turkic Salar people made up the majority of that first cavalry division dispatched to the front. The 29th Army's resistance, and the poor state of its equipment, directly inspired the 1937 composition called the Sword March; with reworked lyrics it became the National Revolutionary Army's standard marching cadence and spread the term guizi as the common epithet for the Japanese invaders. In 1987, on the fiftieth anniversary of the incident, the bridge was renovated and the People's Anti-Japanese War Museum was built nearby to mark the start of the Sino-Japanese War.