Saturday, July 19, 2008

LongHua Martyrs Mausoleum 上海龙华烈士陵园

Our last stop was LongHua Martyrs Mausoleum 龙华烈士陵园. This cemetery is a walking distance from the LongHua Temple. Entrance ticket is extremely cheap at RMB1 per person. Ethan is free entry.
Entrance Ticket
Longhua Martyrs Cemetery may seem a tranquil place now, but it has had a bloody history. It has been the execution site of many Communists, particularly during the Guomingdang crackdown in 1927.

Entrance to the Memorial Cemetery
Nowadays, it's full of large Soviet-style sculpture and immaculate lawns. The most chilling is the small, unkempt, grassy execution area accessed by a tunnel where the remains of murdered Communists were found with leg irons still on in the 1950s.
Interesting sculptures
The museum is a pyramid shaped building right in the middle of the memorial park. When we were there, the weather changed to quite cloudy as if going to rain. A photo that we had taken looks quite eerie like the building in the Mars Attack whereby alien came down from the dark cloud. Take a look at the photo below and you would understand what I mean.
Like alien coming down from dark cloud to the pyramid
Quite a long walk from the entrance to the museum
Initially we thought that this place would only take maybe less then 30 mins to finish exploring. However, we later found out that we were wrong. In fact there was quite a lot of attraction within the cemetery.
The memorial is written with a quote “丹心碧血为人民“ from 江泽民 who served as President of the People's Republic of China from 1993 to 2003.

The memorial stone
There is a fountain right in front of the memorial stone and path leading to the steps towards the museum.

Photo shot in front of the fountain

Pyramid shape museum building
The museum is right inside the pyramid shaped building. When we reached the museum, there were not many people around.
Photo in front of the museum entrance
In March 1927, the KMT set up the Songhu (SongjiangRiverandShanghaiRiver) Garrison Command Department, used to imprison and murder communists and revolutionaries. During the next 10 years, the number of communists and revolutionaries imprisoned there topped 9,000, with over 800 killed.
Among the victims were many leaders of the Communist Party of China, such as the famous Longhua 24 Martyrs: Lin Yunan, He Mengxiong, Long Dadao, Ouyang Li'an, and the Left-Wing Writers League Martyrs, including Li Qiushi, Rou Shi, Hu Yepin, Yin Fu and Feng Qiang.




We did not managed to explore all of this memorial because Ethan was tired. He had slept in mummy's arm, thus we have to leave this place.


Some other monuments on the way out


2 comments:

Unknown said...

You not suppose to take pictures inside the museum....but like you i took pictures too as noone cares.
You did not appear to have gone to the site of the actual exectutions of the 24 Martyrs?? You have to go through the underground tunnel.
I live just 30mins walk from this place but even Chinese seem little interested in this place.

Unknown said...

Also not sure why you paid ...it free...i paid nothing and i have been few times.
I have read other sites that say 4RMB....but it is FREE to get into the museum and park