When the history of the 20th century is written and the great terrors, exterminations and genocides are fully documented, a grisly footnote will have to be appended from this tiny hamlet in southeastern China.
Along with a handful of other remote villages in China, it was the site of the only confirmed biological warfare attacks in modern history, committed by secret units of the Japanese invasion force that occupied much of China from 1931 to 1945.
As the century nears its close, the danger that what occurred at Congshan might happen again refuses to recede, now that a growing number of countries may be secretly developing biological weapons.
Had it not been for Jin Xianlan, the villagers here would never have connected the outbreak of bubonic plague with the Japanese plane that flew out of the western sky in August 1942 and circled low over the rice paddies that surround this huddle of ornate, upturned roof lines in Zhejiang Province.Continue reading the main story
It sprayed ''a kind of smoke from its butt,'' as Ms. Jin, with the bluntness of a Chinese peasant, later recounted to her husband, Wang Dafang, and to their neighbors.
The first signs of the coming epidemic emerged two weeks later, when the rats of the village started dying en masse. Then the fever, transmitted by fleas that carried the same Black Death through Europe in the Middle Ages, struck. It raged for two months, killing 392 out of 1,200 residents before Japanese troops moved in on Nov. 18 and started burning down plague-ridden houses.
At its peak that terrible November, the plague here was killing 20 Chinese a day, all of them civilians. Their screams sundered the night from behind shuttered windows and bolted doors, and some of the most delirious victims ran or crawled down the narrow alleys to gulp putrid water from open sewers in vain attempts to vanquish the septic fire that was consuming them.
They died excruciating deaths. ''You buried the dead knowing that the next day you would be buried,'' said Wang Peigen, who was 10 when the horror began. He is one of the few remaining survivors of the attack, and he still refers to the Japanese soldiers as devils.
After a half-century of recriminations, China and Japan agreed in December to take the first steps toward cleaning up the remains of chemical and biological warfare arsenals abandoned in China at the end of World War II.
Japanese diplomats said that in the next several weeks they would propose a plan to build environmentally safe factories in China to destroy chemicals, chemical bombs and related equipment used by the Japanese Imperial Army to make chemical and biological weapons.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Shen Guofang, said in December that China had insisted that Japan ''shoulder the whole responsibility'' of eliminating the remnants of these weapons. Between 700,000 and two million chemical bombs, most of them loaded with mustard gas and many of them corroded and leaking, are stored in warehouses and old munition dumps in Manchuria, where chemical agents were manufactured and deadly bacteria were cultured on a large scale in the 1930's and 1940's.
The germs that formed the basis of Japan's biological warfare program -- bubonic plague, typhoid and anthrax -- have long since died, though some of the machines where the deadly organisms were spawned remain, along with the terrible memories in places like Congshan.
Historians say Congshan and other Chinese villages are the only confirmed targets of modern biological warfare, although several countries, Iraq among them, have launched attacks with chemical weapons.
The cleanup comes as Japan, China and many other countries are preparing to carry out the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires the destruction of all stockpiles over the next 10 years. Although the treaty has the support of the Clinton Administration, the Senate has yet to ratify it.
Later this year, a working group drawn from countries dedicated to banning germ warfare will present proposals for tighter verification and inspection procedures for the 1972 Convention on Biological Weapons.
But the number of countries suspected of developing or conducting research on biological weapons has increased in the last decade, from about 10 in 1989 to perhaps 17 today, the United States Office of Technology Assessment has reported.
China and Taiwan, whose rival Governments both witnessed the horrible consequences of Japan's biological warfare attacks and experimentation, are both suspected by the United States of carrying out secret biological warfare research, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency reported to Congress. Both Governments deny the allegations.
''In the early 1980's, only one country had been publicly accused of having a biological weapons arsenal, and that was the Soviet Union,'' said Leonard A. Cole, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has written extensively on biological warfare. He offers only one explanation for why the number of suspect nations has surged.
Although most countries denounced biological warfare as repugnant as early as 1925, Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran during their war in the 1980's and against its own Kurdish population demonstrated that such weapons could have a devastating impact.
''Because we let Iraq get away with the terrible use of chemical weapons,'' Professor Cole said, ''the lesson became obvious to middle-rate powers that you could get away with developing a chemical or biological arsenal with impunity and that these weapons could potentially make a difference on the battlefield.''
With the discovery of fearsome new strains of disease, like the Ebola virus, the potential consequences of biological warfare seem more catastrophic than ever, while the technology to acquire biological weapons becomes more simple and inexpensive to develop, far more simple than the development of nuclear weapons, many experts say.
At the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, United Nations inspectors discovered that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had secretly loaded Scud missile warheads with deadly anthrax bacteria that could have terrorized any battlefield or city onto which they were fired.
The allied commander during the war, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, has since written that even on the edge of victory, he feared that a last-ditch use of chemical weapons by the Iraqis could reverse the allied momentum with a devastating psychological blow.
Terror is at the core of these weapons, as the Japanese themselves learned in the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995.
In Congshan, it was the same.
''The thing I remember most is the fear,'' said Wang Da, 68, another survivor. ''People closed their doors, and all you could hear through the night was people dying and people crying for the dead.''
If a villager ventured out of doors, he or she might be captured by the Japanese technicians who wore white coats and masks and who performed experiments on live plague victims in the Buddhist temple just down the road.
In Congshan recently, the old survivors produced a map for a foreign visitor showing the houses destroyed by the purging fires of Nov. 18, 1942, the day the villagers were herded at gunpoint to a nearby slope to watch and wail as their possessions were incinerated. The harvest rotted, and the hardships of that winter still bring tears to the eyes of those who lived through it.
During a tour of the village, Wang Rongli, 63, stripped off his shirt to show his withered right arm, where Japanese doctors injected bacteria and left him to die. ''My arm rotted for many years,'' he said.
In a small courtyard off the village square, the elders have built an activity center, where they store the large, white scrolls that carry the names and ages of the victims, along with the signature of a witness to each death.
There is no museum here, although the villagers are trying to raise money to build one. The Chinese Government is sympathetic, but its only involvement with Congshan over the decades on this matter has been to send a medical team once a year to capture rats and test their blood for plague.
The most poignant stop on the tour was an ordinary house, newly built on the site of an old one. The old men pointed to the foundation and said, ''This is the place where Wu Xiaonai lived.''
She was only 18, they said, when the fever seized her. She made the mistake of walking to the Buddhist temple because the Japanese doctors there had posted signs that they could treat the disease. But word came back from the temple from an old woman named Tong Jinlan that it had been a trap. The old woman told of hearing Miss Wu pleading for her life to the doctors as they tied her to a chair and placed a hood over her head to muffle her screams. Then they dissected her to remove her organs for study.
Over the years, the United States Government has said little about the atrocities committed in China by the Japanese. The Communist victory in 1949 shifted Asian alliances, pushing postwar Japan and the United States together as a bulwark against Soviet and Chinese Communism.
With the opening of wartime archives in recent years, it is now clear that the United States was willing to exempt Japanese officers who directed chemical and biological programs from war crimes prosecution in exchange for a full rendering of their secret programs.
''We were concerned about the potential of the Soviet Union in this area and we wanted to build our own capability,'' Professor Cole said. The United States renounced its biological warfare programs in 1969 and destroyed its weapons.
For all these reasons, a half-century later, many outside China still do not know what happened here.
But the survivors will never forget. On the road out of the village, a stark white pagoda stands on a hilltop that in 1979 was renamed ''The Mountain of Remembering Our Hatred.''Continue reading the main story