Lishui Bihu Yantou Village is now a guyan painting township and a tourist attraction, and if the history is set back to more than 70 years ago, there was also a secret Zhejiang chemical factory here, where hundreds of workers produced military ammunition for the anti-war army. At that time, the two brothers who built and supported this chemical plant were Ruian Xue Jiming and Xue Jiguang.
Today, the chemical plant has long been a relic, and the surrounding area is overgrown with weeds, and few people come. The Xue brothers, who are buried underground, may not have thought that a hundred years later, their descendants would come from all over the world to reminisce about their glorious history in front of the ruins of this chemical plant.
Younger brother set up an arms factory The younger brother donated funds to support him
After the July 7 Incident, China entered an all-out War of Resistance. In 1937, The chairman of Zhejiang Province, Huang Shaohu, moved the provincial government to Lishui and opened four iron factories in Lishui, manufacturing rifles and machine guns. However, due to the lack of chemical raw materials for ammunition, the ironworks have guns without shells and guns without ammunition.
Just when Huang Shaohu had nothing to do, he thought of Xue Jiming, a Ruian who was teaching at Zhejiang University at this time.
Xue Jiming was born in Ruian Shangwang Xueli Village. In 1916, together with his elder brother Xue Jiguang, he was sent to Japan to study after graduating with honors from Zhejiang Provincial No. 10 Middle School. His elder brother Xue Jiguang studied at the Faculty of Political Science and Law at the University of Tokyo, and Xue Jiming studied at the Department of Applied Chemistry at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. After that, Xue Jiming went to the United States to study and obtained a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Illinois, and was recommended as a member of the National Honorary Chemical Society.
In order to revitalize the national industry, Xue Jiming gave up the preferential treatment of the United States, returned to the motherland in 1928 and taught at Zhejiang University.
In May 1939, Xue Jiming was summoned by Huang Shaohu to be appointed as the director of the Zhejiang Chemical Factory, and also a major general, and began to organize the factory in Yantou Village, Bihu Town, Lishui City. However, after receiving the order, Xue Jiming encountered various difficulties before opening the factory, one is that the funds finally arrived at only 250,000 yuan, which was stretched; Second, during the war, a large number of laborers were pulled to replenish the army, and the workers could not be gathered.
At this time, the elder brother Xue Jiguang was working in Lishui and was always concerned about his brother's establishment of a chemical factory. Xue Jiguang found that at this time, there were a large number of young adults in Ruian City who were unwilling to be pulled to be Zhuangding and were worried about the way out, and taking this opportunity, Xue Jiguang cleverly transferred the 500 Zhuangding recruited by Ruian to Xue Jiming's military factory as workers. At the same time, he sold his shop and gave a lot of money to support the armaments factory.
Solving the problem of financial and human resources, the chemical plant was officially launched, and Xue Jiming used his experience as a researcher at the Institute of War Chemistry attached to the U.S. Bureau of Mines to quickly develop and produce sulfuric acid, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid for various types of military ammunition. In addition to supplying these chemical raw materials to the military factories in Zhejiang Province, they were also exported to the gun and ammunition arsenals in six provinces and one city across the country, sending charcoal to the Kuomintang and Communist troops who participated in the War of Resistance at that time.
Later generations visited and excavated in 4 years to restore this history of the ancestors
"Because the military factory was classified during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, except for the two xue brothers, the Xue family did not know about it. After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, because of the chaos, the descendants of the Xue brothers were scattered in Beijing, Shanghai, and the United States, so the descendants of the Xue family were not clear about this history. Xue Jiguang's grandson Xue Keliang told reporters. And a coincidence, let xue's descendants begin to excavate this original dusty history.
Xue Keliang told reporters that before his grandmother's birthday, he and his wife took care of the elderly and heard his grandmother's last words saying that he would be buried with his grandfather Xue Jiguang. However, where Grandpa's grave was, the Xue family did not know. "If it wasn't for Grandma mentioning it, we would never have heard Grandpa's name." Xue Keliang said.
In order to understand the life of the grandfather, but also for the sake of the grandmother's wishes, xue's descendants spent 4 years, traveled to Lishui, Ruian, Taiwan and other eight places, looking for a large number of materials, with clues to find the ruins of the chemical plant, and one by one visited the living old workers of the military factory, the old people of the ancestral hall and the local historians, at the same time, contacted the local government departments in Lishui and Ruian to verify the clues found.
Through unremitting efforts, today, the history of Xue Jiguang and Xue Jiming during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression has been excavated little by little by Xue's descendants like treasure buried in the soil.
Goldman Sachs Chinese executives have traveled thousands of miles to find their roots and worship their ancestors
During this year's Qingming Festival, a special group of guests came to the site of this long-dormant chemical factory - the descendants of Xue from Beijing and Shanghai. After learning the story of their ancestors from the Xue people in Wenzhou, they traveled thousands of miles to worship their ancestors during the Qingming Dynasty.
Among them were Xue Qiya, the granddaughter-in-law of Xue Jiming from Shanghai, Song Bing, the granddaughter of Xue Jiming, who flew from Beijing, Song Bing, the general manager of Goldman Sachs Gaohua and former economic adviser to Singapore's prime minister, Wu Zuodong, and her husband, Daniel, a foreign professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tsinghua University.
"Previously, I didn't know anything about my grandfather and uncle, until last year, when the descendants of the Xue family in Wenzhou contacted me and told me about this history. At that time, I was very surprised, I did not expect my grandfather and uncle to be so great. Song Bing told reporters that during the Spring Festival this year, she decided to bring her husband Daniel back to find her roots and worship her ancestors. For her, it is not only to better understand her family history and inherit her family culture, but also to express deep respect and commemoration of her ancestors.
"This history, like a broken string, has finally continued." On the day of the Qingming Festival, Song Bing and other xue descendants deeply remember their ancestors in front of the ruins of the chemical plant, although it has become an unformed relic, but this family's history will be preserved in their oral tradition.
Character business card
Xue Jiming
Graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan, Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, he became the director of the Zhejiang Chemical Factory in Lishui during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Xue Jiming worked at the Shanghai Research Institute of Chemical Industry and the Shanghai Synthetic Resin Research Institute. He is the author of "National Defense and Industry", "Motherland Petroleum", and translated the original "Viscosity Determination of Polymer Solution" by Hiroshi Hiroshi Ryutani in Japan.
Xue Jiguang
Graduated from the Faculty of Law of the Political Science Department of the University of Tokyo, Japan, he served in the National Government as the chief of the General Affairs Section of the Tobacco and Alcohol Affairs Bureau of the Ninth District (Yeosu) of Zhejiang Province. Since then, he has become Ryan's first practicing lawyer.
This article is transferred from: Wenzhou Network