Deadly legacy of war still hiding beneath the soil
Early last week, some 1,360 bombs and grenades were unearthed from a construction site near a busy commercial street in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province.
The construction worker who found the first bomb was dumbstruck by the discovery, but he decided to call police when he found a whole cache of the "steel potatoes".
Wang Junping, head of the Zhengzhou public security bureau's bomb disposal team said the bombs bore the mark of Showa, the Japanese emperor from 1926 to 1989.
"The markings show that the hazardous explosives were left by the invading Japanese troops during the war from 1937 to 1945," he said.
The bombs and grenades were buried beneath a natural gas pipeline.
It was actually the third weapons cache to have been found in March. The Zhengzhou public security bureau found two other stockpiles of unexploded ordinance earlier in the month.
On March 13, 1,320 unexploded bombs were removed from a site near the local railway station square, the second largest in China after Beijing West Railway Station.
"Lines of bombs were lying neatly beneath a layer of dirt," a witness surnamed Zhang was quoted as saying by the Zhengzhou-based Dahe Daily.
It took six hours for a team of explosive disposal experts to remove the bombs from the scene.
Experts said unearthing and transporting explosives requires a lot of patience and care to avoid unexpected blasts.
Several years ago 1,100 other bombs were found at the same site, Wang said.
He said the site was used as a Japanese base during the war.
"Zhengzhou sits in the center of the central plains area, which would have been of key strategic importance in terms of securing an advantageous fighting position," he said.
And on March 4, nearly 500 unexploded bombs were unearthed at another construction site near the city's center.
All the bombs were loaded onto trucks and transported 40 km to an unpopulated area near the Yellow River where they were detonated in a controlled blast.
In the past decade, more than 10,000 bombs and grenades have been removed from the soil beneath the city. Most of them were in heavily populated districts, according to the public security bureau.
(China Daily 04/01/2008 page6)
