In the outskirts of Baoshan District, a fierce battleground of the Shanghai Incident, the Japanese military abandoned the bodies of Chinese Shanghai citizens they had massacred in tunnels.

    In the outskirts of Baoshan District, a fierce battleground of the Shanghai Incident, the Japanese army abandoned the bodies of Chinese Shanghai citizens they had massacred in pits. The First Shanghai Incident erupted on January 28, 1932, and the Second Shanghai Incident on August 13, 1937. Baoshan in Shanghai faces the Yangtze River and lies west of the Huangpu River, serving as the Japanese army's landing point.

    Following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, full-scale Sino-Japanese War erupted. Chinese forces actively launched strategic offensives against Japanese troops in Shanghai. The Second Shanghai Incident, which broke out on August 13, became one of the largest and fiercest battles throughout the entire Sino-Japanese War. The fighting lasted three months, continuing until Japanese forces captured Shanghai on November 12.

     During the three months of fierce fighting and after the fall of Shanghai, the Japanese military carried out inhumane and systematic massacres against civilians in the Shanghai area. These atrocities were more brutal and widespread than those during the First Shanghai Incident on January 28, 1932. Japanese forces detained large numbers of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in urban and rural areas, subjecting them to mass shootings, beheadings, and burials alive.Massacres erupted particularly in Baoshan, Luojing, Wusong, Pudong, and Songjiang. Japanese forces abandoned tens of thousands of Chinese victims' bodies in wastelands, ponds, tunnels, riverbanks, and hastily dug pits, forming multiple shocking “mass graves.” Japanese forces caused the deaths of at least hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Shanghai and its surrounding areas.