“Up to 100 million Chinese became refugees in their own country”
IF IT HADN’T BEEN FOR A JAPANESE SOLDIER needing a toilet break in July 1937, things could have been so different. At this time imperial Japan had seized parts of north China, and tensions between the countries were rising. Japanese soldiers were involved in nighttime training exercises close to Beijing, near a stone bridge named after the Venetian merchant Marco Polo. One night, a Japanese private had failed to come back to base after an unplanned toilet break, and Chinese guards refused the Japanese entry to a nearby town to look for their lost comrade. The stand-off became violent, and was the spark that set off the Second Sino-Japanese war.