Sixty-three years ago, nearly 200 fishermen in eastern Zhejiang Province rescued more than 380 British prisoners after a Japanese ship was torpedoed and sunk in the East China Sea.
Now, the story of the rescue, which had been largely forgotten, has come out as a confidential document was declassified in the Zhejiang Provincial Archives this month.
The 99-page document, which was accidentally found by scholars in Zhejiang, recorded in detail the rescue and includes 1948 telegrams from the British government expressing gratitude to the fishermen.
On September 27, 1942, more than 1,800 British prisoners of war boarded the "Lisbon Maru," a Japanese prison ship disguised as common cargo vessel, leaving Hong Kong for Japan.
The ship was torpedoed by a US submarine off the Zhoushan Islands in Zhejiang, on October 1, 1942. While many were killed, others jumped from the sinking ship. The document said nearly 200 local fishermen with 46 fishing boats rushed to the site and pulled out 384 British soldiers.
"It was August 23, 1942, in the Chinese lunar calendar. I heard a huge bang. All the men in my family rushed out of the house and we saw a big ship in the sea with its back part in the water," recalled Shen Agui, 81, one of the 13 fishermen still alive.
"First we saw some wooden blocks and cotton floating on the water. But to our surprise, we found many people in the sea, yelling something," said 80-year-old Guo Ade, another fisherman.
"We dared not get too close, as four Japanese ships were around. So we had to wait until they left and began to save the people," said Shen, who said that he, his father and uncle rescued seven soldiers.
"The Japanese came to our village the next day and I told my family to send three foreigners hiding at my home to a nearby cave, which was not known to villagers," said Wang Baorong, another fisherman.
The rescued soldiers were recaptured and taken back to Japan - all except J.C. Fallace, W.C. Johnstone and A.J.W. Evans, the three hidden in the cave, who managed to escape to Chongqing, an inland city in southwest China, with help from the fishermen. according to the document.
Altogether 847 died in the shipwreck, 970 survived.
The three Britishers disclosed the truth of "the Lisbon Maru Incident" and the Japanese army's mistreatment of British soldiers through broadcasts in Chongqing, the first time it became known in public.
As time passed, the "Lisbon Maru Incident" was remembered only by historians and insiders. It was only in 2002 when Wang Haigang, a deputy to the People's Congress of Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province, proposed a salvage mission for the sunken ship, that the public focused on that period of history again.
In May 2003, Tian Qinghua, vice chairman with the Zhoushan Social Science Association, happened to find the classified document in the Zhejiang Provincial Archives, providing authoritative evidence for the truth of the shipwreck.
In fact, the "Lisbon Maru Incident" has also caught the attention of Tony Banham, a British war history scholar, who first learned of the incident in 1988 and decided to write a book on it.
"I heard some British soldiers were saved by Chinese people in a shipwreck, but I wanted to know the details," said Banham, who came to Zhoushan last Saturday to research his book.
Banham's book, scheduled for release early next year, will include a poem by the daughter of a British survivor about her father's experience of being rescued by Chinese fishermen and sent back to Japan.