Extremely rare broadsheet focusing on what has historically become known as the “January 28th Incident” in Shanghai.

This extraordinary broadsheet is a somewhat crude but rapidly produced map with an article around its border reporting on the conflict which has been named as the “January 28th Incident” or “Shanghai Incident”. Initially, this began as a riot by the Japanese community in Shanghai, which rapidly escalated into armed conflict and ultimately resulted in both China and Japan sending around fifty thousand troops into the conflict zone. The Japanese also sent airplanes, battleships and artillery to support their infantry.

The conflict was situated mainly in the International Zone of Shanghai and resulted in the Chinese troops being repulsed from the area. China appealed to the League of Nations and a truce was reached on May 5th 1932. It is now seen as the first urban conflict waged between two modern fighting forces and a chilling prelude to Japanese aggression and behaviour during the Second Sino-Japanese War which began in Shanghai in 1937.

This map bears all the hallmarks of a rapidly and inexpensively produced news sheet designed to report on the escalating conflict. There is a specific date in English on the upper right of Feb 24, 1932, so just under the month after the initiation of the conflict. The map shows a flotilla of Japanese warships on the mouth of the Huangpu River, a series of air fields as well as what seem to be sightings of Japanese airplanes. It is in Chinese script but there are English translations of important sites. It also documents troop movements, presumably red for Japanese and black for Chinese.

The side and lower panels bear an article in largely broken English, legible but obviously not written by someone with English as their first language. The article details the conflict, focusing particularly on Japanese aggression and atrocities, including indiscriminate bombing of civilians, the targeting of refugee camps and a possibly biased report of Chinese and Japanese casualties so far (3,000 for the former and 20,000 for the latter.) Two insets are present on the map: on the upper right, Shanghai and its communication routes are shown in relation to major nearby cities, particularly Nanjing and the lower right shows an inset of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria with a caption stating that the area is twice the size of France and supports a Chinese population of 26 million people.

This is an extraordinary piece of historical ephemera, reporting on a conflict which had wide reaching connotations. After the truce was declared, the Japanese military were left aggrieved and ten days later, a group of young army officers assassinated the current Prime Minister of Japan, establishing military control of the government.

We have been able to find entries in several institutions for this item: the BNF in Paris, the Leventhal Map Centre in the New York Public Library, the Berlin State Library and the State Library in Copenhagen.

Original colour. [SEAS5499]