MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · April 21 · 1949

ON THIS DAY · 21 APRIL 1949

The Yangtze crossing

20–21 Apr 1949 — After peace terms lapse, a million men cross the river on junks and sampans on a 500-km front in two nights; Nanjing falls on the 23rd. The last great natural line of the war is passed almost without pause — the Nationalist army south of it exists mostly on paper.

THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT

The last campaign is a river crossing that meets almost no one. On the night of 20–21 April 1949 (the ✕ on the Yangtze), after peace terms lapse, a million men cross on junks and sampans along a five-hundred-kilometer front; Nanjing falls on the 23rd — government buildings empty, the capital taken by soldiers who photograph each other in the presidential chair. Follow the red arrows south and west as the year runs out: Shanghai in May, Changsha and Lanzhou in August, Canton in October, Chungking in November — provincial armies defecting by the group, the “liberation” of the southwest a procession. Xinjiang’s garrison crosses over in September; the grey-tan plate that has sat in the map’s corner since 1912 goes red without a battle. On 1 October, from the Gate of Heavenly Peace (the ● at Peking), Mao proclaims the People’s Republic of China. Thirty-eight years separate the accidental bomb at Wuchang from this balcony; the succession to the Qing is finally settled, and the tide chart below your timeline — nothing for twenty years, a heartbeat at Ruijin, a flatline in 1934, a hill country smudge through the Japanese war — ends at the top of its scale.

From Chapter 12 — The People’s Republic of China in Revolution, 1911–1949 (1949).

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THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT

China in Revolution, 1911–1949

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP