Foundation was laid Friday in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province for a memorial to the anti-Japanese air warfare during World War Two.
"The new memorial will be a twin sister of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, commemorating the 300,000 innocent civilians massacred by Japanese invaders from 1937, to reflect the original history," said Ni Hong, deputy secretary-general of Nanjing navigation association at the foundation-laying ceremony.
Friday is the Qingming Festival (Tomb Sweeping Day) in China, the day Chinese people commemorate their deceased.
The memorial will cover two hectares on the north slope of the Zijin Mountain in Nanjing.
It aims to tells the history of how volunteer pilots from Russia, the United States and other countries joined their Chinese counterpart in the fighting against Japanese invaders in WWII through relics, via relics, documents, images and videos, Ni said.
More than 4,000 pilots died in the air war against Japan between 1932 and 1945, Ni said.
The association, in collaboration with the administration of Zhongshan Cemetery, had collected more than 400 pieces of related relics from china and abroad since 2002, said Wang Jian, vice president of the association.
According to Wang, the budget of the memorial was estimated to be 20 million yuan (about 2.8 million U.S dollars). In addition to government funding, they had also received donations worth of 2.5 million yuan from the public. The memorial will from a three-in-one complex, together with the cemetery for anti-Japanese navigation martyrs and a monument also in their honor.
The monument, built in 1995, carries the name of 3,304 pilots.
In related development, Wang said they had recently confirmed the identities of another 990 navigation martyrs, including 586 Chinese and 404 Americans.
Their names will be soon added to the monument, Wang said.
(Xinhua News Agency April 5, 2008)