Congshan, China - When the history of the 20th century is written and the great terrors, exterminations and genocides are fully documented, a grisly footnote will have to be appended from this tiny hamlet in southeastern China. Along with a handful of other remote villages in China, it was the site of the only confirmed biological warfare attacks in modern history, committed by secret units of the Japanese invasion force that occupied much of China from 1931 to 1945.

Had it not been for Jin Xianian, the villagers would never have connected the outbreak of bubonic plague with the Japanese plane that flew out of the western sky in August 1942 and circled low over the rice paddies that surround this huddle of ornate, upturned roof lines in Zhefang Province. It sprayed "a kind of smoke from its butt," Ms Jin recounted, with the bluntness of a Chinese peasant, to her husband and their neighbors.

The first signs of the coming epidemic emerged two weeks later, when the rats of the village started dying en masse. Then the fever, transmitted by the fleas that carried the same Black Death through Europe in the middle ages, struck. It raged for two months, killing 392 out of the 1,200 residents before Japanese troops moved in on November 18th and started burning down plague-ridden houses.

During a tour of the village, Wang Rongli, 63, stripped off his shirt to show his withered right arm, where Japanese doctors injected bacteria and left him to die. "My arm rotted for many years," he said. Then, another old man pointed toward a building and said, "This is the place where Wu Xianonai lived."

She was only 18, they said, when the fever seized her. She made the mistake of walking to the Buddhist temple because the Japanese doctors there had posted signs indicating that they could treat the disease. But word came back from the temple from an old woman, named Tong Jinlan, that it had been a trap. The old woman told of hearing Miss Wu pleading for her life to the doctors as they tied her to a chair and placed a hood over head to muffle the screams. Then they dissected her to remove her organs for study.

On the road out of the village, a stark white pagoda stands on a hilltop that in 1978 was renamed The Mountain of Remembering Our Hatred.