An operating room in Guiyang hospital, where almost every item was made from bamboo, including the operating table. Photo Provided to China Daily

Young and idealistic

Chinese casualties are estimated to have accounted for 90 percent of all casualties in the Pacific theater of WWII, so there was no shortage of work for the medics of Guiyang, and many sick and wounded were brought there, according to Yang Yongxuan, 65.

Her father, Yang Xishou, was one of more than 3,000 Chinese doctors the foreigners trained and who were deployed all across the country to save lives.

When she was young, Yang said, her father told her stories of the foreign men and women who came to help China. Mostly young and idealistic, they typically worked 10 hours a day treating patients at the hospital, or even longer on the many forays they made with Chinese medical teams to the front lines.

He told her of Lanto Kaneti, 29, a Bulgarian doctor, who fell in love with a Chinese nurse named Zhang Sunfen, how they later married and went to live in Europe after the war.

"Once they came back and visited," Yang said.

He told her of the day in 1941 when the Japanese bombed the hospital, killing five patients and a Chinese nurse.

He mentioned an Austrian doctor who died on a medical mission to Chongqing in 1945.