An hour or so after sunrise, 25 years ago, an Associated Press reporter and I made a sortie through the back streets of Beijing in a very expensive taxi. We had stopped and were wandering around the Muxidi section of the city, where much of the previous night's gunfire had occurred, when an old man on a bicycle quietly swept in front of us.
He wore a large coned peasant's hat, and so was moving slowly. As he passed us, his right hand left the handlebar, dropped to his side, and pointed to where he had just come from. "Yiyuan," is all that he said. "Hospital."
That is how we found the morgue with the bodies of perhaps 40 or 50 people, mostly young men. Most of them had been shot. We were invited in to bear witness, because everyone knew that, very quickly, we would be the only ones allowed to remember. Publicly, anyway.
Since then, the People's Republic of China has done its best to erase the events that occurred on and around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. The color is somewhat faded, and the negatives were dusty, but here's a taste of what happened before the tanks came:
About the Author
