June 25, 2026
March Madness, 1938 edition
Lianda and the Long March
A 1,000-mile school escape story has readers emotional, arguing, and making memes
TLDR: Lianda tells the real wartime story of Chinese students and professors who relocated their university by traveling deep inland under invasion. Readers were split between admiration for their grit and eye-rolling at people romanticizing hardship, with plenty of jokes about today’s students never surviving the trip.
This wasn’t just a history post — it turned into a full-on comment section pilgrimage. The article looks at the remarkable story of Lianda, the wartime emergency university formed when three top Chinese schools fled invasion in 1938 and moved deep inland. Students marched for weeks through mountains and rivers, dodged bandits, slept in creepy places, and somehow still found time to sing songs, collect folklore, and memorize dictionaries like absolute academic machines. A modern writer retracing part of that route in 2018 only made readers even more obsessed.
And wow, people had feelings. The strongest reaction was straight-up awe: commenters were calling the students “built different,” mourning what they see as a lost era of grit, purpose, and respect for learning. But then came the drama. One camp loved the story as a symbol of education surviving war; another rolled its eyes at what they saw as romanticizing suffering, basically asking, should we really be nostalgic about students hiking a thousand miles because society collapsed? Others jumped into a spicy side debate over whether this says more about patriotism, elite universities, or the simple fact that roads and transport were awful back then.
The jokes were flying too. People compared the marchers to students today needing a charger after ten minutes, dubbed it “the original gap year from hell,” and fixated on the guy tearing pages from a dictionary after memorizing them like he was a human search engine. In classic internet fashion, half the crowd was inspired, and the other half was saying: please stop turning trauma into cottagecore academia.
Key Points
- •The article centers on Lianda, the provisional university created when three elite Chinese universities relocated inland during the Japanese invasion in 1938.
- •It uses Yang Xiao’s 2018 1,000-mile walk from Changsha to Kunming to revisit the original student march and its conditions.
- •The march combined hardship with student cultural activity, and the article cites examples including Liu Zhaoji’s folk-song collection and Zha Liangzheng’s memorization practice.
- •The author argues that wartime transport conditions and partial access to trucks, buses, ships, and rail shaped how these large relocations were possible.
- •The article presents Lianda as an important intellectual center and points to John Israel’s book as a major source on its wartime history and legacy.