Xu Zhimo was warned about the weather. The poet -- one of the most celebrated in modern Chinese literature -- had been told that conditions between Nanjing and Beiping were uncertain on November 19, 1931. But Lin Huiyin was giving an architectural lecture in Beiping that day, and Xu was determined to be there. His relationship with Lin, a brilliant architect and writer in her own right, was the most discussed romantic entanglement in Chinese literary circles. So he boarded a Stinson Detroiter mail plane -- originally the private aircraft of General Zhang Xueliang -- and took off from Ming Gugong Airport around 8:00 that morning. He would never arrive.
The Detroiter, an SM-1F model operated by China Airways Federal under contract with Chunghwa Post, carried two pilots, one passenger, and 500 pounds of mail. Captain Wang Guanyi and First Officer Liang Bitang, both 36 years old and graduates of the Nanyuan Aviation School, were experienced aviators. The flight proceeded normally along the route of the Jing Pu Railway, which served as their primary navigation aid. After a refueling stop at Xuzhou Airport around 10:00 AM, Captain Wang handed the controls to First Officer Liang and moved to the passenger seat. As the plane entered Jinan airspace, it flew into severe fog. The railway vanished below them. Liang pressed on, searching for the nearby Wujiapu Airport that would help him reorient, but the plane was descending.
After passing the waypoint at Changqing District, Liang turned northwest toward the airport. Seconds later, the aircraft struck the peak of what is now called West Mountain, about six kilometers from Dangjiazhuang Railway Station and at an elevation of 150 meters. The impact sheared off the right wing. Despite the fuselage remaining relatively intact, the loss of the wing sent the Detroiter into a descending spiral. It crashed into the valley below, disintegrated, and caught fire. Two of the three aboard -- Xu Zhimo and Captain Wang -- died at the scene. First Officer Liang was found a meter from the other two, severely burned but still conscious. He was rushed to a hospital but died en route. A patrol police officer witnessed the crash and was among the first to reach the wreckage.
Xu Zhimo's friend Liang Sicheng -- himself one of China's greatest architects, and Lin Huiyin's husband -- had gone to Nanyuan Airport to meet Xu at 3:00 PM. By 4:30, when no plane had arrived, Liang feared the worst and called local police. The literary community in China was devastated by the news. Xu was 34 years old, at the height of his fame, a poet whose lyrical verses about love and beauty had defined a generation of Chinese Romantic literature. The investigation concluded that the crash was a controlled flight into terrain: the pilots had descended below minimum safety altitude while navigating by compass through fog, unable to see either the railway or the mountain ahead of them. Without a ground proximity warning system -- technology that lay decades in the future -- they had no warning. Lin Huiyin collected a piece of the wreckage and kept it at her bedside for the rest of her life.
The exact crash site was disputed for decades. The Republican government erected Xu's tomb on Mount Beida, which they mistakenly identified as the location. In 2013, investigators used archival documents and a modern electronic rangefinder to follow the Jing Pu Railway from Dangjiazhuang Station, traveling six kilometers north to a village called Chaomidian. One kilometer from the village, they found the valley that matched eyewitness descriptions. The crash site was definitively established at West Mountain, east of Changqing District in southwest Jinan. A memorial park was built in 1932, a year after the crash. The mountains around Jinan still look much as they did that foggy November morning -- low peaks wreathed in mist, the railway threading through the valley below, the kind of terrain that swallows small aircraft without warning.
The crash site is at approximately 36.55°N, 116.86°E, on West Mountain east of Changqing District in southwest Jinan, Shandong Province, at an elevation of about 150 meters. The terrain is hilly with peaks that can be obscured by fog -- the same conditions that caused the 1931 crash. Nearest major airport: Jinan Yaoqiang International (ZSJN), approximately 40 km northeast. Caution: the area around Jinan is surrounded by low mountains that can be obscured in poor visibility. The Jing Pu Railway is visible running through the valley below the crash site.