Hutou Fortress 虎头要塞

About Hutou Fortress

Concrete underground passages and rooms show how the installation was designed to operate beneath the hills, while the museum explains its construction, forced labour and the fighting of August 1945. The surviving tunnel network is much larger than the public route. Read the exhibition before entering the authorised underground section so that the engineering remains are understood within their wartime human history.

Built by the Japanese Kwantung Army, the fortress was constructed between 1934 and 1939 and garrisoned by the 4th Border Garrison Unit of the Fifth Army, tasked with blocking a Soviet invasion of Manchuria and cutting the Siberian Railway. Because of the Soviet-Japanese neutrality pact the garrison saw no fighting for most of its existence, and by July 1945 it was held by the newly formed 15th Border Garrison Unit, about 1,400 strong.

The fortress occupies high ground on the Manchukuo side of the Ussuri River (乌苏里江), overlooking the Soviet town of Iman, now Dalnerechensk, and measures about 10 kilometers east to west and 4 kilometers north to south. Along the long border line it was the only strategic position able to monitor the Siberian Railway, and it was considered one of the most important of the fortresses the Kwantung Army built across Manchuria.

In 2006 it was listed, as one of the Northeast fortresses of the Japanese invading army, on the sixth batch of Major Historical and Cultural Sites Protected at the National Level (全国重点文物保护单位); the listing covers the underground works at Hutoushan (虎头山), Menghushan (猛虎山) and Hubeishan (虎北山), the Huoshishan train-gun underground works (火石山列车炮地下工事), howitzer turret ruins and the Huxiaoshan (虎啸山) area ruins.

What to look for

• The museum's documents and objects concerning construction and the 1945 fighting.
• The preserved concrete passages and underground rooms on the official visitor route.

Location & getting there

Getting to Hutou Fortress

Use the Hutou Fortress Site Museum in Hutou Town, Hulin, as the arrival point for the protected remains.

• Enter underground areas only through the museum's authorised route; scattered entrances elsewhere in the former military landscape are not public access points.