The National Cemetery on the southern edge of Tengchong holds 9,168 graves of Chinese soldiers who died in the 1944 Salween Offensive — the campaign that drove Japanese forces from the Tengchong area after three years of occupation. The cemetery is laid out in formal rows on a hillside overlooking the Jiandie River valley, with stone monuments and a central memorial hall. It is one of the largest and best-maintained World War II cemeteries in China, and the scale of the losses recorded here gives the site a gravity that is difficult to overstate.
The adjacent Tengchong Bao Guo Museum documents the Burma Campaign and the Salween Offensive with considerably more candour and detail than most Chinese war memorials, including material about the Allied involvement and the strategic context of the Yunnan theatre. The exhibits are in Chinese with some English translation. For travellers who know something of the Burma Road, the Ledo Road, and Stilwell's campaign, the landscape around Tengchong acquires an additional dimension that the monument alone cannot fully convey.