NANCHANG — For more than nine decades, Zhong Xindi knew her father mostly through fading memory. He left home when she was 3 to join the Red Army, and later died during the Long March, the historic military maneuver in modern Chinese history. There were no photographs to remember him by, no familiar face for the family to hold onto, only a name, and the knowledge that he never returned.

Then, a little more than a month ago, students from Anhui Normal University brought the 94-year-old a portrait of her father, Zhong Yanzhu, when he was young.

"Dad, I finally saw your face again," Zhong said, stroking the painted cheek with a trembling hand as tears ran down her face.

In Ruijin, East China's Jiangxi province, absences like Zhong's are woven into the memory of the Long March. Over 90 years ago, the county had a population of about 240,000. Some 113,000 people joined the Red Army, and more than 30,000 local soldiers set out on the Long March. More than 10,800 of them died along the way. Many left no photograph behind for loved ones.

Now, a project to paint portraits of Red Army martyrs is giving some families a face to attach to stories passed down for generations. The first batch included 151 portraits, created by college students, not from imagination, but from careful reconstruction.

Qiu Tian, one of the Anhui Normal University students involved in the project, said the team first contacted the relatives of martyrs and studied photographs of their children to determine basic facial contours. They then revised the portraits repeatedly, drawing on family descriptions of the martyrs' eyes, expressions and habitual looks, until relatives felt the likeness was right.

"I thought he would surely smile when he 'met' his family again, so I gave him a slight grin," Qiu said.

Each portrait, he said, was a dialogue across generations, and a form of human care that technology alone could not provide.

The portrait project is part of a broader effort in Jiangxi to bring names, faces and family ties back to Red Army martyrs whose traces were long obscured by war. For decades, finding a martyr's relatives often meant searching genealogies, combing through archives, and interviewing elderly villagers — work that could take years and still yield no results.

That, however, is beginning to change. Big data comparison, DNA identification, cross-provincial archive sharing, and social media have created new paths for verifying long-fragmented records.

Located less than 80 kilometers from Ruijin, in Yudu county, best known as the starting point of the Long March, over 80,000 Red Army soldiers crossed the Yudu River and embarked on a roughly 12,500-km trek later described by American journalist Harrison Salisbury as "a great human epic".

The martyrs' memorial hall in Yudu has registered more than 16,000 identified martyrs. Hundreds of other names, scattered along the Long March route, are still being checked.

In the past, information on a single Jiangxi martyr might have been dispersed across archives in several provinces, making verification slow and uncertain. With a shared database along the Long March route, the process can now be shortened. In 2024, Yudu verified the identities of 47 martyrs who died in the Battle of Xiangjiang River through the mechanism.

Social media has also helped turn once-improbable searches into possible reunions.

After seeing a short video of volunteers searching for the relatives of martyr Yang Yanting, Zhong Baoqing, curator of the Ruijin revolutionary martyrs memorial hall, began reviewing historical documents. He eventually confirmed Yang's hometown and relatives. In September 2025, Yang's nephew came to Ruijin and touched his uncle's name on the martyrs' wall.

"My father had always hoped his elder brother would come home," he said.

According to incomplete statistics, among the over 100,000 martyrs in the province's Ganzhou city, more than 40,000 have been marked as whereabouts unknown. In March, the city launched a campaign to verify more martyrs' information by establishing a unified database after integrating resources from multiple departments.

As this year marks the 90th anniversary of the Long March victory, Jiangxi has pledged to step up efforts to verify martyrs' information and help more of them regain their names, family ties and portraits, according to the provincial veterans affairs department.

At the end of the martyrs' wall in Yudu's memorial hall, a large blank space remains. An inscription explains that tens of thousands of martyrs are still without verified names, and that the emptiness stands for their sacred memory.

Each new nameplate added to the wall and each portrait delivered to a family fills a small part of that blank.

XINHUA