Two folk painters in Northeast China's Liaoning Province have created a large painting illustrating Japanese germ warfare atrocities during World War II.

An Yubing, one of the painters, said the three-meter-long and 2-meter-high painting is the first of its kind in China depicting the crimes of Unit 731, the Japanese army's biological warfare unit.

In the painting, five Japanese military doctors in white attempt to take organs from a living woman's chest, with bloody limbs littered in buckets and dozens of injured victims watching nearby.

The artists began painting the piece two years ago and completed the work on August 15, the 68th anniversary of China's victory in the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), An said.

Both of the painters are from Shenyang city, where Japanese troops began invading China on September 18, 1931.

According to An, he and his partner, Dong Yonghua, were shocked when they visited the ruins of Unit 731 in the city of Harbin in 2011 and decided then to create the painting.

Unit 731 was established as a top-secret biological and chemical warfare research base in Harbin in 1935 and served as the nerve center of Japan's biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during the war.

More than 10,000 civilians and war prisoners from China, the former Soviet Union, the Korean Peninsula and Mongolia died as subjects of experiments conducted at Unit 731. The Japanese blew up the base when the Soviet Union army regained Harbin in 1945.

Xinhua