Long Fenggao, 78, and his wife He Lianzhen, 75, at their home in Guilin in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.

Long lived in Yangtang village, a suburb of Guilin. "I learned about the world through the wild countryside of rice paddies, rivers and woods. In my dictionary, there were no such words as school or teacher."

He was acclaimed as the naughtiest and smartest kid in the village. Most of his childhood pals are now dead, having spent their whole lives as farmers in Yangtang, living from hand to mouth. He was the only one in his group of friends to earn a government salary.

Reading from his own article on the subject to make sure he didn't miss any details, Long recalled the night they found the pilot: "One night in the fall of 1944, after the family of a fellow villager, Long Qiaobao, had finished the funeral of his father, we were having some food at midnight, when a villager named Li Delong hurried back from the toilet, shouting that he had found a wounded US pilot on the farm."

Just 9 years old at that time, Long followed the villagers to the rice paddy.

"The pilot was tall and his legs were injured and he could not speak any Chinese. He must have been wounded during an aerial battle with Japanese fighter pilots that evening," Long said.

"He chose to eat some beef and groundnuts and the villagers laughed at the fact that he still had a clear enough head to choose the best food. Led by a man holding a lantern, he was carried on a stretcher by two villagers to his headquarters 10 kilometers away."

The stretcher was made from the same wood that was used to carry the dead villager's body hours before, along with hemp rope, which the villagers had unfastened from their wooden casks. The three villagers came back at 5 am with three packs of US cigarettes and a story that they told proudly until their deaths.