The year-old accountant was a year-old schoolboy in October when people in his hometown in Zhejiang province, south-east China, began to fall ill. Panic swept through the area as groups of local sanitation officials frantically disposed of infected corpses and declared war on the local rat population. The villagers soon realised, however, that this was not a freak outbreak but a deliberate attempt to wipe out civilian populations with what was then the world's biggest and most sophisticated biological weapons programme.
Its architect was the occupying Japanese army. On the morning of October 4, , Japanese planes flew over the city of Quzhou and released parcels of rice and wheat, designed to explode in mid-air so that their third ingredient - plague infected fleas - would fall to earth intact.
After hearing of the rising death toll in the neighbourhood, Mr Fang's family - his mother, father, elder brother and nanny - fled to another village 15km away. By , the plague and other killer diseases had spread to several locations along the Zhejiang-Jiangxi railway. The Japanese showered seven pathogens on the province in what is thought to have been retaliation for the "Doolittle" air raids on Tokyo by US bombers.
In addition to the plague, the area was infected with typhoid, typhus, dysentery, cholera, para-typhus and anthrax. Biological warfare finally caught up with Mr Fang and his family. His symptoms began with a tiny blister. Mr Fang recovered, and today shows no obvious signs of his ailment. He shed tears as he described the night that his mother, gravely ill with typhoid, begged him for some water.
By the time he had lit a fire and boiled a cupful of water, she was dead. He had to borrow wood from an old man in the village to make her a coffin. According to local documents, supported by studies conducted by Japanese researchers, between and more than , Chinese civilians in the region were infected with the plague and other diseases.
