Kuomintang officials ordered the city be set on fire in 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War to prevent the Japanese from benefiting from its capture.

The result of this fire made Changsha one of the most damaged cities during World War II, alongside Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden, Warsaw and others.

Soon after, a great number of refugees and injured soldiers, in addition to government institutions and factories, were relocated to Changsha.

Though the city had prepared for such a scenario for a long time, due to the limited transport capacity of Changsha, it still could not hold this amount of goods and people.

False intelligence contended that Imperial Japanese forces would attack Changsha from the East.

say the 12th), the chairman of the Hunan government, Zhang Zhizhong, passed Chiang's idea to his subordinates in a meeting.

Government institutions that were destroyed include the provincial government headquarters, buildings housing the bureaus of civil affairs, construction, police, army mobilizations, security, telegraph, telephone, post as well as the courts, Kuomintang branches, chamber of commerce, central news agency, central radio station and several newspaper offices.

The damage to this factory include $270,000 loss due to burned workshops; $960,000 to raw materials; $600,000 to machinery.

Future Chinese leaders such as Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying were also present in the city during the fire.

[citation needed] The fire, however, annihilated all the cultural accumulations that the city retained since the Spring and Autumn period.