Qiu Tian, one of the Anhui Normal University students involved, 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 answer.

　　That 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-kilometer 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 named martyrs. Hundreds of other names, scattered along the Long March route, are still being checked.