THE film’s title, 8,000 Girls Ascend the Heavenly Mountain, suggests that Chinese audiences will see a tale of joy when it is aired on television this autumn.

It dramatises the lives of thousands of girls aged 13 to 19 who went to China’s remote far west in the 1950s to follow soldiers sent to colonise the turbulent Muslim region.

In real life it was a trip to purgatory. As shooting for the film unfolds in Beijing under the watchful gaze of party censors, an astonishing story of mass deception, forced marriages and suicides has come to light.

Elderly women have come forward to tell how they were lured to China’s new frontier by false promises of training and education - only to find themselves locked in barracks and coerced into marrying soldiers.

Chinese journalists have also discovered that Chairman Mao Tse-tung approved the dispatch of 900 prostitutes from the brothels of Shanghai to undergo “thought reform” at the hands of the troops.

Thousands of war widows were also conscripted to go forth and multiply in the desert with new husbands from the People’s Liberation Army.

It casts new light on the leadership’s determination to occupy and populate the far west, known as Xinjiang, in the early 1950s. Ethnic conflict between Chinese and the Uighur Muslim population has flared ever since. The area recently witnessed its worst riots since an insurrection in 1997.

The stoical endurance of hundreds of thousands of Chinese settlers has rarely been described in such bleak terms as in the accounts of the 8,000 women from Hunan province collected by Lu Yiping, an author. He spent five years tracing the survivors of that naive pilgrimage, simple rural girls infused with the idealism of the “new China”.

“There were 200,000 soldiers in Xinjiang and only a handful had wives. So from 1949 to 1954 the military authorities, hushing up their real motive, recruited 40,000 women from all over China,” he said.

“They were told that they would go to Russian-language schools, work in factories or drive tractors on farms. Marriage was never mentioned,” said Lu in an interview published on the Baidu.com website.

The first shock for the Hunan girls came after a long journey to the west by lorry. They received a military lecture which was not about Soviet studies or engineering but “revolutionary marriage”.

Then they were sent to barracks scattered across the region. One group of 20 girls, who found themselves with a regiment of 1,000 men, hastily married the 20 most senior officers within days of their arrival.

Xiao Yequn, who was 15 at the time, refused to marry a 26-year-old political commissar named Wang Fumin. “When I found out he was nine years older than me I was unwilling to be his wife,” she recalled.

“He immediately took out his pistol and put a bullet in the chamber. I dared not resist and the next year we got married.”

Xiao’s story is among several published by the state media this year as the nation prepares to celebrate 60 years since “liberation” on October 1, 1949.

“We were greeted by the military commander, Wang Zhen, who told us, ‘Comrades, you must prepare to bury your bones in Xinjiang’,” remembered Dai Qingyuan.

“Before he finished, all the girls broke down weeping because we realised we would never be able to go home.”

Dai married a veteran “hero” eight years older than herself. “Most of the girls were so depressed because there was no love in their marriages, only obedience. At home we obeyed our parents. In the army we obeyed the party,” she said.

“Nobody dared do otherwise because our job was to increase the population for the army corps.”

The army corps evolved into big military and business conglomerates called bingtuan which built the economy of Xinjiang and remain its most powerful interest groups. And the fertility of the army wives helped to change the population balance in Xinjiang so that Chinese now outnumber the Muslims.

“The prettier you were, the worse your plight because you would be picked by the older, senior officers,” said Jiang Lihua.

Among the soldiers, however, the arrival of women came like the discovery of an oasis in the desert.

“I knew a battalion commander called Zhao who went mad because he couldn’t find a wife and roamed around waving a gun,” recalled a political officer in an interview with Chinanews, an official agency. “His superior officer locked him up in a room where he committed suicide.”

A colonel named Hu forced a girl into marriage and within days she also killed herself, the political officer said.

One woman, who was due to marry a widowed officer 20 years her senior with three children, went mad on the eve of her wedding.

The number of female suicides is unknown. According to Lu, girls who refused to wed were victimised in political campaigns. A few held out to marry for love, finding the handsome younger soldiers of their dreams.

It remains to be seen how Chinese censors will allow the film to treat its subject, given the unrest in Xinjiang and the emergence of these accounts.

At present the script indicates that it will tell a tale of wholesome adventure in which “girls bring vital dawn to Xinjiang and with the soldiers they write a revolutionary page of blossoming and faith”.