The enduring symbol of the Tiananmen Square protests for Chinese democracy, whose bloodiest stretch began 30 years ago Tuesday, remains the photo of a lone man defiantly blocking a column of tanks.

But a recently unearthed shot illustrates the grim reality of the months-long protests, which left hundreds — or, depending on the source, thousands — of people dead.

In the image, bodies lay strewn across several lanes of blacktop, side by side with mangled wrecks of bicycles. Twisted metal and flesh are indistinguishable.

The photograph is undated and no exact location is listed, but it appears to have been taken along the same stretch of Chang’an Avenue as the iconic “Tank Man” picture, on the northwest edge of the Beijing square. A burned-out vehicle is visible in the background of each shot.

The pictures represent the violent culmination of what began in April 1989 as a series of peaceful, student-led demonstrations against widening economic inequity. They ended amid a clampdown by the Communist government on free speech and an open press.

As the protests wound on and spread to cities across China, some turned to hunger strikes. The government then turned to more extreme measures. Martial law was enacted, and hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army troops were mobilized in Beijing.

In the early hours of June 4, 1989, they advanced with assault rifles and tanks on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, leaving an untold number dead.

“The moment the government ordered its army to fire on its own people, it lost is legitimacy,” said Rowena Xiaoqing He, a former protester who designed a Harvard course on the incident. “It is indeed impossible to understand today’s China without understanding the spring of 1989.”

Thirty years on, China’s economy has caught up with the West’s.

But politically, the nation remains as repressive as ever. Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are interned in camps without charge, and strict government restrictions are in place on social media and art.

“The June 4 incident changed the direction of Chinese history,” said Zhang Lifan, who was a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences at the time of the protest. “The narrative that China would grow strong and normal, become a stable country through a process of political reform, was destroyed.”

With Wires