Friday 10 October 2008

Chongqing II



This is out of order, but I want to fill in our second day in Chongqing. This was just as fascinating as the first, but the weather was atrocious - sheets of rain, and low cloud. At least it gave us a sense of the drab and humid climate which is more typical than the previous day's blue sky.

We began the morning at the Chongqing City Museum, which also houses the new Three Gorges Museum in a splendid modern building. Ying and the British Council had arranged for us to view a collection of wartime photos taken by Michael Sullivan, then a volunteer International Red Cross truck driver in west China. He married a young woman he met in Chongqing and is now, at 92, a distinguished art historian and emeritus professor in Oxford - where we'd had the great pleasure of meeting him a couple of weeks previously. He'd shown us some of his photos then, but the Museum has a much larger collection in the archives, though it hasn't yet been properly catalogued. We spent a tantalizing hour poring over them - unique scenes of bombs raining down all across the city, of the victims and the firefighters, as well as of the rural areas. We also took a look around the public displays on Chongqing in the war years - very good, but no English signage. There's a tunnel which you walk through that represents the caves used as bomb shelters - with gruesome carvings of people trying to escape from a collapsed tunnel in a tragedy which killed thousands.

Next we drove along Zhongshan Si Lu, the leafy street where the historic headquarters of the KMT as well as the residences of their Communist party liaisons, Zhou Enlai and (occasionally) Mao Zedong were situated. The Zhou Enlai residence was a handsome grey brick mansion, with appropriately simple furnishings and a fine view down to the Jialing. We stopped for a bowl of noodles in a local dive, and then met up with a researcher from a still-recognized wing of the KMT, Mr Lei. He had offered to spend the afternoon showing us some important wartime sites, and we began by looking down to the Yangtze at the dry season airfield, Shanhuba: I'd read a lot about this dramatically situated airport. It was on a sandbank in the middle of the river, and pilots had to navigate a tight flight path between the mountains and along the river to land. Mr Lei told us that passengers then crossed a pontoon and climbed up the cliff to the makeshift customs house.

We then drove over one of the now-numerous bridges across the Yangtze and into the South Mountains to visit Chiang Kai-shek's wartime estate, Huangshan. The weather was against us, absolutely pouring with rain, but we could still appreciate the magical mountain setting of the Chiangs' villas - one each for Madame and the Generalissimo. It was at Madame's villa that my parents first met, both guests at a tea party she gave for a visiting British parliamentarian, Irene Ward on Halloween Day 1943. It is east to imagine the guests congregating around the fireplace in Mme's elegant sitting room, still furnished with 1940s sofas and armchairs. Last time we visited, the issues of TIME magazine which featured Mme Chiang on the cover were hanging on the walls - rather to our disappointment, these had been put into storage! But on the plus side, the villas have been redecorated and attract about 30,000 visitors a year.

On our way back to the city we stopped for a (very pricey) coffee at a bar known as the Champs Elysees - this is in a restored French marine barracks on the South Bank, probably the best example of reviving a historic site in Chongqing. All along the South Bank there are remnants of the mansions and warehouses which the first European settlers built after the trader Archibald Little opened the way for Chongqing to become a treaty port around 1890. This was the district where my mother lived in a hostel for Embassy staff, taking a sampan or a ferry each day to cross the turbulent Yangtze to the Embassy on the other side.

We finished the evening as guests of our guide Sun Ying, enjoying a memorable Chongqing hotpot near her home - perfect for warming us up after a soggy day.

No comments: