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China's international wartime capital
Chongqing is a major metropolis with some 30 million inhabitants in China's fast-developing west. As one of China's five national central cities and four direct-controlled municipalities, the only one situated inland, this sprawling megalopolis on the upper reaches of the Yangtze has since 1997 enjoyed the same privileged status as its well-known counterparts on the eastern seaboard including Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. With its economy continually topping national growth charts in recent years, this inland boomtown--dubbed the fastest-growing city on the planet--is set to become western China's leading international hub and a major node along Beijing's envisaged 'Silk Road Economic Belt'.
With gleaming towers of glass and steel today defining the central peninsula's ultra-modern skyline, it is difficult to picture the city's primitive appearance in late 1937 when China's Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek designated this remote treaty port as China's temporary government seat. Known then as one of the country's poorest and dirtiest cities, 'Chungking'--as the city was called according to the Postal Map Romanization system--features in historical first-hand accounts as a gloomy collection of dilapidated grey buildings and shacks, crumbled walls, broken streets, and open sewers, hardly worthy of being called a city, and much less a national capital. The intense chaos, poverty, and filth in the overcrowded streets appalled all newcomers to town. Upon arrival 'at the end of the line' in China's last upriver treaty port, 'downriver' folks--Chinese refugees from central and eastern regions--and foreign visitors alike were invariably shocked by the city's dreadful appearance, which contrasted so strikingly with China's modern coastal cities then under Japanese occupation. A local manager of an American oil company, who moved from Qingdao to Chongqing in March 1938, gave the following description of China's wartime capital in his diary:
Conditions of life in this city, which is practically bulging with humanity, are wretched for the most part. From the pleasant distance of my porch across the river, the whole hill on which Chungking rests looks like one large festering sore. . . . I feel I cannot take a deep breath until I am in the [ferry] launch and out in the middle of the river.
I am fairly used to China smells by now, but these in Chungking get me...