Life in Chongqing, unlikely wartime capital of China, captured in photographic ode to the city
- Featuring photos taken by war correspondent Melville Jacoby, a new book published by Hong Kong’s Blacksmith Books depicts life in China’s inland capital city
This is an extract from A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War
Chungking – as English speakers referred to Chongqing in the early 20th century – was an unlikely capital. Deep inside China, in Szechuan (Sichuan) province, the city became the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s government on November 20, 1937, when Chiang officially transferred China’s government from its previous long-time capital, Nanking (Nanjing).
In a mobilisation unlike any before, China’s leadership moved its entire government and industrial base more than 1,600km (1,000 miles) up the Yangtze (Changjiang) into Szechuan’s mountainous surroundings.
The move was a massive undertaking that involved relocating the entire Chinese economy and wartime manufacturing by carefully dismantling factories, loading them piece by piece onto trains and barges, and transporting them up the Yangtze to be rebuilt in and around Chungking, all amid the constant threat of airborne attacks.
A city unlike any other in China, let alone the world, Chungking was built at the confluence of the Chialing (Jialing) and Yangtze rivers, climbing waterfront cliffs and sprawling over hillsides.
