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Engineer who built roads to the nation’s future
Print Edition
Songjiang-native Zhao Zukang (1900-95) is revered as the “Father of China’s Modern Roads.” He constructed roads in mountainous, poverty-stricken areas of western and central China.
Zhao was an acting mayor of Shanghai for four days before the night of the city’s liberation in 1949. He cooperated with the Communist Party of China to take over the city peacefully.
During the Anti-Japanese War (1937-1945), Zhao was appointed to construct the Sanxi Road as a supply route for food and materials for Chinese troops. The hardest part was the Lexi Road segment through the Suoyi Mountains at an altitude of 2,800 meters, traversing the Dadu River in Sichuan Province.
“Someone took a photo of my father when he was helping build the Lexi Road,” said his son Zhao Guotong. “He looked thin as a rail.”
In 1941 when the road was finally completed, Zhao and general engineer Sun Faduan were the first to drive the risky route.
“Our soldiers were fighting on the frontiers, and my father was among those working hard on their behalf from behind the lines,” his son said.
When he was studying civil engineering at Cornell University in the United States in the early 1930s, the patriotic Zhao Zukang vowed to serve his war-ridden motherland. After graduation, he declined an offer to stay in the US and returned to China.
Half century later in the 1980s, when Zhao’s youngest son Zhao Guoping was about to finish his biological chemistry doctorate in the US, the father urged him to return to China and help build the country.
“You have to come back immediately,” he wrote in one of the letters to the son.
“He was more like a father to me,” recalled a cousin named Zhao Zugang, who is almost 90 years old now.
He remembers how his cousin tutored him in his studies and revised his homework in the courtyard of their Songjiang family home.
In 1938, when Songjiang was occupied by the Japanese, Zhao Zugang had to quit school. Zhao Zukang, who was building roads in Sichuan Province at the time, helped him find a school in Chongqing and sponsored him until he graduated from university.
“Don’t worry about the tuition,” the elder Zhao said. “Just concentrate on your studies because knowledge will be a great treasure benefiting you for your whole life.”
Zhao Zukang himself loved books. He didn’t drink or smoke, and spent all his money buying books. His cousin recalled the time when Zhao Zukang was relocating from Wuhan in Hubei Province to Chongqing in the southwest.
The ship loaded with big chests of Zhao’s books sank. Heartbroken, the elder Zhao took a day’s leave from work when he reached Chongqing and held a “funeral” for his beloved books.
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