More visitors for museum telling the story of China’s role in WWII
Print Edition
THE former World War II headquarters of Allied Forces in China are receiving more visitors as the nation marks the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the war against Japanese aggression.
Numbers rose from 290,000 in 2015 to 320,000 last year, said Liu Wanhong, curator of the Chongqing Anti-Japanese War Heritage Museum. The first five months of this year have seen 140,000 visitors.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the China Theater Command of Allied Forces and named Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek supreme commander and General Joseph Stilwell chief of staff.
Japan began its full-scale invasion of China on July 7, 1937. The ruling Kuomintang government led by Chiang evacuated to the southwest city of Chongqing at the end of that year after its capital Nanjing was seized by the Japanese. Chongqing became China’s temporary capital.
Chiang set up the headquarters on Huangshan mountain in the suburbs of the city, where he and representatives from the United States and the United Kingdom held hundreds of meetings to direct the war.
“China is a major battlefield of World War II,” said 84-year-old visitor Xie Yingwei. “We sacrificed a lot of people and will forever remember the war and the dead, to achieve a lasting peace.”
Liu said visitors to Huangshan have included delegations from US Congress and former Flying Tiger pilots as well as Kuomintang officials from Taiwan.
The Chinese government has renovated the 190,000 square meter site, which comprises dozens of buildings and shelters.
Its main building is a three-story brick villa where Chiang met envoys from the US and the UK. A hall, restored to its original state, is where Far East military meetings were convened and where Chiang and Allied generals made important decisions, such as establishing the Flying Tigers, sending joint troops to Myanmar, and creating the famous “hump” air route across the Himalayas to bring supplies to China.
Between 1938 and 1944, over 9,000 Japanese planes bombed Chongqing, killing and wounding more than 20,000 people. Chiang narrowly escaped a 1941 attack targeting his Huangshan office, while his two bodyguards were killed.
A building named “Green Lotus,” which accommodated a US military delegation, is also well preserved. Americans living there included Joseph Stilwell, David G. Barr and John Leighton Stuart.
Photos of communist leaders such as Mao Zedong meeting American visitors in Yan’an are on display.
Visitors can watch a documentary about Song May-ling, Chiang’s wife and a graduate of Wellesley College, who spoke at the US Congress in 1943 calling for joint efforts to defeat the Japanese. She was the first Chinese speaker on Capitol Hill.
Chiang and Song’s dining table and bed are preserved, as well as rare photos showing their family life.
More than 35 million Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed and wounded during the war. President Roosevelt’s words are inscribed on an exhibition board and describe the significance of Chinese efforts during the war.
It reads: “If there were no Chinese, if China had been destroyed, you think about it, how many divisions of Japanese soldiers for combat could have thus been redeployed?”
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