Chongqing beckons
After working too hard for too long, I have finally managed to get to another city in the vastness of China. This time it was off to Chongqing, another one of China’s “three furnaces”, so named because of the high temperatures during summer. Unfortunately, when I arrived in Chongqing, it was a dreary day with cold temperatures and drizzling. Regardless of the weather, I absolutely loved Chongqing.
After arriving at my hotel, I wandered around the centre of Chongqing, including a few of the back alleys filled with street vendors, before heading to what was deemed by the internet as Chongqing’s greatest ex-pat pub. I was hoping to find out some details of what to do in Chongqing and how but it turned out that Monday was not a popular night at Dee-Dee’s. Instead, I spent a pleasant few hours chatting in bad English and bad Chinese with the bar staff.
The next day started with a trip to Chongqing zoo to get a long-awaited view of a panda. They are incredibly fantastic animals, and I spent a long-time viewing their eating habits.
The afternoon was spent travelling to Dazu, an ancient site with some of the most celebrated Buddhist cave sculptures and grotto art. After a minor problem with the Chinese language (apparently, there are two places called Dazu that differ only by tones and type of tourist attraction), I was on a local bus for the three-hour drive out of the city. Thanks to Evelyn at Red Crane School of Chinese in the city for teaching me the character for “Da” or I would’ve ended up in completely the wrong location.
When I arrived, there were no more tour buses for the day but I negotiated a good fare with one of the local motorcycle taxis and headed up the hill to the entrance of Baoding Shan (the Treasured Summit Hill).
The Dazu Rock Carvings are a series of Chinese religious sculptures and carvings dating back to the 7th century AD. They depict and are influenced by Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist beliefs and provide evidence of the daily life at the time and the harmonious synthesis of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. There are 75 protected sites containing 50,000 statues with over 100,000 Chinese characters forming inscriptions and epigraphs. The main sections are Mount Beishan, and Mount Baoding (where I travelled to).
The trip was worth it as the carvings and sculptures were exquisite. The finesse needed for the carvings is hard to describe, and you can’t take pictures that express the sheer volume of carvings and statues as you wander around the path.
I returned to my hotel for a great night’s sleep in my huge (bigger than King-sized) bed with every plan to get up early in the morning. For once, I woke early but somehow still managed to fiddle around and only left the hotel at 11 am. I had decided to take a trip to the Red Rock Village, about 25 minutes drive from the CBD, and the location of the offices and living quarters of the Communist representatives to the Kuomintang. The museum is the site where Mao Zedong signed the Double Tenth Agreement for peace between the Communist Party and the rival Kuomintang on 10 October 1945.
After failing to stop the Japanese in the Battle of Wuhan, Chongqing was the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government during the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (called the War of Resistance in China), considered by many to be part of World War II. Chongqing was chosen because the Chinese thought it was too far inland for Japanese bombers to reach, but it was still bombed heavily. The conflict was primarily waged between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan and conventionally dated to the Marco Polo Bridge incident on 7 July 1937 when a dispute between Japanese and Chinese troops in Peking escalated to a full-scale invasion. However, some historians believe it started when Japanese troops invaded Manchuria on 18 September 1931. The war is often considered the beginning of World War II in Asia while some scholars consider it to be the start of World War II and others consider the European and Pacific wars to be independent, albeit concurrent wars. The war was caused by the Japanese imperialist policy, particularly after World War I, to expand its influence in order to secure access to raw materials, food and labour.
China fought Japan with aid from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States. Initially, Japan won major victories, capturing Beijing, Shanghai and the Chinese capital of Nanjing in 1937. However, by 1939, the war had reached a stalemate. After the Japanese declared war on the United States and attacked Malaya and Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States increased its flow of aid to China and managed to retake parts of West Hunan and Guangxi. Japan formally surrendered on 2 September 1945.
Following the war, relations between the Kuomingtang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deteriorated further. While both parties were aligned in the goal of beating the Japanese, they had different intentions for China. Spurred on by the United States and the Soviet Union, both parties agreed to negotiations and signed the Double Tenth Agreement for peace at what is now Red Rock Village. The treaty acknowledged the KMT as the legitimate government, while the CCP was recognised as a legitimate opposition party. However, the treaty failed by 1946 and civil war erupted. In 1949, the CCP emerged victorious and, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.
After this, I headed back into the CBD and went shopping for a few hours until it was time to board the boat for the cruise.
