Fifty years on after the end of the India-China war on
November 21, 1962, a Chinese city has announced plans to open a museum
to commemorate a much-forgotten visit by Jawaharlal Nehru to China in
the autumn of 1939.
Chongqing, a municipality in
southwest China that hosted Nehru when it was the wartime capital of
Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government under the Kuomintang (KMT),
plans to mark his visit to the city by opening a museum at the site of
the old Indian Embassy residence building, which is today a protected
heritage site.
Nehru sailed up the Yangtze river and
arrived in the city as a guest of the KMT leader in August 1939,
according to city officials. An essay by scholar Lin Chengjie noted,
drawing on press reports from the time, that Nehru was “honoured as the
great leader of the Indian people” and as “an intimate friend of China”
for showing solidarity during the war with Japan. Nehru also reached out
to the Communists, who were then in their revolutionary base of Yan’an,
and received an invitation from Mao Zedong to visit. The Second World
War, however, forced Nehru to return early to India.
The
India-China war in 1962 dramatically altered Chinese perception of
Nehru, who was in subsequent years vilified by the State media — upon
Mao Zedong’s direction — as a “bourgeois Imperialist.” More recently,
however, Nehru’s role in promoting relations — even during the time of
the KMT, a period usually portrayed by the Communist Party only in
negative terms — has been given more prominent attention, as the
Chongqing initiative suggests, with the 1962 war a fading memory in
China today.
The sprawling old Indian Embassy
residence building, where Nehru stayed sits on a remote hilltop in the
Nanshan mountains. The foggy mountains were a popular site for
government and Embassy residences in the 1930s, seen as providing
shelter from Japanese air-raids. Today, the estate is the site of the
Chongqing Nanshan Botanical Gardens — a popular tourist destination
during the Cherry Blossoms season — and also houses old residences
belonging to the Spanish, French and Russian Embassies.
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