GoKawiilIn 2018, former journalist Yang Xiao walked 1,000 miles from Changsha to Kunming. He was following a trek taken by hundreds students and a few adventurous faculty of three elite Chinese universities in 1938. In the face of the Japanese invasion, they united into one school (Lianda, 臨大, a shorthand for Provisional University) and moved their campus deep into the mountains of southern China.
They climbed mountains, crossed rivers, and sometimes slept side by side with coffins－even spending the night in a supposedly haunted house. They woke up at dawn and slept late, sometimes seeing off the threat of bandits in between. They sang, danced and played cards. One student, Liu Zhaoji, collected more than 2,000 folk songs along the way, and another, named Zha Liangzheng, would tear the page out of an English dictionary after he had memorized its content.
When I first read about the journey, my only reference point was Mao's Long March a few years later. I wondered if that could be the inspiration? Instead, the common thread appears to be advances in technology and roads. Mass movements could now hire a few trucks to carry supplies and injured marchers, and buses over a few steep and snowy stretches, but there were not yet enough vehicles or reliable roads to carry hundreds of travelers continuously from start to finish.
Another wartime march took middle school students ~260 miles from Xi'an to Tianshui.
Just a few years later, the Japanese army's use of bicycle infantry in Malaya would be seen as cutting-edge.
In some ways the student march was seen as a patriotic action, and a way for urban, Han Chinese students to engage with rural communities over ~70 days. In a section maybe foreshadowing the Cultural Revolution, professors at both ends of the political spectrum believed that the students should do some national service in the countryside.
Young women at the schools and most faculty took a more conventional route, but found themselves traveling alongside other refugees through multiple ship and rail links (through Hong Kong or Hanoi). This was fraught with its own difficulties, and the route would be cut by the Japanese in 1941-42.
While Chiang Kai-Shek's government moved to Chongqing, and Mao's army was in Yan'an, the combined university would try to hold on through the bombs of one war and the upcoming rumblings of the next.
Why I was reading about Lianda
After reading about W. E. B. Du Bois's visit to Shanghai in Arise Africa, Roar China, I wondered if pre-war Shanghai had a place as a lost ideal cosmopolitan center, like 'Paris in the 20s'. The Wikipedia article on "History of Shanghai" says as much: "The Paris of the East, the New York of the West". The phrase originated with the travel guide, All About Shanghai and Environs. Same vibes as how people like to talk about Shenzhen today:
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