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“On May 3 (1939), the sky was clear above the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing. The weather was sweltering. Not for nothing is Chongqing known as one of ‘China’s three furnaces,’ where temperatures regularly rise to 104 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. (…) On the docks, stevedores hauled boxes on and off the ships that plied the Yangtze. Passengers descending from the boats would be mobbed by dozens of sedan-chair bearers. Chongqing is famous as a shancheng, a ‘mountain city’ – far better to be carried up the steep hills that separate the river from the upper town, if you could afford it. In the markets, traders and their clients bargained for rice, vegetables, and meat. The number of customers was greater than at any time in the city’s history. In October 1937, the Nationalist government of China had announced that it could no longer defend the existing capital at Nanjing to the east against a Japanese invasion that had begun three months earlier. Chongqing therefore became the temporary capital. Millions of refugees had fled westward, and Chongqing’s population swelled. A city of fewer than half a million inhabitants in 1937 more than doubled in size within eight years. Aside from the crowded markets, the refugees’ presence was clear from the ugly, slapdash buildings, made from mud and metal girders, that had rapidly sprung up across the local landscape. These shanties gave an already slovenly-looking city an even more unkempt air.”