China city plans Nehru museum, 50 years after war

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.