Air-raid shelters, a missing part of local WWII heritage systems in Chongqing, China

Abstract

During World War II, Chongqing was the temporary capital of China, and as a result, it suffered from frequent Japanese air attacks. This bombing was a historically significant case of strategic bombing, being one of the earliest, and happened around the same time as the equally historic bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Therefore, this is why air-raid shelters are a significant and necessary cultural component of the WWII heritage sites in Chongqing. However, even though there are a large number of surviving WWII heritage sites in Chongqing, only one air-raid shelter has been conserved and is open to the public. In the future conservation plan, no air-raid shelters are included. Therefore, the future of and current condition of the air-raid shelters is at risk. The neglect of the air-raid shelters as heritage is reflected in the lack of accurate count of the number of air-raid shelters in Chongqing due to national security issues. Local people from different communities have reported that some air raid shelters are abandoned or used as rubbish dump, and some of them have been directly transformed into different types of modern infrastructure, such as tunnels. The most interesting and famous shelters may be those which have been adaptively reused as restaurants today. Today, the air-raid shelters in Chongqing cannot be defined as well-conserved or well-interpreted. The air raid shelters should be better integrated into the WWII heritage interpretation systems, such as the cultural routes, and be interpreted to deliver not only the collective memory of the whole nation in macro level, but also the life and feelings of people who experienced the tragedies at a micro level. This research will focus on challenges and their solutions to integrate air-raid shelters into the local heritage system. The research scope will include: to capture unique cultural significance of air-raid shelters; to find the potential of air-raid shelter conservation; to identify difficulties faced by previous conservation teams; and finally provide a recommendation (improvement on adaptive reuse or interpretation or both) to conserve the air-raid shelters.