Theater recalls wartime Chongqing

EDINBURGH — For people living in Chongqing, Southwest China, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, fog was more than weather. It could mean precious hours of cover from bombers overhead.

Thick fog made it harder for Japanese pilots to see the ground, giving residents some respite from repeated air raids.

A Chinese-language solo play staged recently at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which runs through Aug 31, offers audiences a glimpse into what life under such circumstances might have been like.

In The Red Lantern, Fan Shaolun performs alone, shifting between narration and multiple characters. Through voice, movement and sound, he re-creates wartime Chongqing through the eyes of a boy named Guang, whose unusually sensitive hearing allows him to detect danger before others do.

Beginning in 1938, Japanese warplanes bombed Chongqing, then China's provisional capital, killing and injuring more than 32,000 people. On June 5, 1941, about 2,500 people suffocated to death while seeking shelter in a tunnel during an air raid.

The play was created by Fan and Liang Yumin, who studied theater in Beijing before pursuing postgraduate studies in Britain. The idea grew from conversations about Chongqing's wartime experience and the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).

For Liang, the history was personal. A native of Chongqing, she recalls hearing air-raid sirens every June 5 from primary school onward, when the city commemorated those killed in the wartime bombings.

She had learned about the history at school, but revisiting it for the play raised new questions.

"When you really look at the history from the perspective of the people who lived through it, you begin to see how they lived and how they managed to get through those years," Liang says.

In May 2026, Fan and Liang traveled to Chongqing for field research, visiting museums, the June 5 tunnel massacre site, and the stage production Chongqing 1949.

One detail stood out: the fog. They found that during periods of particularly heavy fog, air raids could become less frequent. What Liang had regarded since childhood as an ordinary feature of her hometown suddenly took on a different meaning.

"For people at that time, fog was connected with survival," she says.

Fan and Liang chose to tell the story through a child's perspective.

"We didn't want to put the transformation of an entire city directly onto the stage," Fan says. "We wanted to follow the changes in one child and, through him, show something of the state of mind of the whole city."

One image from their research stayed with them. After an air raid, four Chinese characters were written on a surviving wall amid the ruins: "Yu zha yu qiang" — "The more you bomb, the stronger we are." A replica of the slogan is now displayed at a museum commemorating the June 5 bombing.

The play's Edinburgh run also coincided with an important date in the history it depicts. This year's Aug 15 marked the 81st anniversary of Japan's announcement of its unconditional surrender in World War II.

Dong Ning, chairwoman of the Beijing Performance and Arts Group, says the production offers an accessible entry point to a difficult chapter of history.

XINHUA