Xiaolongkan: the stair street on the ridge

Xiaolongkan covers 0.97 square kilometres in the east of Shapingba District and holds 29,433 registered residents across four neighbourhoods, the first of them Longquan Road. The description of its streets in the administrative record is plain: the roads are narrow, the lanes twist, and housing, schools and offices stand along them so closely that the district congests badly at commuting hours. That is the physical fact of a hill town written into an official document. The subdistrict also holds the First Experimental Primary School of Shapingba, Shuren Primary School and Chongqing No. 8 Middle School, and metro Line 1 stops here.

The reason Xiaolongkan matters to the wartime story is its height rather than its size. Pingdingshan Park at its eastern edge is the highest point of central Shapingba. The Chengdu–Chongqing express railway crosses the northern part of the district, and the Shapingba station inside it is an important station on that line, so the ground is crossed twice over: once by the old road and once by the railway. In the war years Shapingba was where the inland schools settled, and the area was grouped with the campuses at Beibei, Chengdu and Hanzhong as the four cultural strongholds of the rear.