Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Another movement, a huge slow-motion upheaval, was relocating the working capacity of Free China to the west. A steady trudging toiling stream of people carried goods and equipment and themselves out of the area of the invader into the independent zone. Boats, trains, carts, pack animals and coolies, under repeated bombing, shared in the inland trek from Canton, Nanking, Hsuchow and other cities. Factory machinery, government records, university libraries, the contents of hospitals, arsenals and offices, were transported in boxes slung on shoulder poles or packed in sampans and pulled upstream by straining teams moving foot by foot over the rocks and roadless banks. In the age-old method of moving vessels up the rapids, the great-muscled coolies, hundreds to a load, bent double against the ropes, slowly hauled the burdens to the free land beyond the Yangtze gorges. A whole textile mill was packed into 380 junks of which a third sank in the rapids, were raised, repacked and started on their way again. Some factories were more than a year en route before renewing operation.