In 1942, the Chefoo School buildings were commandeered by the occupying Japanese forces and students and staff of the school were removed to the Temple Hill area and confined to buildings located on Yuhuangding Road. This was the start of a period of military confinement of foreigners in China. Internment was to last for almost three years until the surrender of Japan following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But in 1941 the Japanese forces had already been in Chefoo (Yantai) City for four years. They had allowed the school to function and staff were able to obtain some basic supplies from the local area. The Pearl Harbour incident of December, 1941 created a new level of concern for safety of Westerners and by November, 1942 students and staff were moved to the Temple Hill area where they were confined for almost a full year.
Today, two of the buildings that were used in the internment remain on Yuhuangding Road. The history of this time is commemorated by a display board located in the parking lot just below the gates to the Temple Hill Park. A tour of this site was arranged as part of Yantai City Museum Official Opening of the Chefoo School History Exhibit March 28, 2018.
David Mitchell, in A Boy’s War (1988), describes their months here on Temple Hill, as follows:
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This first internment camp was a Presbyterian Mission Compound. The part I was assigned to had three good-sized foreign-style homes with about eight rooms each. Our teachers got the message in a hurry that all 175 of our group had to be divided up into these three houses…. (pp 42/43)
Everyone of us in camp had our regular chores from sweeping floors to peeling potatoes. Literally jammed in between all of this we pursued our lessons on trunks and boxes around the walls of our all-in-one classroom-living-room-dining-room-bedroom.
Getting washed at night—with 72 of us crowded in one building and with such limited water—was a problem. Each of us would wash in his own little bit of water in his personal basin then all of us would rinse in a common tub. (p 46)
On the whole our time at Temple Hill was quite tolerable. While crowded conditions and lack of heating and sanitation were hardships, to be sure, the Japanese guards were not deliberately unkind. (p 53)
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First published: 2018/04/14
Latest revision: 2018/10/10