Stilwell Museum

The Stilwell Museum occupies the former wartime residence of US Army General Joseph Stilwell on Jialingxin Road in Yuzhong District, Chongqing, the city that served as China's provisional wartime capital from 1937 to 1946 after the fall of Nanjing. Stilwell commanded Allied forces in the China-Burma-India theater and served as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek between 1942 and 1944, coordinating Lend-Lease aid, the Burma Road supply route, and the American Volunteer Group known as the Flying Tigers from this compound. The two-story wooden villa, built in the 1930s in a plain Republican-era residential style, preserves Stilwell's study, bedroom, and reception rooms largely as they were used during the war, alongside a separate exhibition building added later that displays wartime photographs, military maps of the Burma and China theaters, Stilwell's personal effects, and Flying Tigers memorabilia including uniforms and squadron insignia. The museum's curatorial approach is broadly chronological, tracing the Sino-American wartime alliance from the 1941 Lend-Lease agreements through the reopening of the Burma Road in 1945, with a secondary thematic section on the Flying Tigers' air operations over Chongqing and the Hump airlift. The residence and grounds were restored and converted into a museum in 1991 as one of the first Sino-American joint heritage projects in the city, and the site has since undergone periodic conservation of its wooden structure, which is vulnerable to Chongqing's humid subtropical climate; the museum closes for two months each winter for maintenance. The compound remains one of the few intact wartime foreign-military residences left in the city.