The Department of Drama at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts was made up of staff from several theatrical groups and associations from Shanghai and Beijing. The salary was 1.2 Yuan a month for each member. Zhang Geng enjoyed a monthly allowance of 5 Yuan, equivalent to that of the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Route Army. Food and accommodation were supplied. In the first two years, the Academy produced and performed more than 50 plays and operas.

After 1941, foreign plays came into vogue in the Anti-Japanese Base Areas. On October the 10th that year, the Amateur Theater of the Yan’an Culture Club staged the famous play The Trojan Horse by German dramatist Friedrich Wolf. The play was about resisting Hitler and fascism. Other famous plays that were staged included Thunderstorm and Sunrise by Cao Yu, Under Shanghai Eaves by Xia Yan and The Death of Li Xiucheng by Yang Hansheng.

In June 1941, Chongqing, the temporary capital of the KMT Government, suffered weeks of bombing by the Japanese air force. On June the 5th, the bombing lasted several hours, causing the June 5th Tunnel Disaster.

More than 2,500 people died in the incident, creating terror across Chongqing.

A few months later, Chongqing was shrouded in fog. The annual Fog Season Drama Festival began. It was designed to drum up support for the war of resistance.

On October the 24th, 1941, a month after his 31st birthday, Cao Yu appeared at the new Chongqing Theater of Resistance and Construction. The building, constructed on the orders of Guo Moruo, was designed to stage plays to generate support for the War effort. On that day, Cao Yu’s three-act play Peking Man was premiered by the Central Youth Theater.

A year earlier, when he was teaching at the National Drama School in Jiang’an, Sichuan, Cao Yu had fallen in love with the sister of one of his students, a girl named Fang Rui. That was only three years after his marriage. When his wife Zheng Xiu heard about it, she left him and went back to her mother’s home in a fury. However, the incident inspired Cao Yu to begin writing his play Peking Man. Fang Rui was the prototype of the character Su Fang. Cao Yu said:

When Peking Man premiered at the Chongqing Theater of Resistance and Construction, Fang Rui was in the audience. The play was directed by Zhang Junxiang, and Zhang Ruifang played Su Fang.

For the premiere of Peking Man, the theatre was packed. After watching the play, Zhou Enlai described it as “excellent” and returned to see it another 6 times. From October 1941 to the end of the War, the Fog Season Drama Festival was held in Chongqing on 4 occasions, with 128 plays staged all together.

At the same time as the Fog Season Drama Festival was about to begin in 1941, on October the 12th the Association of Theatrical Artists in Hong Kong, founded by Jin Shan, Wang Ying, Xia Yan and Situ Huimin, was staging the anti-fascist play Professor Mamlock. Written by German playwright Friedrich Wolf, it was directed by Zhang Min. Jin Shan played the role of Professor Mamlock. The production was sponsored by the Alliance for the Protection of China, whose president was Soong Ching Ling.

Soon after Professor Mamlock ended its run, a Polish émigré named Israel Epstein visited Xia Yan in the morning of December the 8th 1941, and told him that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Epstein had been living in China since he was a boy.

Within hours, the Japanese were attacking Hong Kong. After 18 days, they had taken over the territory, which the British had ruled for nearly a century.

On the evening of December the 25th, Mark Young, Governor of Hong Kong, surrendered to the General Staff of the Japanese Army, at Hong Kong’s Peninsular Hotel. The next day, the Japanese ordered the Hong Kong dollar to be withdrawn from circulation.

On New Year’s Day 1942, at around 4 am, 21 people made their escape from Hong Kong. They included Xia Yan, Cai Chusheng, Situ Huimin and Jin Shan. They waited at the dock until 11 am, when they managed to rent a small fishing boat and, crowding onto it, left Hong Kong.

Ten days later, they arrived in Guilin. Tian Han and Hong Shen, who happened to be in the city, went to meet them at the station. On the platform, Hong Shen’s embrace was so enthusiastic that it broke Xia Yan’s pen in his breast pocket. Xia Yan cried out, because the broken pen was painful. Two days later, he was diagnosed with a damaged rib muscle. A week later, Ouyang Yuqian hosted a welcome dinner at a Sichuan restaurant in Guilin. During their stay there, Xia Yan, Tian Han and Hong Shen together wrote a play, Goodbye, Hong Kong.

Before the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, Guo Moruo celebrated his 50th birthday in Chongqing. Celebrations for his 50th birthday, which coincided with the 25th anniversary of him starting to write, were held in cities such as Chongqing, Yan’an, Guilin and Hong Kong. Chongqing’s Xinhua Daily published an article by Zhou Enlai, under the headline: I Have Something to Say. In it, he compared Guo Moruo to Lu Xun. Around this time, Guo Moruo’s play Tangli Zhi Hua was being performed in Chongqing. Soon afterwards, Guo Moruo finished his most famous historical play, Qu Yuan.