English Wikipedia, drawing on John Stroud’s Airports of the World, dates Jianqiao to 1922. In that year Lu Yongxiang, the warlord who then held Zhejiang, and the pilot Zhu Binhou turned the site into an airfield and flight training institute equipped with French Breguet 14 biplanes. It was one of several provincial air arms of the warlord era, each small and short-lived.

The Mukden Incident of September 1931, which opened Japan’s seizure of Manchuria, changed the field’s purpose. The Nationalist government consolidated Jianqiao as an air force base, and the same year the aviation corps of the Central Army Academy moved in from Nanjing, where it had been set up in 1928. As the Central Aviation School it became the main training establishment of the Nationalist air force in the years before the war with Japan.

That school did not end with the Nationalists’ defeat on the mainland. After the fighting of 1937 it moved to Kunming’s Wujiaba airfield, and after 1949 it was re-established at Gangshan in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where it is today the Republic of China Air Force Academy. Its graduates include the Second World War aces Gao Youxin and Yue Yiqin and the former premier Tang Fei. The airfield and the school’s lineage now sit on opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Full-scale war between China and Japan broke out around Shanghai in August 1937. On 14 August, according to English Wikipedia’s account of the Republic of China Air Force, Curtiss Hawk III fighters of the 4th Pursuit Group under Colonel Kao Chih-hang (Gao Zhihang) intercepted Japanese Mitsubishi G3M bombers over Jianqiao, in what Wikipedia calls the first major air engagement of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

The results are a matter of claims. Wikipedia’s Battle of Shanghai article says the 4th Group shot down six Japanese aircraft without loss; Japanese loss figures for the raid were not found in a source reachable for this page, so the claim is given as a Chinese one only. The same day the Nationalist air force also bombed the Japanese flagship Izumo in the Huangpu river.

The Republic of China Air Force, now in Taiwan, calls 14 August Air Force Memorial Day. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force dates its own founding to 11 November 1949 and does not use the date, but the battle is part of the history of the airfield it now occupies.

After 1949 Jianqiao stayed in military hands, but in 1956 it was converted to a public airport and airline flights began on 1 January 1957. It served both roles for more than four decades, a common arrangement in China, where many civil airports sit on air force fields.

The field was expanded in 1971 ahead of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, which ran from 21 to 28 February 1972 and took him to Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai. In 1990 the runway was lengthened and widened to 3,200 by 50 metres. By 1999 Jianqiao was handling about 2.17 million passengers a year, more than a shared military field could comfortably take.

On 29 December 2000 all commercial flights moved to the newly built Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, and Jianqiao returned to purely military use. Zhejiang Airlines, which had its headquarters at the field, went with them.

Jianqiao is an active People’s Liberation Army Air Force base in the Eastern Theatre Command area, the command that faces Taiwan and the East China Sea. China does not publish which units are based where. English Wikipedia’s list of PLAAF air bases names a fighter brigade here, but that assignment could not be checked against the US Department of Defense’s China Military Power Report or CASI, so it is not repeated as fact on this page. No aircraft count for the base has been published by either.