HUNAN
PROVINCE

Hunan Province has the honour of being the birthplace of more Communist revolutionaries than any other province in China. The ate Chairman Mao was born here in the village of Shaoshan 50 miles (80 kilometres) to the southwest of Changsha, the provincial capital, and the former president of China, Liu Shaochi, whom Mao had purged in 1967, was also born nearby. (See Kaifeng, p.144, for details of Liu's death.) Three of the members of the present ruling Politburo come from one county - Liuyang County, 30 miles (48 kilometres) east of Changsha - including the present Communist party chief, Hu Yaobang.

Just why Hunan should have spawned so many future Communists is something of a mystery. Chairman Mao himself put it down to the hot peppers which the Hunanese like to mix in liberally with their food. More likely, it had something to do with the political situation in litinan in the first decades of this century when the province was generally ruled by incompetent, greedy, opium-smoking warlords whose behaviour actively encouraged peasant uprisings and the quest by intellectuals for some alternative political system.

Changsha

Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, is now noted basically for two things: places where Chairman Mao studied, ate and swam as a young man, and the best-preserved 2000-year-old corpse in the world. The corpse is that of a woman who died one summer afternoon around 160 B.C., after eating a melon. She was found in 1974 in an elaborate tomb so heavily insulated with wood and cloth that oxygen and bacteria could not get in to perform their usual functions of decay, and when modern doctors performed an autopsy on her, they found that her body was in good shape for its age. A film of the operation was a box-office hit in China in 1975, an indication of how entertainment-starved the country was in the days when Mao's wife, hang Qing, was still dictating the nation's cultural fare.

what the doctors found indicated that the woman's time had definitely been up: she had heart disease, tuberculosis, gallstones, a slipped disc and worms. Inside her stomach was found a large quantity of melon seeds, and melons being a summer fruit, it was deduced that she died on a summer's day.

The body of this 2000-year-old woman now lies stretched out on a tiled slab in the CHANGSHA MUSEUM. An expression of what appears to be absolute terror sits on her face, and with specimen bottles containing her various internal organs arranged nearby, perhaps this is not surprising. (To get to the museum, turn Left out of the Xiangjiang Hotel and, at the next intersection, take a No.3 bus heading north, getting off at the third stop.) As for Mao, whose own body lies preserved in a mausoleum in the centre of Peking, Changsha contains many memories. The city was his first stop on the road from Shaoshan village to supreme power over his countrymen, and at least three buildings are maintained as



1 yunlu Palace
2 loving dusk pavilion Aiwanting)
3 orange Island Pavilion
4 Hunan No.1 Teachers' Training School (Divi Shifan)
5 Monument to Martyrs
6 Hunan provincial Museum

memorials to schools which he attended during his formative years. Visitors to the CHANG5HA NORMAL COLLEGE (Shuyuan Lu) are reverently shown a classroom and a dormitory, but in fact the whole place burned down in 1938 and was only rebuilt in the 19505, although to a similar design. Behind the school is a well where Mao used to douse himself with cold water every morning. The well would still be usable, the guide said, except that children keep throwing rubbish down it. (For the Normal School - Diyi Shifan - take a No.1 bus from the main square, heading south, and get off after it turns left.)

The best restaurant in town, the HUO GONG DIAN (fire palace altar), was built in the early part of the century and much of its now-tatty decoration is reminiscent of the 1920s. If you concentrate, it's not hard to imagine an earnest young man in a long Chinese gown sitting in the corner, poring over some book, a plate of hot Hunan food in front of him, dreaming of a Marxist revolution. The tea in this restaurant, by the way, comes in big mugs and is among the best I have tasted in China. Outside the restaurant when I visited it was a large poster commemorating the twenty-third anniversary of that historic day in 1958 when Mao had a meal there.

Changsha has a huge MAO MUSEUM, but in line with the policy to tone down the Mao cult, half of it has been turned over to an exhibition of archaeological exhibits. Further changes can be expected, although the 60-foot (18-metre) tall statue of Mao outside, one of the biggest in China, will hopefully stay put for a while.

Changhsa itself is a very Chinese city, and the narrow, rambling streets in the old part of the city with their distinctive architecture are a real joy. The hundreds of licensed hawkers plying their various trades on the streets are a welcome and colourful result of the new liberalised economic policies. For a walking tour of the city, turn right out of the Xiangjiang Hotel and walk along Zhongshan Lu, and then left along Dazhai Lu or Daqing Lu, both busy shopping streets.

The city was only opened up to foreigners for the first time in 1904, but its strategic position as the capital of Hunan quickly attracted a number of foreign consulates as well as numerous religious and education missions. Most of the property owned by Westerners in the city was destroyed during anti-foreign riots in 1910, which may account for the rather peculiar location of the former consulates - on an island in the middle of the Xiang River, which runs through Changsha. ORANGE ISLAND must have been the perfect haven for times when the natives got restless. Many of the consulates were housed in magnificently robust buildings, although the former British mission with its tall chimneys and Victorian redbrick facade looks as if it would be more at home in a Charles Dickens novel than in one of the hottest cities in China. In the old days, the representatives of His Britannic Majesty must have sweltered inside, as nowadays do representatives of the Changsha River Engineering Company. (The No. 16 bus, starting just to the east of the main square, goes to the tip of Orange Island.)

One pleasant place to visit just outside the city is the YUELU SHAN PARK on the opposite bank of the river. The large wooded reserve, dotted with temples and pavilions, makes a pleasant afternoon's walk and there's a good view of Changsha from the top. (Take a No.3 bus, heading south, to its terminus, then a No.5 bus; get off at the fourth stop and walk up the hill.)

How to get there and where to stay
Changsha is connected by air services to Peking, Canton and Shanghai, and is also on the main Peking-Canton trunk railway line, about 20 hours from the former and 13 hours from the latter. The best hotel to stay at is the Xiangjiang Hotel on Zhongshan Lu, which has double rooms for 22 yuan and dorm beds in three-bed rooms for six yuan each (take a No.1 bus from the station, and get off at the fourth stop.)

Shaoshan

Shaoshan is a tiny village 50 miles (80 kilometres) south of Changsha, which is famed as the birthplace of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung. Ten years ago, more than a million people a year used to make the pilgrimage to this Mecca of Maoism, but it has now virtually reverted to being the sleepy village in a sea of rice paddies that it was before Mao came to the world's attention.

The old Chairman is now no longer considered to be the infallible Helmsman that he once was and the whole Mao cult has been sharply cut down to size, thanks to the more sensible approach of China's present leader, Deng Xiaoping. Most of the outrageous political slogans praising Mao and his invincible Thoughts have been remsoved, and the village factory, which used to churn out millions of Mao badges to sell to visitors, now makes tea canisters and other consumer products instead.

The Mao cult may be a thing of the past, but Shaoshan will not be able to forget its famous son so quickly - the place is littered with memorials to him and his doings as a young boy. The FORMER HOME OF THE MAO FAMILY, once a shrine of mystical significance to the millions of Maoist Red Guards who tramped through it during and after the Cultural Revolution, is open to tourists now, following a period of renovation. The house is almost palatial by peasant standards, and gives the lie to the Cultural Revolution propaganda line about Mao being born into a poor peasant family, an attempt to establish his proletarian credentials.

Nearby is the MAO EXHIBITION HALL filled with Mao memorabilia. Each room in the exhibition deals with a different period in his life, but the last room, dealing with the years after the Communist victory in 1949 when he made most of his serious mistakes, has been closed for several years for 'readjustment', and looks likely to stay that way for a while yet. The exhibition used to have two complete sets of rooms with identical exhibits to handle the massive flow of visitors, but now one set has been closed.

The man credited with making Shaoshan such a revered, almost holy spot, is Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party in 1976, only to be toppled from the post by Deng Xiaoping in 1981 after a long political battle. Hua was Party boss of the Shaoshan area in the early 1960s, and obviously did all he could to ingratiate himself with Mao. But in the end, his efforts worked to undo him. His close association with the discredited Mao cult proved to be a powerful weapon which his enemies did not hesitate to use against him. Shaoshan is best seen as a day-trip from Changsha. There is a daily train which pulls in at a huge, almost-deserted station built in 1968 to handle the hoards of Red Guard pilgrims.

However, for those wanting to stay the night, there is the Shaoshan Guesthouse, in which Mao and the then-President Liu Shaoqi stayed during a visit in the early 1960s. Visitors can ask to sleep in Mao's or in Liu's bed, and can marvel at the huge bathrooms these men had at their disposal. I, for one, can proudly claim that I Have Slept on Mao's Bed.