South of the Yangtze

by Bill Porter

  We asked Mister T’ang if he painted. He did, and he waxed poetical about it. “Painting,” he said, “is like singing a song. It’s like dancing. Once I start painting, I don’t stop, not even for tea.” We asked if we could see some of his work, and for the next hour he showed us everything he had painted for the past two years. He was no Ch’i Pai-shih, but who is? He painted with a freedom that was refreshing, mostly landscapes. He said he traveled all around China sketching. And when he got home, he painted what he had sketched.

  T’ang Ch’ing-hai painting

  Before we said good-bye, Steve asked if he could buy one of his paintings, and Mister T’ang sold him one for 50RMB, or ten bucks. It was more of a gift than a purchase. It was a painting of a poet drinking at a place South of the Yangtze, a place we planned to visit. When we finally said good-bye, Mister T’ang asked where we were going next. We said we were going to Shaoshan. He said before we did we should visit Hsiangtan’s old guildhall. Since the day was young, and we weren’t in a hurry, we decided to follow his suggestion—and his directions, to the east edge of town.

  Locals referred to the guildhall as Lord Kuan’s Shrine because it included a shrine to Kuan-kung, the God of War. When he was alive, which was 1,800 years ago, Kuan-kung was noted for his military prowess but also for keeping his word. This last virtue endeared him to merchants, and they often built shrines to him as part of their guildhalls. This hall, though, wasn’t built by the merchants of Hsiangtan but by merchants from Shansi province in North China. They hauled millet and corn to Hsiangtan and traded it for cotton and medicinal herbs, and they needed a place to conduct business negotiations as well as a place to stay. That was the function of a guildhall in China. Unfortunately, when we finally found it—which wasn’t easy—it turned out to be closed.

  It was already nine o’clock, so we weren’t too early. Thinking there might be another entrance, we walked around the surrounding wall. No luck. We walked back to the entrance and knocked. We thought maybe someone was inside. An old man who saw us knocking said the man with the key died the day before. It wasn’t our lucky day, nor the man with the key’s. As we started to walk away, suddenly another man appeared, and he was holding a set of keys. Apparently, he was the new caretaker. He must have had thirty of them on a big iron ring, and being new at his job, he tried twenty-nine before the lock finally clicked and the door swung open.

  The courtyard we entered was surrounded by the loveliest of gardens. It was an elegant and quiet setting, and it would have been the perfect place for people with money to conduct negotiations with other people with money. The hall also included a huge, wonderfully wrought statue of Kuan-kung and several of the most impressive stone pillars we had seen anywhere. The old man who showed us around said the hall was first built in the Ch’ing dynasty but it was about to be renovated. He said as soon as everything was finished, the hall’s ten original Ch’i Pai-shih paintings would be prominently displayed inside. We had to smile. The Ch’i Pai-shih Memorial Hall didn’t have a single original by Hsiangtan’s most famous artist, but the guildhall had ten. I guess only merchants could afford them.

  Farmhouse where Mao Tse-tung grew up

  We thanked our guide for this unexpected addition to our day, and he helped us flag down a taxi that took us back to our hotel. Once we collected our bags, we proceeded to the main bus station. Our next destination was thirty kilometers west of Hsiangtan and was the hometown of an even more illustrious son of Hunan. Ten minutes after reaching the station, we were on a bus bound for Shaoshan.

  Shaoshan was where Mao Tse-tung was born, in 1893 on the day after Christmas. Mao later left this brief account of his childhood:

  My family owned two and a half acres of good land, which my father had managed to buy back through small-scale trading after losing it due to debts. I began doing farm chores when I was six. We didn’t eat much, but we always had enough. I started going to school when I was eight, and when I wasn’t attending school I helped with the farm work. At school I read the Confucian classics, but I hated them. What I enjoyed were the historical romances, especially the stories about rebellions.

  Although Mao grew up on the family farm, he had no desire to be a farmer. He saw himself in the role of a knight-errant, and when he was seventeen he left home. He didn’t return home for ten years. And when he did, he didn’t come back to farm. He came back to organize the local farmers and convinced his two younger brothers and his cousin to join him. Then they all went to take part in the revolution.

  An hour after we left Hsiangtan, the bus dropped us off in a large public square a few kilometers west of the original village of Shaoshan. The square was in “New” Shaoshan. On one side was a guesthouse where visitors could spend the night. But we weren’t planning on staying that long and walked over to the other side of the square, where there was a memorial hall and a clan hall. Sixty percent of the people living in the Shaoshan area belonged to the Mao clan, and they used the clan hall for funerals and other communal functions. The hall was also where Mao met with local farmers when he came back to win them over to the revolutionary cause.

  The memorial hall next to it was built later to honor Mao. It was pretty much a waste of time. It was poorly lit and consisted mostly of documents. Some of the photos, though, were interesting, and there was an old black sedan used by Mao that was rusting along one of the corridors. We walked back to the other side of the square to where buses departed for Mao’s home every fifteen minutes.

  While we waited, we couldn’t help noticing the mountain peak that overlooked the square to the southwest. It was called Shaofeng and was named after China’s most famous ancient music, which was composed there 4,500 years ago during a visit by Emperor Shun. In Chinese, the word shao means “exuberant,” and that was what the emperor called the music one of his officials had composed—hence the name of the peak and the town. Two thousand years later, when Confucius visited the capital of the state of Ch’i in North China, Confucius heard this music for the first time. So overwhelming was its effect on him, he didn’t notice what he was eating for the next three months.

  We opted to let the mountain and its music be and climbed, instead, aboard the next bus to where Mao listened to frogs and crickets and tried not to think about farming. Five minutes later, we were there. From the parking lot, we walked down a dirt road to the farmhouse where Mao grew up. The original house was destroyed by the KMT in 1929, but it had been restored to its original condition with its mud-brick walls, its dirt floor, and its thatched roof. Mao’s bedroom was at the front of the building and looked out over a large pond full of lotuses left over from summer. It was a pleasant place. And it was quiet. The surrounding area was still farmland. But there wasn’t much else to see, and we returned to New Shaoshan on the next bus.

  Mao was certainly one of the great heroes of Chinese history. Few men accomplished as much or benefited so many. But he was also one of his country’s greatest villains, and few men destroyed as much or hurt so many. I’m sure it will take a long time before the Chinese resolve their feelings about these two aspects of his legacy. Sometimes heroes live a bit too long.

  Speaking of heroes, it turns out that he wasn’t the only one from this area. Among his fellow revolutionaries from the same county were P’eng Te-huai (1898–1974) and Liu Shao-ch’i (1898–1969). P’eng Te-huai’s hometown was thirty kilometers to the south, and Liu Shao-ch’i’s was half that to the north. I suppose we could have visited the former homes of all three men in a single day, but local transportation in that area was limited and infrequent, and there weren’t any taxis. So we had to choose: P’eng Te-huai or Liu Shao-ch’i.

  A few years earlier, I read P’eng’s autobiography Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal. He was the sort of man I would have liked to meet, and I asked the bus driver who plied the route between Shaoshan and Mao’s home if there were any buses to P’eng’s village of Wushihchen. P’eng was serving as China’s Minister of Defense when he returned home in 1959. He was on
his way to attend the Lushan Conference, one of the most important meetings ever held by the Communist Party, and he hadn’t been to the countryside in some time. He was appalled at the poverty and starvation he saw. This was during Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Following his visit, P’eng wrote an open letter blaming the suffering of the peasants directly on Mao. This was too much for the Great Helmsman. Mao stripped P’eng of his post, replaced him with Lin Piao, and purged him from the party. But that was only the beginning. Public humiliation followed public humiliation, until the Red Guards finally finished the job. P’eng died in prison, as did many others who tried to tell Mao about the sufferings he was creating. Mao’s greatest failing was that he tried to model Chinese society as if he were modeling clay instead of people. If problems arose, they were the fault of the people, not the theories he was trying to implement.

  The bus driver said there were no buses that went anywhere near P’eng’s old village, so we turned our attention to Liu Shao-ch’i, who suffered a similar fate as P’eng. In 1966, Mao began fanning the flames of revolution again—this time a Cultural Revolution. The Chairman’s Great Leap Forward had turned out to be a great leap backward, and conditions had become chaotic. Mao spotted signs of revisionism, even capitalism, and he called on the students.

  Liu Shao-ch’i was president at the time, and Mao was party chairman. Liu became annoyed at Mao’s attempt to destabilize an already unstable situation. He sent teams of workers onto the campuses to quell the disorder. It was then that Mao came up with one of his more memorable lines. The Chairman said, “Whoever suppresses the students will come to a bad end.” I wonder if anyone in Beijing still remembers that quote.

  In any case, the emperor waved his hand, and Liu was thrown to the mob. Like P’eng Te-huai, he was brutally and repeatedly humiliated in public by the Red Guards he had tried to suppress. It was too much for him. Within months of being purged, Liu became ill. He already had diabetes. Now he contracted tuberculosis. When word of the former president’s condition reached Mao, he ordered Liu flown from Beijing to the backwater town of Kaifeng to be treated as local conditions allowed. There were, however, no facilities capable of treating him in Kaifeng, and so Liu Shao-ch’i died soon after he landed. Another victim of the man who loved revolutions.

  Farmhouse where Liu Shao-ch’i grew up

  Liu’s hometown was only fifteen kilometers northeast of Mao’s, and the same bus driver said there was a bus that traveled to within a few kilometers several times a day on its way between Shaoshan and Ninghsiang. And we were in luck. The next bus left thirty minutes later with us on it. We told the driver where we wanted to go, and he let us off at a crossroads. After waiting for another thirty minutes, we caught a bus heading east, toward Changsha. Ten minutes later, we got off again just past the village of Huaminglou. After checking with the driver to make sure there would be another bus to Changsha, we walked up a side road and five hundred meters later came to the Liu Shao-ch’i Memorial Hall.

  It was impressive, and new. But a little too new. The grass and plants surrounding the building looked like a bad toupee. They hadn’t yet grown into the soil. But at least there were grass and plants. According to an English-language brochure, Liu Shao-ch’i was rehabilitated in 1980, two years after P’eng Te-huai—both after they had died. Previously, during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, Teng Hsiao-p’ing (1904–1997) was branded China’s number-two Capitalist Roader, and Liu Shao-ch’i was number-one.

  The displays inside the hall were much better than those at Mao’s memorial hall. They were even interesting. They weren’t all slogans and political posturing. Afterwards, we walked farther down the road to his old house. It was very similar to Mao’s. Like Mao’s, it also looked out across a pond where the remnants of the summer’s lotuses swayed in the autumn breeze.

  While we were standing there enjoying the view, we suddenly realized we were about to miss the last bus of the day. The bus driver told us the last bus to Changsha was scheduled to pass through Huaminglou at 2:30, and it was 2:30. We hurried, but it was nearly three by the time we made it to the village. We were hoping the bus was late.

  We dropped our bags in the dirt next to the road and waited. Apparently no one in Huaminglou had ever seen a foreigner before, and it didn’t take long for a crowd to form. When the local elementary school let out at 3:30, the crowd became a mob, and the bus was still nowhere in sight. Finally, around 4:30 the police showed up. Someone in the crowd told the police I spoke Chinese, and I cringed, regretting the day I ever learned the language. Actually, it was sort of weird, the way I learned Chinese.

  After I graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in anthropology, I applied to Columbia University for graduate school. Since I didn’t have enough money for the tuition, I checked every fellowship on the list when I applied, even one they called a “language fellowship,” where applicants had to specify what language they wanted to study. I had just read a book about Zen and thought it made wonderful sense, so I wrote the word “Chinese.” That was how I learned Chinese, purely by accident. And I was regretting that accident when four policemen worked their way through the crowd and pointed to a small farm shed away from the road. The officer in charge said, “Let’s go talk.” Of course, I didn’t want to talk, especially to a policeman in a farm shed. I said, “If you want to talk, let’s talk here so we can see the bus if it comes.” The chief wouldn’t accept this reasoning, and one of his underlings shoved his clipboard into my ribs, pushing me in the direction of the shed. Apparently, the police needed to file a report about why a crowd had formed. Instead of moving in the direction of the shed, I grabbed the policeman’s wrist with one hand and with the other knocked his clipboard to the ground. Suddenly I realized I had gone too far. I had this sinking feeling. Just then, the crowd started yelling: “The bus! The bus!” Indeed, it was the bus.

  As the crowd made way for the bus, we grabbed our packs then climbed aboard and waved good-bye to the good people of Huaminglou, the hometown of China’s number-one Capitalist Roader. As we pulled away, the police were still standing where we had left them. They didn’t wave back. They were probably wondering how they were going to fill out their report about the crowd. Crowds were actually illegal in China. Meanwhile, we yelled and laughed through the beautiful red-earth/green-field countryside of Hunan all the way to Changsha.

  Changsha wasn’t that far. But the bus took its time and stopped at every farm village on the way. It took over two hours to go maybe thirty kilometers. Finally, as the bus approached Changsha and was about to cross the bridge that spanned the Hsiang River, we asked the driver to let us off. The sun had already gone down, and I saw a sign for the Maple Hotel. We wanted to stay on the west side of the Hsiang, and this looked like a good spot. We thanked the driver for rescuing us at Huaminglou, waved good-bye, and walked up the hotel driveway. It looked like an oasis. But when we entered the lobby and went to the front desk, the clerk said they didn’t have any rooms. It was probably our appearance. We must have looked like tramps. However, if there is one thing I have learned about staying in hotels in China, it’s that there is always a room. To get that room, though, requires perseverance and good karma. Our karma, apparently, was still good. While we were standing there wondering what to do next—we hadn’t seen any other hotels on the west side of the bridge, the manager passed by the front desk and saw how tired we looked, and a room suddenly materialized. And that was how we got to Changsha, on the wings of good karma.

  4. Changsha

  So there we were at the front desk of Changsha’s Maple Hotel congratulating ourselves on getting a room. But before we headed to our room, the manager said if we wanted to eat dinner at the hotel, we would have to hurry. The restaurant stopped taking orders at eight, and it was already after seven. Usually we didn’t eat in hotel restaurants; we preferred night markets or noodle stands. But the manager insisted. Since he had been instrumental in prying loose the last available room for u
s, we couldn’t refuse. He led us into the dining room, and we ordered a couple of random dishes. Then he left, and we waited for our meal.

  Sanpan at Chutzuchou

  An hour later, we were still searching for superlatives. We had never eaten better food in China. I can still taste the crisp sesame chicken. The chef must have been trained in Heaven. And the price? Enough food and beer for the three of us cost less than 50RMB, or ten bucks. And the beer was from outside the province. The Hunan beer we drank two nights earlier tasted like formaldehyde—in fact, maybe that’s what it was, left over from the recycling process.

  But food and beer wasn’t the reason we stayed at the Maple. It was on the west side of the Hsiang and at the foot of Yuehlushan. During our whirlwind visit of Hengyang, we visited Huiyenfeng, or Returning Goose Peak. Huiyenfeng was considered the southernmost of Hengshan’s seventy-two peaks. Yuehlushan was considered its northernmost peak. And like Hengyang, it was the home of another Confucian academy, but not just any Confucian academy. It was the home of Yuehlu Academy, one of the four most famous academies in all of China. Naturally, that was our first destination the next morning.