Library:Mao Zedong, a Biography. Volume 1. 1893–1949

CCCPC Party Literature Research Office

Chief Editors Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji

Translated by Foreign Languages Press, edited by Sheng-chi Shu

Originally published by CCCPC Party Literature Research Office,

Chief Editors Pang Xianzhi and Jin Chongji, Volume I and II in

2011.

More information at

www.cbi.gov.cn/wisework/content/10005.html

Leaving Home

An age- old legend tells us that 5,000 years ago Emperor Shun, while on an inspection tour of southern China, came to the Xiang river. There, while resting on a hilltop, the emperor ordered the playing of a tune called Shao Yue (Melody of Shao). The music is said to have attracted a flock of phoenixes that danced to its lilt. From this, people began to call the hill Shaoshan (Mount Shao), and to call the narrow valley it embraces Shaoshan Chong (Shaoshan Valley), located in what is now Xiangtan County of Hunan Province.

In this same Shaoshan Valley, on 26 December 1893 (19th day of the 11th lunar month in the 19th year of Qing Dynasty Emperor Guangxu), a boy was born to the family of peasant Mao Yichang. The child was named Zedong, also to be known as Yongzhi and later as Runzhi. Two babies preceding this child had died in infancy and, fearing a likely recurrence, the mother took her new-born son to a small temple of the Stone Statue of the Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin, or Avalokitesvara in Sanskrit). There, she bowed her head to the ground and asked the great rock to be the child’s adoptive mother, so the boy acquired the pet name of Shi San Yazi (Third Kid of the Rock).

This Mao family of Shaoshan was originally from Jiangxi Province. In the early years of the Mind Dynasty, the family moved to settle in Xiangxiang Country, Hunan Province. Two sons moved to Shaoshan Valley, where, in a place some 40 kilometers west from the middle reaches of the Xiang River, three Hunan counties -Xiangtan, Ningxiang and Xiangxiang – come together. It is a narrow valley, surrounded by hills, where inhabitants have lived largely by agriculture, so the Mao family engaged mainly in land reclamation and farming. Some 500 years elapsed before Mao Zedong, the twentieth generation after Mao Taihua, was born.

Despite the lovely legend of its name, the valley’s conditions when Mao Zedong was born were much as in other poor, secluded areas of later imperial China. In Shaoshan Valley were more than 600 households, one being that of Mao Enpu, Mao Zedong’s grandfather, an honest kind-hearted peasant. As he became increasingly hard-up, he had to pawn some of his ancestral lands to sustain the family. He had only one son, Mao Zedong’s father; and when he passed away, Mao Zedong was only 10 years old.

Mao Zedong’s father, Mao Yinchang, also known as Mao Shunsheng or Mao Liangbi, began to help manage household affairs when he was only 17 years old. Pressed by family debts, he had to leave his home village to join the local army of Hunan Province. This broadened his vision and gave him the chance to save some money. When he returned home, Mao Shunsheng first redeemed the farmland pawned by his father. Then he bought a little more land so that his holdings totaled 22 mu (about 1.5 hectares) that yielded about 80 dan (about 4 tons) of grain annually. Mao Shunsheng then turned to buying, selling and transporting rice and livestock to the markets of Xiangtan Country. In this way, his wealth grew gradually to about 2-3,000 Chinese silver dollars. With this accumulated capital, he even once issued a kind of local paper money in the name of ‘Mao Yishun & Co.’, so in his little valley he would have been reckoned a moneybags.