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Out with the Devils. Nothing was sacred. Red Guards plastered the walls of the Sacred Heart Convent, the leading school in Peking for the children of foreign diplomats, with posters reading GET OUT, FOREIGN DEVILS! and suspended classes. Five of the Roman Catholic nuns were forced to sit in a gutter while the Guards publicly berated them. Guards also stormed Peking's few remaining Christian churches, defacing the walls, and replacing religious statues with busts of Mao.
They dragged a Moslem leader from a mosque in Peking and beat him, invaded a lamasery and carried off statues of Buddha. In the seaside resort city of Hangchow, Red Guards invaded Ling Ying Temple and covered a statue of Buddha with pasted-on slogans that read DESTROY THE OLD WORLD! BUILD THE NEW WORLD!
Bands of juveniles ransacked Chinese homes for any signs of wealth. Well-to-do residents were warned to clear out of Peking within three days, return to their villages and submit themselves to the will of the people. Overseas Chinese who had returned to Peking to live out their last days were ordered to go to work on farms. Cried the Guards: "We shall transform Peking into a truly proletarian, truly revolutionary city."
Down with the Venus of Milo. The transformation was often painfully crude. Kangaroo courts convened in the streets and meted out embarrassing punishment to anyone guilty of associating with foreigners. Doctors, for example, were forced to walk on their knees in the gutters because they had treated foreign patients. At Peking University, Red Guards encouraged students to spit on their professors. In Shanghai, two professors were forced to parade naked in front of the students.
Red Guards prevented Soviet diplomats from leaving their Peking embassy by holding a huge picture of Mao across the driveway. Other Guards rampaged through a large apartment building housing families of some 100 foreign diplomats and pasted a portrait of Mao on each apartment door. Red Guards tossed confiscated art objects, including replicas of the Venus de Milo and Apollo, onto bonfires.
In fact, Mao's mobs seemed set on obliterating China's pre-Communist identity. Across the country, monuments to China's own rich history came tumbling down. In Hangchow, a stone column commemorating a visit to the city by the 17th century Manchu Emperor Kang Hsi was pulled down. Though he brought more territory under Chinese rule than anyone since Genghis Khan, Kang Hsi had also allowed Catholic priests into the country and had approved China's first treaty with Russia, thus forfeiting his right to a place of honor in Mao's new China.
Scattered Resistance. Crowed the official news agency: "The revolutionary spirit of the Red Guards has sparked a prairie fire that is sweeping the whole of China, burning down all decadent influences of the bourgeois and feudal classes as well as all old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits." Official reports claimed that the Red Guards were received enthusiastically just about everywhere. In fact, reports from foreign correspondents at week's end stated that the Red Guards in Pe king had met resistance, resulting in at least 14 persons injured and perhaps nine deaths, and that troops had been called in to patrol the city at night.