(2 of 2)
Just below the ledge are two cottages, one for Peng Dehuai, who would become Defense Minister, one for Liu Shaoqi, who would become President. The three cave dwellings above and the two cottages below made the ruling group; they met as neighbors, friends, brothers, as they planned the revolution to come. The lesser two were persecuted to death; the reigning three were all to die of natural causes in a nine-month period of 1976, at least two of them knowing their revolution had misfired, and the largest of them all, Mao, insane.
The Date Garden is now tidied up, a splendid Chinese garden. No sounds echo through it, no bugles sound in the morning. It was all abustle in its glory days, but now the water ripples silently through the irrigation ditch and the pears and apple trees in springtime's pink and white blossoms offer their beauty only to occasional visitors.
On then to the army headquarters at Wangjiaping, a mile or two away. When I had last seen it in 1944, it was a place of excitement. It is now a gray, empty barracks, quite forbidding. Adjacent to it is the last station of the pilgrimage—Mao slept here for several weeks in his last days in Yanan, preparing to flee and reorganize his armies for the final assault on the Nationalists; he and the entire Central Committee were to be on the march for the next two years. Mao, says the guide, left Yanan on March 19, 1947, maneuvering to lure Chiang Kai-shek after him while he closed in on Chiang's rear. The guide took us to where a red memorial now stands to Mao's son, killed by the artillery of the enemy in Korea, the enemy unnamed in courtesy to this American visitor.
"Had Mao ever come back to visit?" I asked. No, others had returned to this Valley Forge of the Chinese Revolution—Chou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, others. But not Mao. He lived in a world of his own and never looked back.