The Long March. Sun Shuyun

of provincial towns in the 1930s. I was dropped off next to a dumpling shop with a queue of hungry customers. Behind it was Wang's courtyard, shaded by a pomegranate tree with its dark red fruit just bursting open. Beneath it, there she sat, looking gentle, serene and elegant, belying her 91 years, and without a trace of the toughness of the Red Army commander.

      She was not surprised to see me, a complete stranger, walking in off the street and wanting to find out about her past. My copy of her biography was a good enough introduction. She asked me to sit down and called, ‘Another visitor from Beijing!’ A middle-aged woman came out. From what I had read, I assumed she was her adopted daughter – Wang was unable to conceive after the Long March. ‘You shouldn't ask too many questions, she gets too excited. Last week we had a journalist from Beijing, and she talked so much, it made her ill. Anyway, it is all in there,’ she said, referring to the book on my lap. Wang cut her short. ‘They think talking is a waste of breath, but they don't understand. So many men and women died for the good life we live today and I want people to remember that.’ She sent her daughter back inside for another biography, written by a local Party historian. ‘You might not have come across it.’

      The daughter came out with the book and a tray of sliced watermelon. ‘Eat now, read later. I will answer all your questions. It will take you a few days – you see, unfortunately, I have had such a long life.’ She took a mouthful of the melon, and smiled, as if it was the rarest fruit in the world and she was tasting it for the first time. Clearly she was keen to talk. She was quick and warm, and over the next three days she opened up like the pomegranates – I heard of the idealism, the hope, the suffering, the sacrifice, the harshness and the courage of her life, like those of so many others. But Wang also painted in some of the shadows of her history, things that were almost against her nature to reveal, and most certainly at odds with the glorious stories of the Long March that I had grown up with.

      Wang was born in 1913 in Lufu Village, not far from where she lives now. They barely had enough rice for six months after the landlord took his exorbitant rent. From the age of 5, she roamed the mountains with her sister to collect wild plants to eat. By the time she was 11, her parents found her a husband, who offered to pay off the family debt of 200 kilos of rice. She was in the dark about the arrangement until the wedding day, when her mother dressed her in a bright red outfit, and put her on a palanquin sent by the groom. He was sixteen years older than Wang, slightly retarded, and with so many smallpox scars he was nicknamed Big Smallpox. The villagers said a flower had been planted on a cowpat. When Wang saw him, she fainted, but her mother said the rice was in the pot, and nothing could be done about it.

      Her parents’ only request was that he would not consummate the marriage until Wang was 18. Meanwhile, she would work like a slave in his household. But he could not wait for seven years: he slept around and the wife of a blind fortune-teller bore him a son. Gossip spread around the village and Wang was so humiliated that she returned to her parents’ house, hoping they would pity her and annul the marriage. No, you must go back, her mother told her. ‘When you marry a chicken, live with a chicken; when you marry a dog, live with a dog.’ It was fate.

      When the Red Army marched into her village in the spring of 1930, she learned it was not fate. ‘Why do the landlords have so much land, while you have none?’ a Red Army officer asked her and her family. ‘Why do they eat fat pork every day, while you don't see one drop of oil for a whole year? Why do they wear silk while you are in rags? It isn't fair! For every one of them, there are ten of us. If we unite, we are bound to win. What do you say? Join us! Join the Revolution!’ She signed up on the spot, and her family received land, salt, rice, ham and tools, all confiscated from the landlords.

      She told everyone about the benefits of the Communist Revolution, citing herself and her family as examples. And she did so by using the most popular method in rural Jiangxi – folksongs. She set new words to the old tunes, not the usual love ballads but full of zeal for the Revolution. She was so good, she was given the nickname ‘Golden Throat’. This was one of her favourites:

      If we save the mountain, we'll have wood.

      If we save the river, we'll have fish to fry.

      If we save the Revolution, we'll have our own land.

      If we save the Soviet, red flags will fly.

      In December 1933, Wang had some unexpected news. Her devotion and success in work with women and young people brought her to Ruijin, the Red capital, as the people's representative for the Second National Congress of the Soviet.

      ‘Have you visited Ruijin?’ Wang asked me expectantly. I said I was going to after seeing her.

      ‘You should have gone there first. It was the capital! An old lady like me can wait. You know, we had a saying at the time: up north it is Beijing; down south it is Ruijin.’

      She did concede later, although very reluctantly, that Ruijin could not compare with Beijing. It was a typical southern town with good feng shui. The curving Mian River embraced it, and an undulating mountain range shielded it from the west, with a white pagoda overlooking it from the hill to the east. No bigger than an average county town, its four gates and four roads leading in from them crossed at the centre, and 7,000 people lived within its walls. Because Chiang had imposed an economic blockade with his Fifth Campaign, many shops had their shutters down. Local products such as bamboo, paper, nuts and dried vegetables from the mountains could not be shipped out; salt, oil, petrol, cloth and other daily necessities could not come in. Those who broke the embargo were liable to punishment or even execution. The Nationalists reinforced the blockade with a Special Movement Corps, whose members had every incentive to catch the offenders – they were rewarded with 50% of whatever they confiscated.

      Wherever there were profits, there were smugglers: salt, medicine, gunpowder and other much-needed items were transported, hidden in coffins, at the bottom of manure baskets and inside bamboo poles. They even managed to bring in an X-ray machine in a coffin, with three dozen men and women pretending to be grieving relatives, crying their eyes out. The warlord of Guangdong also defied the blockade by secretly buying tungsten that was found in abundance within the Soviet. But it was like throwing a cup of water onto flaming firewood. Ruijin was feeling the pinch. Salt was the scarcest commodity; Wang did not taste salt for months, and out of sheer desperation she and her friends scraped the white deposits from the walls of toilets, and even from graveyards, and boiled them down.

      Even today she craved salt. ‘I think I'm making up for the shortage all those years ago. You don't know what it's like, as if your body were made of cotton, or you were walking on clouds. I often fell.’ I knew how deprived she felt when she invited me to join her, her daughter, and her two grandchildren for lunch. Had she not explained, I would have thought the daughter had emptied the salt pot when she was cooking. The chicken, the bean curd, the beans and the soup were all so salty that I could barely eat them. I must have drunk a gallon of tea to wash the meal down.

      All the hardship of daily life in Ruijin was forgotten when Wang attended the Congress on 22 January 1934. The Hall of Workers and Peasants, specially built for the occasion, took her breath away. She had never seen anything like it. It was not like a Buddhist temple; it was not like the mansions of rich people; it was not like shrine halls, which were normally the most impressive buildings in southern towns and villages. It was very grand, an octagon, the shape of a Red Army cap. Above the imposing main entrance was a big red star with a hammer and sickle on it, the emblem of the Red Army. The impressive scale of the interior matched that of the exterior: it was massive, with two storeys, and it could hold over 2,000 people. She could not understand how they had built it, with a roof but no central pillar. And it was lit by these strange lamps that did not need oil. All it took was for someone to pull down a black handle on the wall, and the hall was flooded with brilliant light.

      Wang and the 776 delegates stood inside the hall, listening as a band played a rousing song, the Internationale. A tall, lean man with big eyes came onto the platform, and stood in front of the Communist red flag. The woman next to her whispered that this was Comrade Mao, the man who set up the Soviet. She had hardly registered the fact before Mao said, in his thick Hunan accent: ‘Comrades, on behalf of the Central Executive Committee, I declare the Second National Congress of the Soviet open. On