The Revolutionary Museum

In the northeast corner of town, the Revolutionary Museum (daily 8am-5.30pm; RMB10), has something of the aura ora shrine, and a sculpture depicting revolu- tionary struggle inside, opposite the entrance, has offerings of money in front of it. The huge halls hold a massive collection of artefacts; curatorial policy seems to be that anything that was in the town between the years of 1935 and 1949 is now worth exhibiting. Relics include deflat- ed footballs, sewing machines, rusty mugs and hundreds of guns and hand grenades. There is a stuffed white horse that is said to have once carried Mao, and translations of books by Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in Chinese. Nothing is labelled in English though; the things of most interest to non-Chinese speakers are probably the propaganda pictures, which include wood- and papercuts of Red Army s01- diers helping peasants iii the fields. The walls of the halls are covered with photographs taken at the time, and sinologists can amuse themselves by try- ing to match the portraits of awkwardly posed, youthful, fresh-faced figures, identically dressed in Mao suits, to the octogenarian leaders of late twenti- eth-century China. More interesting is the Lao Ganbu Menqiu Chang (old Cadre Croquet Pitch) to the left of the museum entrance, where codgers shoot the breeze with anyone who will listen.

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