YANAN: CRADLE OF THE REVOLUTION

Camels with tinkling bells no longer shuffle through; nor do mules with their red tufts; nor shepherds with their flocks. Yanan is now a small north Chinatown, its main street traffic controlled by two stop lights. It boasts cigarette factories, woolen mills, an opera house, a modern hotel. Only the yellow Song pagoda marks the village where history once happened.

For ten years this cleft in the hills was the cradle of China's revolution. Now its few visitors (6,000 all last year) come like pilgrims to Jerusalem to see where it began--or to remember. Their route is almost as well marked as the Stations of the Cross. Following it, one traces the explosions that overturned China.

First station: the home of Mao Tse-tung, where he made his headquarters in January 1937, preparing to fight the Japanese as ally of Chiang Kaishek. The shrine sits in a dusty courtyard, now gardened and grown with new pines. Here was his bed, says the guide, here the two blue enamel boxes in which he carried his records on the Long March; here is the charcoal pan at which, one day while he was writing, he was so absorbed his sandals began to burn. Next door is another little house, once shared by Chu Teh (with wife) and Chou En-lai (with wife) One notes: a private house for Mao, for his two closest companions a shared cottage. Here Mao lived until 1938, when the Japanese began to bomb Yanan and he moved three miles north to the cave encampment at Yangjialing.

By 1938 one notes, Mao had two whitewashed rooms in Yangjialing and a private air-raid shelter. On either side Chu Teh and Chou En-lai each had caves. By now their Red Army had become the Eighth Route Army and was across the Yellow River, fighting Japan. Beneath their hill, by 1942, they had built the yellow brick headquarters of the Central Committee. These three were to remain the power for almost 40 years.

The next stage of pilgrimage comes another mile or two away the famous Zaoyuan, or Date Garden, to which the leaders moved in 1942. By then, they had broken completely with Chiang. There, on the dominant slope, are the caves of the same three men. Mao's boasted no fewer than five rooms; he slept now in a handsome dark wood sleigh bed, on a hardwood board with only a thin pad on top. Chu Teh had a fine cave suite to his left, Chou En-lai to his right.

What I remember best is the stone tables, the stone blocks used as chairs when they chose to dine outside; and the little pavilion built for Mao to rest, think, write when the skies were sunny. Beyond the hills his troops had reached the coast of China, fighting on Pacific shores. On this ledge, at such a stone table, Major General Patrick Hurley signed his compact with Mao in November 1944. Both promised, with American aid, to bring to China Roosevelt's Four Freedoms and the Bill of Rights. It required only Chiang Kai-shek's consent, which never came. Nor did Mao follow through on his commitment.

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. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.