Some 170km north of Guiyang, ZUNYI - despite being heavily industrialized of late - is historically the site of one of the most important events in China's recent past. The Communist army arrived here on their Long March in January 1935, in disarray after months on the run and having suffered two defeats in their attempts to join up with sympathetic forces in Hunan. Having taken the city by surprise, the leadership convened the Zunyi Conference , a decision that was to alter the entire purpose of the March and see Mao Zedong emerge as political head of the Communist Party. Previously, the Party had been led by Russian Comintern advisers, who modelled their strategies on urban-based uprisings among the proletariat. Mao felt that China's revolution could only succeed by mobilizing the peasantry, and that the Communist forces should base themselves in the countryside to do this. His opinions carried the day, saving the Red Army from certain annihilation at the hands of the Guomindang and, though its conquest still lay fifteen years away, marking the Communists' first step towards Beijing.
The City
The obvious first place to head for is the Site of the Zunyi Conference (daily 8.30am-4.30pm; ¥10), an attractive black-brick European-style house over the river on Ziyin Lu. There's a powerful feeling that this is where history was made, though there's little to see beyond a tour of the rooms - including the leaders' quarters and, of course, the Conference Hall - all of which have been restored to their 1930s condition and filled with period furniture. For more in the way of information, head a short way back east to the nineteenth-century French Catholic Church , now a Long March Museum (daily 8.30am-5pm; ¥3). Photos and maps illustrate the Communist peregrinations through Guizhou; they actually circled around to the north and captured the city again shortly after leaving it, completely disorganizing local Guomindang militias. One thing subtly absent is any mention of the actual manoeuvrings behind Mao's appropriation of the political scene, and doubtless there never will be. For a last taste of Red history, cross back over the river and up into Fenghuang Shan Park , where the Monument to the Red Army Martyrs rises to the west, a reminder that of the eighty thousand soldiers who started the Long March, only twenty thousand arrived at the Communists' final base in Shaanxi. However, it's grand rather than maudlin, with four huge red sandstone busts (vaguely resembling Lenin) supporting a floating, circular wall and a pillar topped with the Communist hammer and sickle.
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