The Dream And The Destiny

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; World War II; Sagas

Synopsis

The Long March was an extraordinary feat of human endurance. Lin-Wai, a young doctor newly recruited into the Red Army, is caught up in the breakout of the followers of Mao and their ensuing flight. The marchers struggle on through pain and suffering, under continual harrassment from the enormously superior Kuomintang forces. Through the blistering heat of the Grasslands to the icy-zub-zero temperatures of the Great Snow Mountain, they march. Over a hundred thousand men begin the march. Only five thousand will survive.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 384

Sample

Outside my window the snow is falling. Beyond the love-pavilions the fields are white; a mantle of snow covers my mother’s grave.

In Laoshan the snow falls in great wavering flakes as big as orchid petals, the bamboo bows to the frozen river. A bird is calling from the woods of Shengsu where Pipa lived; a dog is barking; somebody is knocking at a door. The village is deserted, the world holding its breath.

Sounds appear muted in this room where my mother used to sit to escape the vulgar peasantry of my father. She was fond of the place, and her tastes were delicate. Nor was it tampered with during the Revolution – the occupants being gracious enough to leave the decoration as my mother designed it. The walls are of silk, wonderfully preserved, the ceiling high and plain. The small peony fairy standing on the ledge of the window reflects my mother’s love of poetry.

There is little left of the original furniture, of course; the local bandits saw to that. All that remains of the Kuomintang looting is the cracked Peking vase which Lu, our servant, hid for me. The Tientsin carpet, for instance, is a recent acquisition; as is the rose-wood desk, where I am writing this.

My father, who was executed by the Red Army before I returned to Laoshan, is not buried here in the ancestral home of the Chans, but I do have my mother; her grave, as I said, is in the garden. In summer it is covered with lotus blossom, her favourite flower. And, at every Ching Ming festival I sweep her grave as she would have wished, for she was a reverent Taoist.

Certainly, she is worth more than a passing mention.

A bondmaid of a wealthy shopkeeper of Homan, my mother was so poor that in her sixteenth year she worked in the fields with but a rag to cover her nakedness. Escaping from her master, she begged her way south during famine and entered this house as a second kitchen-maid; the men servants had their way with her, as was then the custom. And, in a moment of drunken rage, my father sought from her a son, since all he could begot from his wife and concubines was daughters.

Now, my mother, though not beautiful, had a brain of some intellect. She was a tall, angular woman, with big shoulders and large, veined hands calloused with labour. At the nape of her neck she wore a bun which shone like black silk. Once I saw her combing out this hair: certainly it was splendid hair – better than Su-tai’s, my father’s favourite concubine. Also, my mother’s feet had been expertly bound; tiny for such a big woman.

It was from my mother that I heard of the poets. Having taught herself to read and write within a year of taking to my father’s bed, she attended me many hours each day, reading to me such books as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and quoting the poems of Li Po, such as Drinking Alone under the Summer Moon. It was from her that I learned the subtle dynastic changes; the differences, say, between the Sung poet, Yeh Li, and his contemporaries. My mother was a valuable woman.

Although my father rejected poetry, he respected it: finally, so impressed was he with my ability to quote yards of it while I was attending Shengsu Middle School (and it was here that I met my lovely Pipa) that he divorced his wife for gossiping and married my mother, naturally taking care, of course, to retain his concubines.

When I was eighteen, I left Laoshan and took my place in Shanghai University with a grant to study medicine for the next five years at Chiang Kai-shek’s expense. I scarcely repaid this generosity because three years later I returned to Laoshan and joined Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army.

Two months before my arrival home, my mother died.

Many relatives attended the funeral, said Lu, our servant; whenever there’s a will there are abundant relatives.

My ancient Aunt Tezan came – she who despised my mother for her childhood poverty. She wore upon her cheek a cluster of rubies to conceal a disease contracted from my Uncle Soon, a rare old roué, even for Hunan. Some cousins on my father’s side came too – one of them a landlord who used whips on his peasants. But most of the mourners were my father’s courtesans; these arrived in best white funeral clothes with their many children, every one a female.

My father, apparently, did not come in immediately from the burial in the garden, but stood astride my mother’s grave with his hands clasped, staring up at the sky. The rain poured down, said Lu, and the relatives hammered at the window, telling him not to be a fool, or he would be next in the grave. But he did not obey: for hours he stood there, said Lu, staring up at the rain, and his face, with his lips curled back, was the face of a wolf.

This servant, now long dead, told me that the lavatories had over-flowed and that a smell of boiled chicken and rice polluted the incense of the mansion: also the children were howling and being smacked by their painted mothers.

When my father came into the house he was dishevelled: even the hem of his gown was stained with mud from the burying, yet about his appearance he was at all times particular.

Coming into the hall, said Lu, he turned and flung wide the great, double doors and pointed at the garden, crying:

“Out!”

At this the mourners were outraged and they gathered their children about them, nudging and tossing their heads indignantly. And, when my Aunt Tezan stamped her ivory stick on the floor, cackling, my father approached her threateningly.

“Out!”

They flew before him, followed by items of furniture.

Then, Lu told me, my father went full length on to the couch in the room where I am writing this, and wept, crying:

“Sula, forgive me, Sula, forgive me,” which was not my mother’s name but the one by which he called her.

Within a week, said the servant, he was back with his concubines.

So now I am writing this in the place my mother loved, remembering her.

Before me are the musty, rain-stained sheets of my Long March diaries (and the special entries, of course, for the Paoan-Yenan route, for which I am responsible to the Party).

Sitting here in the dusk, with Kwelin asleep in the chair, I recall the lost years: amazingly, by some trick of the ear, I can hear my mother’s voice – reading passages from The Water Margin and All Men are Brothers.

Earlier, the house was a bedlam of noise, with people clattering about and children shrieking: it was impossible to write under such conditions. But now the guests have gone, if not the ghosts, and the room is quiet again.

There is no sound now but the hissing of the fire, and Kwelin’s breathing; in this firelight her face is young again.

The dusk grows kinder. I can hear the wild geese calling from the village. The house is talking to itself in creaks and whispers, as houses do at night; the wind is sighing down the road to Laoshan where the ravens fly. And strangely, even as I pick up the brush to write, I can see an ocean of camellias: they stretch across the Sikang Mountains where Pipa lies, to Laoshan, the hills of home.

In the Autumn of 1934, aged twenty-one, I returned home from Shanghai University in my third years as a medical student. China was at war with herself, this time with communism, and rumours persisted that Chiang Kai-shek was beginning a new purge of the radicals. It was also the Mid-Autumn Festival, when the wife of the Celestial Archer swallowed the potion of everlasting life and became the Queen of the Moon.

Such was the charming rubbish believed by people like my father.

No such immortality was conferred on Old Teh, my friend the Laoshan water-carrier: he had just been sentenced to death for protesting about his rent.

It was because of such injustices that the Chiang Kai-shek clique was faced with the extremism of progressive thinkers: violence alone, they claimed, was the only outlet for complaint. But men like my father, bound by the old ideals, had neither the compassion nor sense to realise the outcome. He said, soon after my arrival at Laoshan:

“Old Teh, you ask? He will have to die. The mandarin has sentenced him, it is the law.”

“It’s cruel and unjust!” I said.

“It will be cruel and unjust if others follow his example: soon we’ll have peasants refusing to pay rent at all.” He eased his great shining backside into a cane chair on the verandah. “It’s all the fault of these damned communists, of course. How are the medical studies going?”

Later, the moon rose over the paddy fields, and the stars shimmered over the rim of Big Wall Mountain. My Pipa would be finished teaching in Shengsu village by now; even if I couldn’t borrow a horse, I could walk and run the distance between us in well under an hour.

Su-tai, my father’s eldest concubine, younger than I, was lying in a wicker chair beside me, her eyes like the stars above. She was bewitchingly beautiful; her skin was of the same languid whiteness as the orchid from which she took her name.

“Lin-wai,” said she, “aren’t you going to Shengsu tonight?”

“At the moment I’m more concerned with Old Teh’s murder,” I replied.

“The old fool parades his communism – what do you expect?”

“Anyone with the smallest protest is always a communist. You may be advanced in certain subjects, little tart, but not in the Manifesto.”

Rising with easy grace, she joined me at the verandah rail and stared up at the moon, saying, “Old age is boring, Lin-wai. An hour with me would be more entertaining than a dozen political speeches.” She winked with pert charm. “Your father is visiting the mandarin tonight to confirm some sentences. Is Shengsu village still attractive?”

I did not reply.

“It is amazing to me how your perfect Pipa gets away with it,” said she, adding, “the way she’s been behaving while you’ve been away, you certainly need to make the best of her.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“For all her breeding, she’s not above the law. Tang Fu may be the secret communist agent in these parts, but Yang Pipa’s an open agitator; your father, you know, would scarcely approve.” She smiled at me, her head on one side. “I will even change this dress for a red one, if that suits you better?”

I did not look her way.

Pipa was small and her skin was golden. Her god, said my mother once, had cooked her beautifully in the oven of the sun, enhancing her quaint beauty. Her hair was black and plaited either side of her face; she possessed the high-boned cheeks of the blood Cantonese. Also she was finely educated, though her blind Aunt Lei was notoriously poor: the whole of Shengsu wondered how she had ever afforded it.

“In fact,” said Su-tai, “I will change into nothing at all if you find that preferable.”

Her skittishness was hard to ignore; all over the land it was happening – young concubines, tiring of fruitless service to aged masters, were seeking out sons.

“Mine’s a very unsatisfactory existence, Lin-wai,” she said now. “Do you realise how unrewarding it can be?”

“Somebody’s bound to come in in the middle of it,” I replied. “Best I go to Shengsu.”

“Then watch your Pipa’s Aunt Lei,” said she. “Blind she may be, but she has ears to hear brown grass growing, take it from me. Meanwhile, Chan Lin-wai, you are a pig’s arse.”

It was a reasonable statement, all things considered.

I bowed to her.

“I love you,” said Yang Pipa.

The little red-roofed cottage in Shengsu was a haven after the discord of Laoshan.

I said, “And I love you, but when will your Aunt Lei be back? Ever since I got home I’ve been dodging somebody.”

Pipa replied, “When she comes she will tap with her stick; we will hear this – be peaceful.”

“People say she isn’t as blind as she makes out.”

Pipa replied: “When Yang, my namesake, the queen of all concubines, was born in the year seven hundred and eighteen, her parents in Shensi saw a star fall out of the sky: later, when she died for encouraging her emperor’s folly, a dynasty collapsed about her.” She looked at the window moon. “Important as you are, Lin-wai, I can’t think this would happen if Aunt Lei found me in bed with you. But I’m fortunate indeed to own such a lover.” She opened wide, beautiful eyes in the dim light, adding, “‘Yang Pipa,’ I sometimes say to myself, ‘you are a fool. You are in love with this Chan Lin-wai, a common medical student of Laoshan, and he comes to your arms but twice a year. What will you do for a lover for the next six months?’”

I answered, “You’ll teach at Shengsu Middle School and continue your studies in nursing until he returns from Shanghai with his doctorate in two years time. Then you can be his receptionist.”

“Another two years? Aiya!” She showed her straight, white teeth. “Meanwhile, what would he do if I presented him with a baby?”

“He’d discuss it with you at the first opportunity. Aren’t you his wife in everything but name?”

I paid her the respects of my body, and there was warmth in her and a trembling; she caressed my face in sighs, saying, “You don’t much flatter the woman who is your slave, do you? Couldn’t you tell me that my lips are carmine, my skin like jade, and that my eyebrows curve like a willow tree?”

“Your mirror tells you you are beautiful, Pipa. Need I waste words while others are dying?”

“Let’s not forget Old Teh, Lin-wai – just for a minute?”

So I made her one with me. A night-bird sang from the thickets of autumn.

“My Aunt Lei would be appalled,” said Pipa.

Soon, I thought. I will carry this one in a red sedan chair and a scarlet marriage gown to my father, presenting her to him for naming as wife, and she would kneel before him in Laoshan. In days this would happen – long before obtaining my doctorate as planned – while the big carp slept in the pools of the garden under the big autumn moon.

“Not before time,” said Pipa.

The Confucian doctrine of Social Status governed our house in Laoshan, therefore Su-tai and the other concubines sat at my father’s table, but in junior status to my Aunt Tezan, who was staying a few days. The Book of Rites, the directive on the subject, was explicit about this; it was an abominable enemy to China’s social progress that instructed everybody on how to behave.

It may not have been in accordance with the Origins of Culture, but I despised my father; he epitomised for me all that was wrong with the old system of parental advantage. Life for him was legitimate loot. Under the junta of the Chiang Kai-shek clique, the regular verb, ‘I steal, you steal, he steals, they steal, we all steal’, was the dominant precept of his existence: it applied to humans as well as to syntax. The peasants chained to their carts like animals, the exploitation of children, barbaric foot-binding and ferocious punishments for minor crime were a result of Confucian interpretation of religious principles – all in conflict with the gentler Taoism practised by the masses.

The Confucian injustice that forbade family argument, for instance, had degenerated into parental domination. The ancient Chinese saying that the country was like a box of sand, each grain representing a family unit, no longer applied. Under the law of filial piety, my father, I considered, had died in a morass of corruption, China’s oldest disease.

The intelligent young of 1934 were at war with the old: it was a widening generation gap that only violence could bridge. The masses were dying in millions of famine, pestilence, war. Men like Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the warlord, lived like Indian maharajas and the poor lived with pigs. The governor of one province alone was worth thirty concubines and thirty million dollars, but the peasant who spat at the feet of a landlord died for it. Martyrs, as always in times of revolution, proliferated.

Life in Laoshan, like other southern villages, was one of uneasy quiet; Kwangtung province, with its ever-rebellious capital, Canton, was afire with a new spirit, and the Old Order war-lords put down violence with growing malice. Flogging to death, once a punishment reserved for banditry, was now the sentence for even minor crimes; burying alive was reserved for non-payment of rent. But Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army of over a hundred thousand peasants, surrounded in their Juichin Soviet in south-east China, was threatening to break out, and peasants were flocking to their Red banner.

Old China, with the last fling of the ruling class, was like a hog being fattened for slaughter. The mocking smiles of Taoism, the peasant religion of millions, tolled the death-knell of old Confucius, who was dead, said the workers, but wouldn’t lie down. The mass murders of seven years ago in Shanghai, when twenty thousand progressives died, became the spark now spreading a flame over the southern provinces. Little rebellions, breaking out like bonfires, were instantly put out by the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army. Hundreds of thousands of peasants died in a last attempt to extinguish communism. With the fall of the City of Wuhan, when a Red Army was routed, Chiang Kai-shek began systematically to soak the land in blood.

Old Teh, my friend the water-carrier, about to die, was the way in which Laoshan paid for what the communists called the New Ideal.

Next day, at sunset, my father led the family down to the village square, there officially to witness Old Teh’s execution. The villagers of Laoshan were already assembled, many of them Tanga and Hoklo people of the sea; others were land Hakka, the Guest-People, who had fled south from other butcheries.

As I took my seat in front of the crowd facing the execution stake, I was surprised to see Old Teh sitting with his back to a tree near the mandarin’s justice seat. With his legs crossed and his knees cocked up, he scarcely looked the victim; he was reading Six Chapters of a Floating Life, a classic he had borrowed from me and failed to return. We all sat in silence, awaiting the mandarin. Flies buzzed, frogs croaked, cicadas sang. My father sat in sweating obesity, wiping his florid face. Old Teh, after a glance in our direction, went on reading.

When the mandarin’s procession came into sight, we rose. Preceded by his bodyguard of fifty Kuomintang soldiers, he came in his crimson sedan chair and the twelve bearers carrying him were naked to the waist. The personification of wealth and power, he descended from the sedan in tottering age, and was helped to the Chair of Justice; there his white and purple robes were arranged before an open grave. When the soldiers were ranked behind the mandarin’s chair with the usual bawled commands, Old Teh momentarily looked up, made a wry face at the disturbance, and went on reading.

Indeed, he made no protest when the executioner touched his shoulder, but followed the soldiers to the open grave before the mandarin’s chair and sat on the edge of it, swinging his legs in it, still reading. Captain Pai wheeled his big brown horse before the crowd and shouted:

“The man sitting before you has protested about an increase in his rent, the amount of which has long been recorded as less than is the landlord’s due. This is mandarin land; it is fairly distributed – it’s only through your lord’s good offices that you are paying rent at all.” He trotted the bay back to the mandarin’s chair. “It’s clear that the prisoner has been reading communist posters about land reform: let his execution for an attempt at propaganda be a lesson to you all.”

The soldiers heaved Old Teh to his feet. Rising, I walked slowly to the mandarin’s chair, calling, “My lord, I would speak with you.”

The mandarin’s eyes drifted over me and he waved away the two guards barring my approach, saying, “You also protest about your rent?”

I replied, “My Lord, I am the son of your Laoshan agent. I pay no rent.”

“Then why present yourself unbidden?”

“To make a request for the prisoner.”

He was intrigued. “A request of a common labourer?”

I said, “The book he has there belongs to me.”

Old Teh, still reading, glanced over his shoulder, crying, “Don’t worry, lackey, you’ll get it back.”

The mandarin asked, “A rare book, young man?”

“The thing’s a classic. I lent it in good faith and I’m entitled to have it returned.”

He made a wry face. “It’s astonishing to me that people steal books, yet wouldn’t dream of touching an umbrella.”

This was the Pig of Kwangtung, the representative of Chiang’s Central Government in Nanking. His breeding was stained with royal blood, for he was related to the old Dowager Empress, a sow of the first order. The opium which had destroyed his body had earned him princely wealth, for he had soaked Kwangtung in the blood of the poppy. He ate from beaten gold, slept on silk. Ten concubines and a eunuch had he, none of whom he could serve, and his wife, as ugly as a Tibetan monkey, had contracted Mandarin’s Disease: the poor enjoy their private revenges. Now he said:

“A peasant actually reading?” He added, drolly, “Doubtless one of the eight-legged essays of the old Imperial Examinations?”

“Six Chapters of a Floating Life,” shouted Old Teh, pushing away the soldiers.

The mandarin answered, “Six Chapters, eh? By all the gods!” And he quoted cynically, “‘… touched by autumn, one’s figure grows slender. Soaked in frost, the chrysanthemum blooms …’ He wrote it, they say, between bouts of needlework, and I can well believe it. It doesn’t compare with the Dream of the Red Chamber.”

“That,” cried Old Teh, “is your bloody ignorance.” Followed by the disconcerted soldiers, he came closer to the mandarin’s chair, saying, “Red Chamber isn’t literature, man, it’s an ode to the barbarism of Confucius. Do what you want with my body, but don’t insult my intellect.”

Reaching out, the mandarin took my book from his hands, saying, “Ah yes, I know it well enough, but it’s a very poor edition.” He flapped its pages. “The construction’s poor, the crises few; it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but nobody could call it literature.”

Old Teh snatched back the book, crying, “Good writing is life, it has no rules.” He spat. “Had you read this instead of rubbish you might have ended up a water-carrier instead of a mandarin. So piss off, and take your Red Chamber with you. Confine yourself to rent-collecting.”

The mandarin said, obviously trying to keep his temper, “Frankly, I’m getting tired of this conversation.”

“Me too,” I said, “for I still haven’t got my book,” and Old Teh angrily shouted, “By my grandma’s arse, you’re nearly as bad as him.” He took a stance. “I shan’t let it go until I’ve finished it. It’s outrageous to be denied the ending of a book.”

Allowing freedom to literary discussion, the mandarin sighed deep. “All right, all right, how much more have you got?”

“Five pages.”

“Then don’t take all day about it, and when you’ve finished it, give it to its owner – there’s thieves all round us when it comes to books.”

So Old Teh shoved the soldiers aside with unprintable curses and sat down with his back to the tree again, and the mandarin, the garrison commander, fifty soldiers and 600 villagers waited in silence until he had read the last five pages of the classic. The sun burned into dusk, the birds sought their nests, the cicadas began in triumphant chorus. And, when he had finished reading, Old Teh rose, handed the book to me, bowed to the mandarin and said:

“In the Tang dynasty 1,000 books a month were published – not that you’d know this. In my grave, unhampered by gentry louts and mandarins, I will read the lot.” He turned to me. “My condolences to your father over there – may he continue to exploit his labourers until the communists come and take his head, and my curses on the soul of this generous old fool.” Having said this, he went to the soldiers, calling over his shoulder as they bound him hand and foot, “Goodbye Chan Lin-wai, I prefer the friendship of your childhood …”

I interrupted this by shouting to the mandarin, “My lord, this execution is against the Law!”

“Don’t you plead for me,” said Old Teh as they carried him away.

Before the mandarin’s chair, I shouted, “The government lays down certain punishments for certain crimes. Non-payment of rent attracts only a few months imprisonment …” Hearing this, Captain Pai shouted:

“Kwangtung is under martial law; the mandarin’s jurisdiction applies.”

I yelled back, “But only after reference to the Nanking judiciary!”

My father, behind me now, wailed, “Lin-wai, please …!”

Recovering himself, the mandarin said, “I will deal with this outrage later. Meanwhile, I am master here – even the son of my agent would do well to remember it.”

I shouted, while the soldiers restrained me, “He is dying because he read a poster. For communism he can be beheaded without trial and by mandarin’s command, but first he must appear before the Provincial Court and guilt reasonably proven.”

In the following momentary silence that followed, Old Teh, shouted, “I am dying because I’m a communist. With luck, the young will follow my example.”

I said, “I’ll tell them that you died for China.”

The soldiers lifted Old Teh, carried him, laid him face down in the grave and buried him alive.

I knelt above him until the struggling earth had tired.

I was awakened next dawn by sounds of firing, and Su-tai shaking me by the shoulder.

“Lin-wai, get up?” cried she.

“What is happening?”

“A messenger is here, waiting on the verandah.” This was a different Su-tai; gone was the artless languor.

“You know him?” Out of bed now, I was dressing swiftly.

“Everybody knows the communist messenger.” She stood aside as I went through the door. “Good luck.”

“You’re a strange one,” I said.

“We live in strange times.” She drew her robe closer about her.

I had seen the messenger before, one thinned by heroin; his rags fluttered in the cold dawn wind. Gasping, he said:

“I am come from Tang, the agent, to warn you. Last night many villagers signed government repentance slips, promising to deny communism; they betrayed themselves. Now the Kuomintang are rounding them up and shooting them in batches. Many in Shengsu have been buried alive.”

In Anyang County whole families were murdered on suspicion alone; slaughter was wholesale over the southern provinces, ordered by Chiang’s Nationalist Government in Nanking.

I said to the messenger, “How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

With surprising verve, he replied, “You do not, Chan Lin-wai, but if you wait here for Captain Pai you’ll very soon find out.”

“Is this man Tang in Shengsu?”

Su-tai said, behind me, “Comrade Tang is everywhere. Go, Lin-wai.” She handed me an envelope. “Don’t waste time reading it now. Collect your woman – she, too, is in danger.”

“There are communists here in this house?” I ran past her and she followed me into my room, watching while I finished dressing.

“Of course,” said she.

“They’re a strange brand.”

“That’s the art of being a communist.” She winked at me.

The messenger was still awaiting me. I looked back once, I remember. Su-tai was standing motionless on the verandah under a lightening sky. I waved: she did not wave back.

Fires burned on the outskirts of Laoshan, ragged firing grew in the middle of the village; faintly on the wind came the shrieks of women and the bass shouts of men. The messenger and I began a jog-trot into the hills, taking the road to Shengsu.

I was not surprised to find Pipa awaiting me in the yard of her cottage. I asked her if she knew what had happened, and she replied:

“All last night they’ve been rounding up the villagers who signed repentance slips. Look, I have food and a water-bottle. Tang, the agent, said you would have a letter of introduction – who to?”

The messenger gasped, “Don’t waste time reading it here – make north to Juichin, and watch the nationalist patrols.”

“Why Juichin?”

“Because Mao Tse-tung is in Juichin Soviet – if you are good communists he’s your only hope.” A sudden burst of firing came from Shengsu village outskirts. He jerked his head towards the sound. “If you are half communists, stay and die.”

Pipa whispered, her face pale in the dawn light. “But Juichin is encircled – the place is under siege – a million people have already died in Juichin Soviet!”

The young man spread his hands. “Then what is two more?”

“Come,” I said, and seized Pipa’s hand.

“But Aunt Lei, Lin – I must say goodbye to my aunt!”

“To hell with your aunt,” I said, and towed her away, ignoring her protest.

“Good luck!” called the messenger.

Later, I heard they caught him a mile outside Shengsu, warning other communists, and beheaded him. And for harbouring a communist they sought – Yang Pipa – the Kuomintang also beheaded blind Aunt Lei.

Although bathed in an Indian summer of late September, radiant and golden, this was vicious country.

Ever since the birth of Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army – the first Red uprising was at Nanchang but 100 miles north, in 1927 – this was an embattled area constantly patrolled by the Kuomintang, Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist army of millions. Kwangtung, like her sister province of Kiangsi, was a land of bayonets; occupied territory where every village was an armed outpost and every town a bastion against communism. True, there were large areas of verdant country between us