Background Info'

"Without the victory of the Long March, we wouldn't have today's China. The victory was big. But also the sacrifice was big."

(Long March survivor)

Mao Zedong and He Zezhen (Gui-yuan) - his third wife and one of the few female Long Marchers

With Chiang Kai-shek’s massive Nationalist army on the verge of annihilating the Red bases in eastern and southeastern China, the Communists had to flee. They began setting off in the early hours of October 10th, 1934, with some 80-odd thousand soldiers marching over a pontoon bridge spanning a river on the southern edge of a town called Yudu, in Jiangxi province. They initially wove a path west before eventually veering north, crossing over snow-topped mountains and raging rivers, bleak treeless plateaus, dangerous swampy marshes and baking-hot deserts, all the while dodging relentless attacks from the chasing Nationalists. It's estimated that less than 10 percent made it to Yan'an, in Shaanxi.

Men and boys comprised the vast majority of the ill-equipped marchers, with merely 30 women being allowed to join the First Army's trek. Some were the partners of leaders, such as Mao's wife, He Zezhen, who was pregnant. The others had jumped at the rare chance to escape from the rampant poverty and incessant hardship of rural China, where young girls were often sold as brides – tongyangxi – and thereafter often condemned to a slave-like life of abuse.

It took 12 arduous months for the roughly 8,000 - perhaps even as few as 4,000 - survivors to reach a new home up in the remote province of Shaanxi. Their miraculous escape got dubbed The Long March, something skillfully used as a clarion call for a generation of revolutionary Chinese, and a historic feat which remains a powerful piece of Party propaganda. It forms the foundation on which the CCP is built and in the words of one marcher, "Without the victory of the Long March, we wouldn't have today's China."

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