February 21, 2016
Jeishou on the Xiang River
the X142, S201 & S303
It isn’t if it would rain, but when. My money will go on sooner rather than later.
It turns out I'd have backed a looser, but it's chilly and quite a contrast from yesterday.
I cruise down to the river to have another quick look for a marker about the Long March crossing, and also to find some breakfast - specifically steamed buns. A mother and her roughly 25-year-old daughter have a monopoly on them. I eat three, which is slightly piggy of me, and chat to the young woman through an app on her phone. She seems a bit bored in te place and intrigued to find a foreigner, but her mother is overbearing and doesn’t seem to care for her daughter being interested in what an old guy like me - clad in black tights - is doing in their small town. I can understand it, but it isn't nice.
I could have told her my plan is to head down to where the southern-most group of Red Army troops got caught by some Nationalists who had advanced north.
The spot is about 15km west of the Guanjiang River, near a village called Guanmingcun, which now sits beside the north-south S201 near a junction with Country Road X142.
I hope the rain will stay away and the daughter types ‘be careful’ on her phone then we wave each other goodbye, as her sour-faced mother looks on while the man in black tights pedals off down the main street, back over the simple bridge spanning the Guanjiang.
Just a few kilometres south from the S-road is a village called Yueling, which was once a paifang (an administrative centre). Its tall and fancy 150-year-old carved gateway has characters honoring chastity and filial piety, plus a pair of dragons toying with a pearl, but the real joy of the place is its narrow passages and ramshackle alleys, lined with homes oozing character.
It’s not a museum piece and hasn’t been gentrified, like others have. In a way it is sad to see it so dilapidated, but it's a proper living village, at least what's left of it.
Most of the people I see are quite old, around 70 or more, and I wonder if they’d been Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. The men’s clothes look to be of that period – blue jackets and caps. Half a dozen are grouped at the entrance and eye me up silently with a disconcerting concoction of indifference and curiosity.
I spend around an hour wandering around the village. There's only one small group of visitors, and they don’t hang around long. It's the highlight of my day. Although sunshine is absent, I still go a bit crazy taking snaps and the lack of light just means using the tripod...
Back on the now undulating X142, I ride south towards the fateful river crossing at the village of Shuiche. I pop down to the river bank, via a passage between houses, but can’t see any Long March marker. As I ride across the bridge, a modern concrete one, I imagine the Reds wading across in the cold November weather. Ouch.
From here it's an hour or more to where around 100 Reds were killed during fighting at the very end of November 1934. I use a screen-shot I have on my tablet to get directions.
The X road connects to the S201 and I follow it south for 10 minutes and see a sign for the memorial. It's right beside a quarry that's being excavated and large trucks are carting off the lumps of rock. There's dust in the air and the memorial looks a bit sad and it's hard to imagine many people stopping to check it out. It's built beside a well, still there, that many Red soldiers were thrown down.
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As I want to get close to where I can renew my visa, its a good idea to press on and with the rain holding off, I stay on the S201 until it reach the S303, at a place called Shitanzhen. A 2,000-strong Red vanguard went through this place on November 27th and 10,000 marchers did so the following day. The back markers arrived about a week later. It was the vanguard that organized a pontoon to be built across the Xiang River, 20-odd kilometers ahead.
Maybe it's the dismal weather, but Shitanzhen looks a bit forlorn and doesn't appeal as a rest stop. I ride on and follow the highway west all the way to the Jeishou, which sits astride the Xiang River - the scene of the biggest number of deaths suffered by the Reds during the Long March.
Today's ride: 85 km (53 miles)
Total: 1,167 km (725 miles)
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