Hommage to the "Marques de Dai" & to Mao Tse Tung

  Changsha, Hunan, China
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Changsha's main attraction is without any question the Hunan Provincial Museum and its most important tenant: the well preserved mummy of the "Marques de Dai" (Lady Dai) who was a noble woman belonging to the upper class and who died at the age of 50.

Marques de Dai "alive"

2100 years ago.When her body was found by Chinese archeologists, it was applauded as one of the most important excarvations in modern history, to compare only to the pharaons in ancient Egypt.

Marques de Dai, the 2100 year old mummy

But the museum is also worthwile to visit for its other collections, all thousand of years old.It tries to portrait Hunan province as the craddle of Chinese civilization.
My second visit today goes to a person whose body has also been preserved for the future!!Mao Tse Tung, the founder father of Modern China!Of course, the corps is in Beijing, on Tiananman square, but his birthplace is in Shaoshan, just 130km SW of Changsha.But the problem is to find transportation today, its a major chinese holiday time just around the corner, and the waiting time at the train station, just to buy a ticket, is enormous.
So I decide to take local bus no. 7 to the south bus terminal (with its golden Mao statue!)

At the busstation of Changsha-Mao's province

and from there another local bus for around 90 minutes through lovely countryside scenery.
The birthplace of Mao is a simple farmerhouse

Birthplace of Mao Tse Tung-Shaoshan

, on the wall photos of the parents and his two brothers who have both fallen in the war against the Japanese.Mao Tse Tung has come back here just once for a short visit in 1959. On the way back to Changsha, we had a bus accident

Our bus accident

, nothing serious, but the driver had to report to the police, and I had to look for a taxi, but no chance, all full. It took me more than an hour to find onward transportation, stranded on a highway, on the outskirts of Changsha.