Mao Ze Dung Statue, Orange island, Changsha

Mao Ze Dung Statue, Orange island, Changsha

The father of modern China is forever associated with Changsha. While he was born in 1893 in the little town of Shaoshan about half an hour’s drive from the city, Mao went to school and subsequently university – at the Yuelu Academy in Changsha City and launched his political career here. He is remembered with this strikingly romantic, thirty-two-metre-high bust, sculpted from 800 tons of granite. It depicts Mao in his early thirties, in a period when he would swim in the Xiangjiang river with his friends, and when he wrote a poem dedicated to the city and set on Orange Island where he stood, ‘in the autumn cold…, the Xiang flowing northward… a thousand hills crimsoned through, by their serried woods.’ The island is easily visited by boat from Changsha.