Excerpt from The Long March by Sun Shuyun, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

If we save the mountain, we’ll have wood.
If we save the river, we’ll have fish to fry.
If we save the Revolution, we’ll have our own land.
If we save the Soviet, red flags will fly.


In December 1933, Wang had some unexpected news. Her devotion and success in work with women and young people brought her to Ruijin, the Red capital, as the people’s representative for the Second National Congress of the Soviet.

“Have you visited Ruijin?” Wang asked me expectantly. I said I was going to after seeing her.

“You should have gone there first. It was the capital! An old lady like me can wait. You know, we had a saying at the time: up north it is Beijing; down south it is Ruijin.”

She did concede later, although very reluctantly, that Ruijin could not compare with Beijing. It was a typical southern town with good feng shui. The curving Mian River embraced it, and an undulating mountain range shielded it from the west, with a white pagoda overlooking it from the hill to the east. No bigger than an average county town, its four gates and four roads leading in from them crossed at the center, and 7,000 people lived within its walls. Because Chiang had imposed an economic blockade with his Fifth Campaign, many shops had their shutters down. Local products such as bamboo, paper, nuts, and dried vegetables from the mountains could not be shipped out; salt, oil, gasoline, cloth, and other daily necessities could not come in. Those who broke the embargo were liable to punishment or even execution. The Nationalists reinforced the blockade with a Special Movement Corps, whose members had every incentive to catch the offenders—they were rewarded with 50 percent of whatever they confiscated.

Wherever there were profits, there were smugglers: salt, medicine, gunpowder, and other much-needed items were transported, hidden in coffins, at the bottom of manure baskets, and inside bamboo poles. They even managed to bring in an X–ray machine in a coffin, with three dozen men and women pretending to be grieving relatives, crying their eyes out. The warlord of Guangdong also defied the blockade by secretly buying tungsten that was found in abundance within the Soviet. But it was like throwing a cup of water onto flaming firewood. Ruijin was feeling the pinch. Salt was the scarcest commodity; Wang did not taste salt for months, and out of sheer desperation she and her friends scraped the white deposits from the walls of toilets, and even from graveyards, and boiled them down.

Excerpted from The Long March by Sun Shuyun Copyright © 2007 by Sun Shuyun. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.