YAN’AN (China): Coarse grain and a night in a cave don’t feature in most holiday brochures, but the remote town of Yan’an hopes to earn a fortune from ‘red tourists’ eager to relive the tough experiences of China’s Communist pioneers.

Yan’an was a dusty but secure home to Mao Zedong from 1935 to 1947 and where he coined the motto ‘serve the people’ and welded his party into a fighting force capable of winning the civil war. But since the troops left, its main industry has been reliving the past.

And with 2005 declared the year of Red Tourism – travels to sites where Communist heroes were born, lived or fought — the town government hopes to increase its earnings.

“Only if we understand history can we improve our future,” said Mayor Zhang Shenian as he detailed a 21-billion-yuan ($2.5-billion) plan to improve Yan’an’s museums, air links and roads in order to lure revolution fans.

“We are one of China’s revolutionary bases ... But we also live here and therefore we have to use it as an opportunity to develop the economy,” Zhang added.

Among the attractions the town offers are a three-star cave hotel, endless Mao memorabilia ranging from key-rings to lifesize busts and communist snacks such as ‘coarse grain’ to feed any pangs of nostalgia for tougher days.

Financially, the 3.9 million tourists they helped lure last year to the town, in the northern province of Shaanxi, could be a powerful tool for raising incomes that averaged only 6,334 yuan ($765) a year in the region’s towns.

A Yan’an tour also sets an example to the party faithful by depicting its founders leading an austere, self-sacrificing existence — although a recent biography of Mao claims they also sanctioned opium production while based there to raise funds.

Despite a couple of skyscrapers and a gleaming department store in the town centre, parts of Yan’an are crying out for investment.

At the Revolution Memorial Hall a white-washed wall separates the crowds of young soldiers, cadres and veterans filing past the stuffed remains of Mao’s getaway house from the type of slum the communists were fighting to eradicate.

Dirty-faced children play in mud alleys between wood and dirt shacks; a network of wires snake above the houses while raw sewage bakes in a ditch behind a public toilet.

Near the museum gate, a woman selling toilet paper and soft drinks has never heard of red tourism but is more nostalgic than many of the middle-class visitors to the complex.

“These days the poor just stay poor and the rich are getting richer. Things were more equal in Mao’s time,” she said, giving only her last name, Zhou.

She brought up two children in the small slum and earns less than 10,000 yuan a year, and although she says visitor numbers are up, there seems to be little ‘trickle-down’ wealth reaching her, as most tourists are whisked by her stall on buses.

Taxi drivers say they also make little from tourists, who all arrive on buses, are driven around and stick in their groups.

Indeed, in Yan’an’s communist heritage sites there are barely any individual visitors, just groups in uniform or with matching baseball caps trooping around together.

“We mostly get students and cadres,” said party member Zuo Tie, who for nine years has been showing visitors around caves that were home to Mao, Zhou Enlai and other party luminaries.

Cadres or not, there is little sign among many of the 3,000 visitors per day of the iron discipline the old leaders might have advocated.

A group from Anhui province — another relatively poor area — spurned the chance to dress up in Mao suits for the excitement of taking photos with foreigners.

For other groups of visitors it is just one more stop on a tour through the nationalist heartland of Chinese history.

“We have visited the terracotta warriors and the mausoleum of the Yellow Emperor,” said a Nanjing shipping agent, referring to one of the legendary founding fathers of Chinese civilization.

“Mao is one of the great figures of our history ... so we wanted to come here as well,” added the tourist as he clambered aboard a tour bus with his giggling 6-year-old daughter.

Others, such as Yan’an teacher Zhang Hongwei, whose first name means Red Guard — chosen because she was born in 1966 to fervently Maoist parents — never tire of the dusty halls.

Leading a group of visiting teachers between the military maps and touched-up photographs of Mao, past artefacts ranging from the blanket of purged writer Ding Ling to yellowing boxes of medicine, she said she always enjoys a trip.

“Mao was a great man. I’m looking forward to the new museum.”

—Reuters