THIS year marks the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army’s 12,500-kilometre Long March, the Communist Party of China’s strategic retreat and redeployment from October 1934 to October 1936 that brought its forces to Northwest China’s Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, where the Party established revolutionary bases. It has come to symbolise the determination, persistence and presence of mind needed to enable people to accomplish the seemingly impossible. This epic journey relocated the CPC’s political base, established Mao Zedong’s leadership and ultimately paved the way for the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The march was an arduous trek, as the Red Army battled Kuomintang forces and adverse natural conditions, crossing 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers through some of China’s most forbidding terrain. Only less than one-tenth of the original 86,000 comrades of the Central Red Army leaving their base in Jiangxi province survived upon ending the journey.

Hunan people relate this history to the region around the Xiangjiang River. In the Tianyi Wood Kingdom scenic area within a high-tech zone situated between Changsha and Yiyang, stands a monumental Long March-themed root carving, alongside works embodying the Silk Road and ancient Chinese classics including The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Journey to the West.

Carved from a single mass of 1,000-year-old camphor tree roots weighing over 600 metric tons, it stretches 100 metres long, 2.5 metres wide and 3.8 metres tall. A team of more than 70 root-carving craftsmen spent three years meticulously sculpting the enormous trunk. The carving depicts 808 individual Red Army soldiers and brings to life 13 classic historical scenes, including the Zunyi Conference and the forced crossing of the Dadu River, transitioning from the snowy mountains and grasslands to the final settling in northern Shaanxi.

Published in Dawn, October 26th, 2026