📍Shaoshan Village, Shaoshan, Xiangtan, Hunan 411300, China
1893 – 1913“I was born in 1893 in Shaoshan, a village in Hunan province in central China, the son of a peasant farmer who had made himself prosperous through frugality and hard work. Shaoshan was a village of perhaps six hundred people, surrounded by rice paddies and low green hills, and my childhood was the childhood of rural China — intensely physical, close to the land, shaped by the rhythms of agriculture and the Confucian social order that my father enforced with an authority I resisted from early childhood. I left Shaoshan at sixteen to attend school in the county town, and I never really returned. But the Hunan peasant world gave me the subject of my political life: the hundreds of millions of people like my father's neighbours whose labour sustained China and who received nothing for it.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Chang, J. & Halliday, J. Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), Knopf; Short, P. Mao: A Life (1999), Henry Holt