Also known as Jinggang Shan Shi, CIPING is, at least in scale, nothing more than a village. Completely destroyed by artillery bombardments during the 1930s, it was rebuilt after the Communist takeover as one enormous revolutionary relic, though recent greening projects have lightened the heavily heroic architecture and monuments, giving the place a dated rural charm. The main streets form a two-kilometre elliptical circuit, the lower half of which is taken up with a lake surrounded by grassy gardens - much appreciated by straying cattle - and a tiny amusement park, complete with a real MiG-style fighter plane to play on.

 

Ciping's austere historical monuments can be breezed through fairly quickly, as it's the surrounding hills which better recreate a feeling of how the Communist guerrillas might have lived. Five minutes west of the bus station at the top end of town is the squat, angular Martyrs' Tomb , positioned at the top of a broad flight of stairs and facing the mountains that the fighters it commemorates died defending. Farther round at the Revolutionary Museum (8am-4pm; ¥6), signs ban smoking, spitting and laughter, and the exhibition consists almost entirely of maps showing battle sites and troop movements up until 1930 - after this the Communists suffered some heavy defeats. Paintings of a smiling Mao preaching to peasant armies face cases of the spears, flintlocks and mortars which initially comprised the Communist arsenal, perhaps suggesting that righteousness will prevail against all odds. On a more mundane level, a group of mud-brick rooms across the park at the Former Revolutionary Headquarters (8am-4pm; ¥6) gives an idea of what Ciping might have originally looked like, and, as the site of where Mao and Zhu De co-ordinated their guerrilla activities and the start of the Long March, is the town's biggest attraction as far as visiting cadres are concerned.