Monday, 1 June 2015

The Former Residence of Zhou Enlai

Originally posted 13th February 2015

Zhou Enlais house on Sinan Road
Zhou Enlai's house on Sinan Road
Just down the road from Dr Sun Yat-sen's house on Sinan Road is the former residence of Zhou Enlai, first Premier of the People's Republic of China.  When he lived on Sinan Road he was head of the Shanghai Communist Party.
 
 
Photographs were allowed here and I didn't have to pay to enter.  It's portrayed more as a command post than a home, with dormitories for visiting communist party members and furnished very spartanly.

 
Interior Zhou Enlai's house
Interior Zhou Enlai's house
Dormitory Zhou Enlai's house
Dormitory Zhou Enlai's house
Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai
 
Replica Buick official car
Replica Buick official car

A man who appears to have been a supreme diplomat both as Foreign Minister and internally within the Communist Party, Zhou Enlai was one of the very few to survive the purges within the party during the Cultural Revolution. He consolidated the Communists' rise to power, devised policies over disputes with many states including Taiwan, the US, India, Vietnam and the USSR, as well as doing his best to diminish the consequences of the actions of the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.  He was the ultimate survivor and appears to have managed his close relationship with Mao Zedong extraordinarily well, given what happened to his other comrades.  When he was dying of cancer, Mao refused to let the doctors tell Zhou or his wife, or to let them treat him, for that matter.  Of all those in power after the 1949 revolution it is Zhou Enlai that appears to have come through it all as the most revered by the Chinese.

No comments:

Post a Comment