Chingkang Mountain
[a tsu to the melody of Moon over the West River, Hsichiang Yueh]
[Translated by Nancy Lin]
Flags and banners stud the mountain side,
Drums and bugles rally on the top.
Let the enemy come
With their thousand-ringed siege,
Unmoved we stand –
A towering rock!
Guarded forts and vigilant watch;
A citadel, too, of united wills!
Then – the burst and boom
Of the reports of guns from Huangyangkai:
The enemy, oho,
Have scuttled at night!
Notes [by Nancy Lin]
Chingkang Mountain: now known throughout the country as the cradle of revolution. Striding the border between Hunan and Kiangsi, the mountain covers an area of 250 kilometres round, with terrains of strong natural defense position. Here in September 1927, Mao established with some 1,000 men the first rural base of Red power, joined by forces under Chu The and Chen Yi in April 1928.
Huangyangkai: one of the five strategic passes that lead up to Chingkang Mountain. On August 30, 1928, Kuomintang troops launched four successive attacks on Huangyangkai and finally withdrew with heavy losses. In explaining the last lines of the present poem, Chen Yi, himself a poet, made it clear in a lecture on Mao’s poems some time in May 1962 that the boom of guns here refers to the volleys of enemy fire designed to protect their rear on retreating.
The poem stands as an apt memento to the successful defense of the Chingkang base. A little over a month’s time after the poem, Mao wrote his momentous article ‘Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?’