From October 1927 until February 1930 the mountain was the first revolutionary base of the Chinese Communist Party. Mao Zedong, Zhu De, Chen Yi, Peng Dehuai and Teng Daiyuan led the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army here, and the mountain is given as the place where a road was opened from the countryside around the cities, to be taken by armed force, and from there to national victory. The physical remains are substantial: more than a hundred sites from those years survive, and twenty-one of them are listed as national key protected relics.
From the journal
Two mountains in one
Jinggangshan is a revolutionary memorial and a spring garden at the same time, and the honest way to read it keeps both.
In the same city · Ji'an ↗October 1927 to February 1930
Ten li of azalea
The other mountain is the one that makes the place worth visiting in a particular month. The scenic area covers 213.5 square kilometres across eight sections, including Ciping, Huangyangjie, Longtan and the main peak, and in April and May the ridges carry flowering azalea for a distance the guides simply call ten li. It is subtropical highland: cloud, bamboo, and forest that closes in as the road climbs. Standing at Huangyangjie with the cloud below you, it is not difficult to see why the place was chosen as a base in the first place.
How to read a memorial mountain
Both halves are real and they are usually presented in separate paragraphs, which is why visitors can leave having seen one or the other. The mountain is a documented revolutionary site with museums and protected monuments, and it is simultaneously one of the most beautiful mountain areas in the province. A more useful question is how the two fit: the roads, the ridges and the weather that shaped this place are the same ones the revolutionaries used. Read as one mountain, the history and the landscape explain each other, and the visitor gets both.