The marshal's birthplace at Wutan, and the hall in the town

Nie Rongzhen was born on 29 December 1899 at Shiyuanzi in Wutan township, in what was then Jiangjin County. His father was Nie Shixian and his mother Tang Yushan. At eight he spent three years in a private school at his maternal grandfather's house; in 1917 he entered Jiangjin Middle School, where he read Darwin, Huxley and the magazine New Youth. He joined the student protests of 1919, and when the school came under pressure and he could not continue, he left for France on the work-study programme. He sailed from Shanghai on 9 December 1919 and reached Marseille on 14 January 1920.

Shiyuanzi is now listed as a national key cultural relic site under the name Nie Rongzhen Former Residence; it was listed by Sichuan in 1996, by Chongqing in 2000, and in the seventh national batch on 5 March 2013. In 1999 the city built the Nie Rongzhen Marshal Exhibition Hall, now a national second-grade museum and a 4A scenic area, its name inscribed by Jiang Zemin. The Chongqing Nie Rongzhen Research Society was founded on 20 December 1997 and has its office in the hall. A bronze statue stands in the town centre.

He was made a Marshal of the People's Republic in September 1955 and directed the military modernisation programme known as Two Bombs, One Satellite. He died in Beijing on 14 May 1992, aged 92, the last of the ten marshals to die. In November 1999 Jiangjin and Miyakonojō, the birthplace of the Japanese girl he had rescued in 1940, became sister cities; Mihoko had visited him in Beijing in 1980 with her family. His early working years were spent as a tyre inspector, fitter, turner and coking worker at Hutchinson, Schneider, Renault and Siemens.