The general headquarters of the uprising was the Jiangxi Grand Hotel, next to the Wanshou Palace. It was put up in 1923 as a five-storey grey brick-and-timber building, 26 metres wide and 42 metres deep, 23.5 metres high, its plan folded into the shape of the character hui around a central courtyard, with ninety-six rooms in all. It was a working hotel for travellers on the Gan when it became the place where a rebellion was planned.
From the journal
The room where the date was chosen
The 1927 uprising that opened the Chinese civil war was organised in a hotel that had been built four years earlier.
In the same city · Nanchang ↗A hotel with ninety-six rooms
Why the first of August
On 1 August 1927 the Communist Party of China launched the August 1st Uprising from this building, and the date is why the uprising still carries it. The second floor on the east side held the working and living rooms of Zhou Enlai and Lin Boqu. The set of sites that makes up the uprising headquarters, including the overall headquarters, the He Long and Ye Ting headquarters, the Zhu De officers' training corps and Zhu De's former home, was listed as a first-batch national key protected relic in 1961.
A corner in an ordinary street
The museum is easy to miss, which is part of its character. The building is not a monument set apart from the city; it is a hotel on a street of shops and arcades near the Wanshou Palace market, and its courtyard still has to be entered through the same doorway any guest would have used. That is what makes the place worth standing in: a revolution began in a room that had been built for sleeping, on a street that still trades.