Xiangtan (湘潭) sits on a C-shaped bend of the Xiang in central Hunan. Rice and medicine trade made it the richest inland market of the Ming and Qing, nicknamed Little Nanjing, with shop streets strung along seven kilometres of bank. The coming of the railways moved the transport hub to neighbouring Zhuzhou, and Xiangtan turned to steel and machinery instead. It administers Shaoshan, Mao Zedong's birthplace, and counts among its natives the Qing statesman Zeng Guofan, the painter Qi Baishi and the marshal Peng Dehuai.
Shaoshan is the small hill county where Mao Zedong was born in 1893, a memorial landscape for over seventy years. The old village, the memorial complex and the living town around it are the three faces of a place turned shrine.