China still has an estimated 312 statues of Chairman Mao standing — a big drop from the 2,000-plus that dotted the country at the peak of Cultural Revolution-era devotion. For travellers with an interest in 'red tourism', those that remain make for a genuinely quirky theme to build a trip around, and some of them are enormous.
The tallest of them all sits on the Jinyun campus of Chongqing Medical University: a stainless-steel Mao completed in 2008, standing 37.4 metres tall with its pedestal and weighing around 46 tonnes. It shares the top spot's billing with itself in most rankings — the figure alone is 20.6 metres. Nearby rivals include the 36.6-metre gold-painted seated Mao in Zhushigang village, Tongxu County, Henan, finished in 2015. It briefly made international headlines before being dismantled, so check before you go.
Third place belongs not to a conventional standing statue but to the young Mao of Orange Isle in Changsha, Hunan: a 32-metre granite head-and-torso portrait of Mao in his youth, stretching 83 metres long. It's arguably the most photogenic of the lot and sits in a pleasant riverside park in the middle of a major city.
Classic Cultural Revolution-era pieces deserve their own detour. Shenyang's Zhongshan Square monument (around 20 metres, unveiled 1970) shows Mao looming above workers, peasants and soldiers in full socialist-realist style. Chengdu's Tianfu Square statue, completed in 1969, packs symbolic measurements referencing Mao's birthday and the founding of the Communist Party into its 19.36 metres. Zhengzhou has a similar 1968 build with embedded symbolic dates. Down the scale a little, Mao's birthplace of Shaoshan in Hunan has a 10.1-metre statue unveiled in 1993 for his centenary — now the heart of a whole pilgrim-tourism town.
For steel purists, the debate is between the Fularji district statue in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang — built in 1969 from stainless steel produced by China First Heavy Industries — and the Chongqing monument. Fularji long claimed the 'largest steel Mao' title, though it may actually be runner-up. There's also a 12.26-metre stone Mao in Gongga County, Tibet, and an honourable mention for the big statue beside Dandong railway station, facing North Korea.
One bonus for Europe-based collectors of the unusual: the world's only Mao statue outside China stands on Place du XXe Siècle in Montpellier, France, installed in 2012 at the instigation of mayor Georges Frêche as part of a rogues' gallery of historical figures.
Why bother? These statues double as an offbeat map of modern China — rust-belt industrial towns, university campuses, city-centre squares and Mao's home village — and several are easy to slot into a standard Beijing–Xi'an–Chengdu itinerary. Shenyang, Chengdu, Zhengzhou, Changsha and Chongqing all have major airports or high-speed rail, so you can string together a statue-hopping route with proper food and sightseeing in between.
