On a chilly October evening in 1934, more than 86,000 Red Army soldiers gathered on the banks of the Yudu River in Jiangxi Province and slipped across the water under cover of darkness. Nobody in the ranks knew it at the time, but that crossing marked the start of the Long March — a two-year, 25,000-li trek across some of China's toughest terrain that would reshape the country's future.
The crossing itself was a feat of improvisation. Locals floated more than 800 boats of every size, lashing them together with planks taken from villagers' doorways, roof beams and even coffin boards saved for elderly relatives. The result was a pontoon bridge strong enough to move an army, built by a riverside community that lined the banks to wave the soldiers off, pressing eggs and glutinous rice balls into their pockets as they marched.
A recent interview for China.org.cn between Wang Xiaohui and editor David Ferguson revisits why that night mattered. The Red Army had been boxed in. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang had mounted repeated encirclement campaigns, and a fifth, launched in 1933 with over a million troops and more than 200 aircraft, squeezed the revolutionary base areas around Ruijin until, by October 1934, breakthrough was the only option left. Ruijin, a small village in southeastern Jiangxi, had been proclaimed capital of the Chinese Soviet Republic in November 1931 — a brief-lived state where farmers received land and a vote.
The interview's central theme is the faith that carried poorly equipped soldiers — some units lacked even a single light machine gun — through devastating losses and an unknown destination. As Ferguson puts it in his reflection on the riverbank, ideals untested by hardship may have no real substance; the Long March was the test. The army lost entire battalions defending earth-and-wood bunkers against artillery and airstrikes, yet kept its cohesion and its sense of mission through two years of marching into the unknown.
For travellers, Yudu and Ruijin sit at the heart of China's 'red tourism' circuit in Jiangxi. The Yudu River crossing site and its memorial are the emotional starting point of any Long March itinerary, and Ruijin's preserved Soviet-era sites add context to the story that began there. It's a very different kind of Chinese trip: not temples or megacities, but rural Jiangxi scenery and a chapter of 20th-century history that locals treat with real reverence.
