Mausoleum of Mao Zedong
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The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall (Chinese: 毛主席纪念堂; pinyin: Máo Zhǔxí Jìniàntáng), commonly known as the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, or the Mao Mausoleum, is the last resting place of Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China from 1943 and the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China from 1945 until his death.
Although Mao had wished to be cremated, his body was embalmed, and construction of a mausoleum began shortly after his death. This highly popular attraction is located in the middle of Tiananmen Square, in Beijing, the capital of China. On this site had previously stood the Gate of China, the southern (main) gate of the Imperial City during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
The remains of the Great Helmsman, as he is sometimes known, are on display for public viewing. People queue up for hundreds of metres every day to see the former chairman, many paying tribute to him with flowers that can be rented at the entrance on the north side. There is a souvenir shop at the exit on the south side.
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[edit] Construction
The mausoleum was built right after Mao's death (September 9, 1976). The groundbreaking ceremony took place November 24, 1976, and the mausoleum was completed on May 24, 1977. Hua Guofeng, who supervised the mausoleum's project, has his handwriting on the mausoleum's sign.
According to China Pictorial, Issue 9, 1977, people throughout China designed and built the mausoleum. Material from all over China was used for the construction: granite from Sichuan Province, porcelain plates from Guangdong Province, pine trees from Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, saw-wort seeds from the Tian Shan Mountains in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, earth from the quake-stricken Tangshan, color pebbles from Nanjing, milky quartz from the Kunlun Mountains, pine logs from Jiangxi Province, and rock samples from Mount Everest. Water and sand from the Taiwan Straits were also used to symbolically emphasize the People's Republic of China's claims over Taiwan. 700,000 people from different provinces, autonomous regions, and nationalities did symbolic voluntary labour. It is closed for renovation until September 20, 2007.
[edit] Embalming
At Mao's death, China did not have the embalming technologies needed to preserve Mao's body for public display. Since it was impossible for China to obtain the necessary technologies from the USSR in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, China asked for help from Vietnam, which had learned the trade from the USSR when Ho Chi Minh's body was preserved for public display, again contrary to his final wishes. Perhaps reflecting gratitude for Chinese support during the Vietnam War, Vietnam passed on the expertise learnt from the USSR. However, the effectiveness of such practice is subject to debate because there is significant controversy over whether the body is real. Visitors have noted the exceedingly waxy appearance of the corpse, as well as the speed at which visitors are ushered through the room. The body is on display for at most a few hours each day - with further restrictions during summer - fueling speculation that if the body is real, it is decaying rapidly.
[edit] Crystal coffin
Although the embalming of the body was solved by learning the Soviet trade from Vietnam, displaying the body proved a more difficult problem to solve. Because the crystal coffin for Ho Chi Minh was directly provided by the USSR, Vietnam could not pass on the necessary expertise to China. As a result, China was forced to develop the know-how indigenously. This proved to be a much greater task with huge difficulties.
[edit] Original Soviet crystal coffin
The first attempted solution for the display of Mao's body was to use the crystal coffin the USSR had provided for Sun Yat-sen, who passed away in 1925. This proved unfeasible, however, because the length of the coffin (1.75 metres) was not sufficient for Mao's 1.8 metre height. Furthermore, as the Soviets had only made the cover out of crystal, with the sides and the bottom made of steel with nickel plating, visitors would have been forced to look down at Mao's body in a way that was deemed unacceptable by the authorities.
[edit] Main Contractor
Projects to develop an indigenous crystal coffin were distributed to enterprises all over China in code names, and the one named "Task # 1" was assigned to the 608th Factory. The 608th factory was originally the 2nd Spectacles Factory, and was famed for its good quality products. For example, in 1963, merchants in Hong Kong placed an order of 6,000 pairs of lenses, the largest single foreign order China received at the time, and later, the camera lenses it produced were exported to East German Zeiss firm.[citation needed] Once its products were used for military applications, the name of the factory was changed to 608th Factory for security reasons. In 1976, the factory was one of the few in China equipped with advanced imported equipment and a mainframe computer. Mao's spectacles and magnifying glasses were made in this factory, under the plant manager, Mr. Cai Dengyuan (蔡登元), who was a famous optometrist/optician before becoming the plant manager. The communist party secretary of the plant was Mr. Wang Zhuqian (王著谦). The design was a political task, and started immediately after the order was received, even before the design team had an opportunity to inspect the Soviet crystal coffin delivered to China in 1925 for Dr. Sun Yat-sen. The only reference the team had was the photo of the crystal coffin of Lenin faxed to them by the Chinese embassy. Just two days fter receiving the fax, the design was completed, and a 1:4 scaled mock-up made of plastic was built soon after.
[edit] Material and technical challenges
Quartz glass is a vital material for the production of crystal coffins, but the raw material - quartz crystals - were rare in China. Furthermore, less than 10% of the total available quartz met the requirements to manufacture quartz glass. The largest piece found in China was no larger than 40 cm, and there was no good grade crystal in the world of the required size: 2 metres.
Compounding the material shortage, there was no equipment in China large enough to handle the size of the required material. In fact, there was (and at present still is) no such equipment of this kind in the world , and the largest piece China was equipped to handle was only 0.5 metres or less.
[edit] Overcoming the difficulties
The subcontractors to produce the quartz powder for the quartz glass surfaces of the crystal coffin were numerous, including the 603rd factory, the 605th factory, and the Beijing General Glass Factory. The crystal used was from the East China Sea, solving the raw material shortage problem, but there was a new problem: after the annealing, it would take three years for the internal stress of the large piece of quartz glass to disappear. Mr. Xu Zhaocai (徐兆采), a senior technician of the 605th Factory, developed a new technique of processing that solved this problem by welding 20 square centimeter pieces into the larger 2 square meters plate. The melting point was over 2000 degrees Celsius, and a senior technician, Mr. Shi Weicheng (石维成) was assigned the task of welding with a hydrogen-oxygen flame gun. During the welding process, the metallic protective gear worn by Mr. Shi Weicheng (石维成) began to smoke due to the high temperature, and he had to stand in a specially designed pool while other workers poured water on him to cool him down; when he was finished, the water level reached his ankles. The resulting purity reached 99.9999%.
[edit] Processing the crystal plate
The 100 mm crystal plates needed to be ground down to 45 mm in order to be built into the crystal coffin, and China had no technology to do so. The 608th factory staff finally found equipment large enough for the task in the Beijing First Machine Tool Factory: a single West German 2 metre precision grinding machine and eight planer-type milling machines. The equipment did not exactly meet the requirements, so the teams of both factories sacrificed other production to join forces and modify the equipment to fit the exact need of the political task. At this time, Beijing was frequently struck by the aftershocks of the 1976 Tangshan earthquake; during these aftershocks, workers would reportedly stop the machine and throw themselves on top of the plates, using their own bodies to shield the plates from falling debris.
[edit] Illumination
While overcoming the problems of processing the crystal into the quartz plates, the issue of appropriate illumination was being worked on simultaneously, lead by project manager Mr. Ren Fuguang (任夫广), the head of the optical research and design department, with the optical engineer Mr. Li Jiaying (李家英) as the chief designer.
Beijing Medical University (now merged into Beijing University) provided a ten-year old specimen head for the project, and after harmonizing colors by varying the colors, angles, and intensity of the illumination, the skin color appeared to be closer to that of a living person instead of the original grey, and the appearance of wrinkles was significantly reduced. After evaluating numerous designs, it was decided to adopt illumination via xenon lamps installed inside the coffin. The xenon lamps inside the coffin were from a brand new design that adopted fiber-optic technology, could not be seen by visitors when viewing Mao's body, and would still provide the correct illumination if one of the lamps was out. The xenon illumination system inside the crystal coffin was designed by Mr. Cai Zuquan (蔡祖泉).
[edit] Shape of the coffin
In order to elimate reflections, as well as obtaining the strongest strength, the crystal plates had to be connected at precise angles. Optical engineer Mr. Wang Daheng (王大珩) was enlisted to help and after numerous calculations the best angles were obtained. It was discovered that the selection of the angles was so precise that even without the adhesives and other methods of connection, the plates would not collapse. The dimensional tolerance was up to 10 micrometres.
[edit] Selection
On November 27, 1976, the crystal coffin built by the 608th factory was sent for earthquake (magnitude 8.0), vibration, temperature, and other environmental tests. Nearly two dozen crystal coffins from all over China were also there for the competition, and Shanghai had six in total. The unique one was the one from Sichuan, which was in a circular shape with red carpet inside, symbolizing the red sun, the symbol of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. However, the crystal coffin built by the 608th factory defeated its competitors and was selected on the spot.
The building of the crystal coffin for Mao was a closely guarded secret until recently, and Dr. Xu Jing (徐静), who participated in the design and later headed the managerial bureau of Mao Zedong's Mausoleum before his retirement, wrote a book titled The Place where a Great Man Rests after the declassification to finally reveal the process previously unknown to the public.
[edit] Controversy
After the reform started in 1979 in China, however, it was revealed that the symbolic voluntary labor was, allegedly, a complete waste of time and other resources, because the significant majority of the voluntary work performed was nothing other than a political propaganda showpiece: the so-called 'volunteers' would come to the construction site to form a human chain and pass the bricks from one end to the other, and the next day, a different group of the so-called 'volunteers' would repeat the task, except the bricks were passed back to the original spot. Actual work that would really help the construction was never done. As a result, the construction of the mausoleum of Mao cost (measured in 1977 prices) ten times more than that of the Great Hall of the People (measured in 1959 prices). This waste of resources was used by the reformers within the communist party to criticize Hua Guofeng and his followers, but once the reformers had consolidated their power after Hua Guofeng was removed, further discussion on this sensitive topic was banned.
[edit] Vandalism attempts
Security of the mausoleum has increased steadily since its completion due to sporadic vandalism attempts. The Chinese government admits that the guards have successfully thwarted two vandalism attempts by subduing the culprits while they were still waiting in line outside: both were carried out by a man acting alone, and both involved attempts to use explosives. In one case, the guards discovered the wooden handles of hand grenades protruding outside the culprit's pockets, while in the other, the guards discovered the unusually bulging pockets of the culprit contained dynamite.[citation needed]
According to the Chinese democracy movement, there was at least one attempt which successfully reached inside the mausoleum: in the 1990s, an unemployed female textile worker from Xinyang managed to slip inside and attempted to use a metal weight to crack the crystal casket of Mao, but she was quickly apprehended.[citation needed]
[edit] Reference
- The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall Successfully Completed (Issue 9, 1977). China Pictorial, pg. 4-12.
[edit] External links
