Site of the Former Hospital of the Fourth Red Army of China in Xiaojing

Site of the Former Hospital of the Fourth Red Army of China in Xiaojing

The Site of the Former Hospital of the Fourth Red Army of China in Xiaojing is a classic red tourism attraction.

In October 1927, on his way to Jinggangshan with the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army, Mao Zedong set up a makeshift field hospital in Maoping Village, Ninggang County. After the victorious rendezvous of Mao Zedong and Zhu De’s forces in Jinggangshan in May 1928, they established a rear hospital in the Greater and Lesser Wujing areas of Jinggangshan. The hospital was divided into four management units: the first and second were located in Dajing Village, the third in Zhongjing Village, and the fourth in Xiaojing Village, with the hospital headquarters in Zhongjing Village. Cao ?U served as the hospital director, and Xiao Guangqiu as the Party representative. By the end of the year, Zeng Zhi had taken on the role of Party branch secretary. To improve medical conditions for wounded and sick Red Army soldiers, the Second Congress of the CPC Border Area Committee in October of the same year resolved to “build a better Red Army hospital.” Red Army officers and soldiers donated their meal allowances, and soldiers and civilians worked together using local materials. At the time, Zeng Zhi was seven months pregnant but still joined others in chopping and carrying wood up the mountain to Xiaojing Village. In the winter of 1928, a two-story Red Army inpatient ward was completed in Xiaojing, featuring a roof covered with Chinese fir bark, entirely made of wood, with a total of 32 rooms. It was named the “Hongguang Hospital.”

Due to the enemy’s tight economic blockade of Jinggangshan, medical conditions at the hospital were extremely poor. Medical staff and wounded soldiers struggled arduously, relying on their own resourcefulness and making do with limited resources to overcome numerous challenges and heal batches of wounded who then returned to the front lines. Western medicine was scarce, so medical personnel collected herbs such as honeysuckle, heartleaf houttuynia, and spreading hedyotis from the mountains to make decoctions for the wounded. Lacking medical instruments, they improvised tools such as tweezers, disinfection basins, and probes from wood and bamboo. Without cotton wool, they washed and reused local cloth as substitute. A single gauze bandage was washed and reused dozens of times until it could no longer be used. Without surgical knives, doctors used razors soaked in saline, spears, or even kitchen knives, and made bone saws from small-toothed carpentry saws to perform surgery. At the most difficult times, when there was no antiseptic solution at all, they used saltwater or even limewater to clean wounds. During one battle, Red Army Division Commander Zhang Ziqing suffered a serious leg wound. While hospitalized in Xiaojing, the medical staff gave him a small packet of salt each day to clean his wound, but Commander Zhang used only tea to wash it and hid the salt packets under his bedding. By the end of 1928, when the revolutionary base was completely cut off from salt and wounded soldiers had none for wound care, he donated all his hidden salt to severely injured soldiers in urgent need. His own wound, lacking proper disinfection, became infected and festered, and he eventually sacrificed his life on Jinggangshan. Commander Zhang’s touching story of giving up his salt has been passed down among the people of Jinggangshan to this day.

After October 1928, the Red Army engaged in frequent battles, and the number of wounded soldiers sometimes reached five or six hundred, peaking at eight hundred. The hospital could not accommodate them all, so many wounded were treated in local villagers’ homes. The living conditions of the wounded were extremely harsh—each person received only one dime per day for firewood, vegetables, oil, and salt, and they ate red rice and pumpkin soup every day. Despite this, they continued to hold study sessions during treatment, kept up with the battle situation at the front, and some lightly wounded soldiers even made bamboo spikes for Red Army sentry posts every day. They also organized recreational activities in the hospital, crafting flutes and huqin (a type of Chinese fiddle) from bamboo, and performing self-written and self-directed cultural programs, demonstrating a revolutionary spirit of optimism. Comrades such as Mao Zedong and Zhu De also cared deeply about the wounded soldiers’ lives, often visiting them with captured supplies as tokens of concern and comfort.

At the end of January 1929, after the Red Army and local forces suffered a defeat in the third anti-“encirclement and suppression” campaign in Jinggangshan, enemy troops invaded Xiaojing Village, burned down the hospital building, and captured over 130 seriously wounded soldiers who couldn’t be evacuated. After torturing them, the enemy carried out a mass execution by shooting them in the rice fields by the river.

In 1967, the people of Jinggangshan restored the former site of Xiaojing Red Army Hospital to its historical appearance. In 1987, the Jiangxi Provincial People’s Government designated the “Site of the Former Hospital of the Fourth Red Army of China” as a provincial-level key cultural relics protection unit.