I can’t believe it has taken me so long to write this post, but that’s the way blogging goes sometimes.  This post relates back to my trip to Sichuan over two months ago.  It took me to Chengdu, Kangding, Litang, and finally back to Chengdu, where I went shopping for books.

There is no other kind of shopping that satisfies me the way shopping for books does.  China loves bookstores and I love China for loving bookstores.  However the large impressive book stores that most Chinese people go to are filled with new shiny copies of books (even Barack Obama’s last book can be found!), none of the books seem to be older than 5 years.  If you want to find used books and bits of China’s fascinating past you need to dig a little deeper.

When I visited Chengdu in 2006 I had visited Dufu’s Grass Hut park, a large leafy area where the Tang dynasty poet had once lived and written some of his best poetry.  Right outside the park there was a wonderful and uncommon collection of used book stores, a sight which had existed for hundreds of years.  Their musty smell and dusty piles of books that reached to the ceiling had no resemblance to the new massive “book cities” that one normally runs into.  The clientele were also skewed older than most bookstores here.  I had fallen in love with this used book district of Chengdu two years ago, so I eagerly went back in 2008.

Sadly times have changed.  Tourism to the Dufu park was much heavier this year and the surrounding neighborhood was filled with more restaurants and even a new Amway cosmetics store.  The used book stores I had fallen in love with two years ago were no more.  In their place was an assortment of antique stores, mostly selling items that could hardly be considered antique.  But since it was the National Holiday the sidewalk was brimming with entrepreneurial energy, goods laid out on table cloths choked one’s ability to walk.  One man’s goods I found tucked away down an alley and behind a building instantly drew me in.  Browned books were displayed on the ground and classic posters of China’s Maoist era hung from a clothesline.  The object of my curiosity was this poster:

(Click on the picture for more details)

I had seen a copy of this classic Cultural Revolution poster while reading the my copy of MacFarquhar and Schoenhals’ Mao’s Last Revolution, a great history of the tumultuous period.  The title of the poster is:

漫画刊  百丑图 （红卫兵上海红捍卫东风编辑部编列）68.10

Caricatures of One Hundred Clowns (Compiled by the Shanghai Red Guards Defend the Revolution Editorial Department) October, 1968

These ‘clowns’ are the men and women whom Mao and his cronies violently spoke out against, ranked by importance.  Ever since the June 1, 1966 publication of the People’s Daily editorial “Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons” at the very start of the Cultural Revolution Red Guards took it upon themselves to find such “monsters and demons” and expose them.  The Red Guards humiliated these men and women by publicly parading them at massive rallies, by writing “big character posters” denouncing them, and also by publishing posters of them, like the one I bought.  The blue stamp in the top right corner says that it was published by the Shanghai Red Guards.

While I cannot completely vouch for the poster’s authenticity, everything I’ve seen makes me think it is the real thing.  The paper was made in the old method, by catching pulp on a screen made of bamboo or metal skewers (you can the imprint of the screen on the paper).  It has browned edges and the brittle like you would expect from paper that is 40 years old.  I also wholeheartedly trust the seller.

When I show this poster to my Chinese friends they inhale slowly with an awed look on their face as they point out the many famous figures from Chinese politics and arts: men and women who are certainly not clowns.  There are the obvious political figures that today are considered to have been wrongly “struggled” against, people such as Liu Shaoqi and his wife Wang Guangmei, Peng Dehuai, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi, and many more (though no Deng Xiaoping (at least not yet)).  Less well known by both foreigners and Chinese alike are the many literary and artistic figure who were denounced during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.  The author Ba Jin is there along with the most famous Peking Opera star of all time (his name escapes me).

There is a special section in the bottom right of the poster titled: “Imperialists and all reactionaries are paper tigers” (带国主义和一切反动派都是纸老虎).  These foreign “paper tigers” include: Dulles, Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson; Khruschchev, Brezhnev, Kosygin, Sholokhov; Harold Wilson; Tito; Tsedenbal (Mongolia); Indira Ghandi; Chiang Kai-shek; Sukarno and General Nasution; General Ne Win; Miyamoto Kenji (Japan; Communist Party general secretary).  If you want a concise and visual guide to who these caricatures represent please visit the poster’s Flickr photo page.

Up next: Part two will be about this small book that I also bought in Chengdu that day.  It is a collection of CCP editorials that were published in June and July 1966, the first time that the public was told about the Cultural Revolution and the first time that college students began to take revolution into their own hands.  June 1966 marks the beginning of the chaos that would engulf China for the next 10 years until Mao’s death in 1976.  It is a priceless piece of Chinese history and deserves it’s own post.