Homage to the past

The Beijing exhibition Collected Artifacts of Founding Fathers celebrates the 90th anniversary of the People's Liberation Army. Exhibits include letters, posts, weapons, paintings and wax figures. [Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily]

Items used by New China's founding fathers are now on show in Beijing, Lin Qi reports.

A media group comprising 15 Chinese and foreign journalists arrived in Yan'an, Shaanxi province, in June 1944. They stayed there for a month, visiting the Communist bases nearby and interviewing leaders of the Communist Party of China, such as Mao Zedong.

The visit generated a series of reports, which updated the accounts of Communist-controlled border areas in northwestern China, after American journalist Edgar Snow's 1937 book, Red Star over China.

Maurice Votaw was a member of the visiting group who worked for the US newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. He was gifted a set of nine woodblock prints from Zhu De, one of the Communist leaders who later became New China's commander-in-chief.

The set was made to publicize to villages the discipline of the Communist Eighth Route Army. It was given back to China by a visiting group of US scholars in 1979.

Now the woodblock prints are being shown for the first public viewing at an exhibition at the National Museum of China. More than seven decades after they were created, the colors still look vivid.

The exhibition, Collected Artifacts of Founding Fathers, that runs through Sept 26 shows some 300 artifacts once used by or related to the founding fathers of the People's Republic of China, such as letters, posts, photos, weapons, wax figures and paintings.