Zunyi Meeting Site

The Zunyi Meeting Site in Zunyi, northern Guizhou, preserves the building where the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party met from 15 to 17 January 1935, during the Long March. The Red Army had just crossed the Wu River and occupied Zunyi after heavy losses in the Xiang River campaign, and the leadership used the pause to review its military failures. The meeting criticised the earlier command and elevated Mao Zedong to a central role in military decision-making, a turning point that Communist Party histories treat as the start of his leadership. Participants included Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Bo Gu, Zhang Wentian, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who served as recording secretary. The venue is a two-storey masonry building in a Western-influenced style, constructed in the 1930s as the residence of a Guizhou warlord officer on what is now Hongqi Road in Huichuan District. Its carved balconies and grey-brick walls differ from the timber architecture typical of the region. The site is now run as the Zunyi Meeting Memorial Hall, which opened to the public in the mid-1950s. The preserved rooms include the meeting chamber on the upper floor, furnished with a table, chairs and a charcoal brazier arranged to match the accounts of the three days, along with bedrooms and offices used by leaders during the stay. Adjacent exhibition halls follow a chronological, narrative approach, covering the Long March route, the Xiang River losses and the Zunyi decisions through photographs, maps, documents and period objects. The building has been maintained and periodically restored by the state and is protected as a national key cultural heritage site, and the grounds are kept as a formal memorial. Visitors encounter a solemn, patriotic-education atmosphere, with uniformed guides, group tours and queues during national holidays. Zunyi city also contains other Long March sites, which are often combined with the meeting site in a half-day itinerary.