Yan'an Revolutionary Memorial Hall & Baota Pagoda

The Yan'an Revolutionary Memorial Hall stands in Baota District of Yan'an, a city in northern Shaanxi that became the Chinese Communist Party's base of operations after the Long March ended here in 1935, serving as the party's headquarters from 1937 until it was abandoned to advancing Nationalist forces in 1947. The memorial hall, first built in the 1950s and substantially renovated and expanded in 2009, houses several thousand photographs, documents, weapons, and personal items from the Yan'an period, including materials connected to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other party leaders who lived and worked in the surrounding cave-dwelling compounds during those years. Exhibits cover the Communist Party's wartime resistance against Japan, its administrative and land-reform experiments in the Yan'an base area, and the ideological rectification campaigns Mao conducted here that consolidated his leadership within the party ahead of the 1949 revolution. On a hill overlooking the city stands Baota Pagoda, a brick pagoda whose original construction dates to the Tang or Song dynasty and which was restored multiple times over the centuries; despite its far older origins, the pagoda became closely associated with the Communist period because it was the visible landmark overlooking the party's wartime headquarters, and it remains one of the most recognizable symbols of the Yan'an era in Chinese political iconography. The pagoda park includes the surrounding hillside grounds, an ancient bell, and views over the Yan River valley and the city below.