So I was sitting in the office yesterday morning after class and picked up the copy of 新京报/The Beijing News the boss has delivered every day and on the sidebar of the front page is a headline referring to an article on page A17:

华国锋骨灰将回交城

Hua Guofeng’s ahes to return to Jiaocheng

So I’m flipping through the paper scanning for other interesting articles, and I get to page A17, and there it is, but with a different headline:

华国锋骨灰将安放交城卦山

Hua Guofeng’s ashes to be laid at Guashan, Jiaocheng

So I think, recognising the influene of a certain Granite Studio, this is interesting- China’s most forgotten former leader is even getting pushed around in his death. Poor guy. But somehow I just couldn’t find the article on TBN’s regular website, and registration for their e-paper requires far more information than I’m willing to divulge to a newspaper (information, in other words, just asking me anything more than a username, email and password is too much to be given to a newspaper in my book). Anyway, I didn’t search terribly hard- a quick entry of either 华国锋 or 交城卦山 into Google or Baidu would’ve gotten plenty of articles on the subject. But Jeremiah did send me a link to Sina’s reprint of the umm… Dayoo/大洋网-广州日报 article which, like TBN, refers back to 山西青年报, whose search function seems to be missing….. ah, could this be the original?

Interesting, though, how the Sina’s reprint of the Dayoo article chops off an opening paragraph whose last sentence reads:

华国锋曾在1976年10月-1981年6月间担任中共中央主席，领导粉碎“四人帮”。

Hua Guofeng was chairman of the CCP Central Committee and lead the smashing of the “gang of four”.

Anyway, what intrigued me wasn’t the moving of Hua’s ashes- what could be more natural than being buried in one’s hometown?- but TBN’s listing of all the cultural relics and historic sites surrounding his new tomb. And it looks like I’ll have to type this out by hand, dammit… oh well:

华国锋陵园位于交城县城西北卦山，顺南望去，整个交城县城一览无余。 北面是国家级文物保护单位卦山天宁寺。 西边是山西省级文物保护区瓦窑原始遗址， 东侧有建于清康熙年间的古庙文昌宫。

Hua Guofeng’s tomb lies on Guashan, to the northwest of the Jiaocheng county town, facing south, overlooking the whole of Jiaocheng county town. To the north is the state-level cultural relic protection unit Guashan Tianning Temple. To the west is the Shanxi provincial-level cultural relic protection zone Primitive Tile-Kiln Ruins [Help! I don’t really know how to translate that], and to the east is the ancient temple Wenchang Gong built in the reign of the Qing emperor Kangxi.

Well, they may be moving him around, but they’re moving him to a what is clearly a very fascinating area.

And just to make it clear: That quotation was taken from the article “华国锋骨灰将安放交城卦山” on page A17 of the Monday, April 13, 2009 edition of 新京报. Now, I’m sorry, I’m tired and hungry and the smell of shrimp from the kitchen is just too distracting…. Were my timing better, I would be interested in translating that 山西青年报 article, which seems to contain many interesting little snippets of information and facets of the story.