Statue of young Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was born on December 26, 1893 in the village of Shaoshan, Hunan Province , near the provincial capital, the city of Changsha . As a child, Mao and his friends walked around the island of Juzhou and sailed in the Xiangjiang River ^{[1] [2]} . In Changsha, Mao met the Xinhai revolution , and from 1913 to 1918 he studied at the Hunan Pedagogical School No. 1, where he was inspired by the ideas of philosophers and revolutionaries ^[3] . After that, he went to Beijing , traveled around the country for a long time, and finally settled in Shanghai . Due to his activities in the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, he was physically and mentally exhausted and decided to return to Shaoshan, where he later took part in the military and theoretical training of the peasantry ^[4] . In the winter of 1925, this activity attracted the attention of regional authorities, and Mao Zedong had to leave ^[5] .

In 2007, the People’s Government of Hunan Province , the Communist Party of China City Council and the Changsha City Administration decided to begin construction of the monument, which required more than 8,000 blocks of red granite with a total weight of 2 thousand tons mined in Fujian ^{[6] [7]} . About 300 million yuan (35 million US dollars ) was spent on construction ^[8] . One of the sculptors, Si Le Ving, said that "in creating the image of the 32-year-old Mao, we were especially concerned about moving away from established stereotypes." It was reported that the daughter of Shao Hua and the grandson of Mao Xinyu Zedong were satisfied with the composition of the sculpture ^[9] .

December 20, 2009 , to the 116th year of the birth of Mao, the statue was unveiled.

The monument depicts a young Mao Zedong in 1925 with hair fluttering in the wind. The length of the monument is 83 meters, width - 41 meters, height - 32 meters. A memorial museum was built on the area surrounding the monument with an area of ​​3,500 m², reflecting the revolutionary activities of Mao and his associates, and the Institute of Poetry and Art of Mao Zedong was also created ^[10] .

On December 3, 2013, work on cleaning the monument, which took place within a month, was completed, after which it was again opened for viewing ^[11] .