Yan'an

Loess plateau city; the Communist Party's wartime capital from 1937 to 1947. The substantive site of revolutionary-tourism in northwest China; cave dwellings (yaodong), the Yan'an Pagoda Mountain, and the Forum on Literature and Art site.

Yan'an, in the loess plateau hills of northern Shaanxi, was the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party from 1937 — when the remnants of the Long March arrived here — until 1947, when the Nationalists briefly took the city and Mao's forces evacuated north. The decade spent here shaped the party's organisation, ideology and propaganda methods: the Yan'an Rectification Movement (1942), the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art (1942, where Mao set the terms of socialist realist culture), and the expansion of party membership from under 100,000 to over 1.2 million all happened in this remote plateau valley.

The yaodong cave dwellings — cut horizontally into the loess hillsides — were both the party's offices and leaders' residences. Mao Zedong's cave at Yangjialing, Zhou Enlai's at Wangjiaping, and dozens of other preserved sites constitute the revolutionary-heritage circuit. Domestic patriotic tourism makes Yan'an one of the most-visited secondary cities in the northwest.

Yan'an Pagoda Mountain (Baota Shan), with its eight-sided Tang-era pagoda overlook, is the city's visual centrepiece. The Yellow River Hukou Falls — a 280-metre-wide cascade in a loess gorge — lie 130 km east and are the most impressive Yellow River scenery accessible from any Chinese city. The Yellow Emperor Mausoleum at Qiaoshan, 170 km south, is one of the most-visited ritual sites in China, drawing visitors during the annual Qingming tomb-sweeping festival.