13 March, Chaozhou
Home Inn 168CNY

We overslept in our windowless room, awaking after 10h00. So we were late backtracking via Shantou, through which we had passed yesterday, to the Cultural Revolution Museum at the top of one of the hills in pretty Tashan Park. This museum, founded and funded privately, is the only one in all of China to honour victims of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) during which over a million people were murdered or hounded into committing suicide. The revolution’s stated goal was to preserve communist ideology and purge “remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society”. At Mao’s urging, China’s youth formed the Red Guard, carried Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations, and persecuted millions of people, displacing large segments of the population during the Down to the Countryside Movement. “Historical relics and artifacts were destroyed. Cultural and religious sites were ransacked.” Although the Party subsequently “declared that the Cultural Revolution was ‘responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic’”, discussion and analysis of the Cultural Revolution is discouraged in China. We were pleased, therefore, to find that this museum exists. Despite the lack of English captions, many of the etched photographs were disturbing, and told their own wordless tale.

(Quotes from Wikipedia)