The Chairman Is Dead

I GAZED WITH ghoulish fascination at the withered, waxen corpse. The infamous domed forehead and rounded cheeks looked weary and wrinkled, a far cry from the jubilant, plump jowls of the propaganda posters. The embalmed cadaver of Chairman Mao lay swaddled in military uniform, his hands crossed over his chest. An orange lamp beamed through the semidarkness onto his shriveled, death-stiffened skin. His face glowed like a ghastly candlelit pumpkin.

A hushed awe filled this inner chamber of the mausoleum. Nobody spoke above a whisper. The room quivered with palpable excitement. My heart was beating faster than usual; a perverse thrill tickled my skin. I felt a morbid compulsion to stop and stare at the macabre spectacle, at the mortal remains of this man who had, to such catastrophic effect, held absolute power over the most populous nation on earth. A few decades ago, a single suggestion from that formaldehyde-plumped mouth could have spelled the slaughter of a man; the disastrous economic strategies that evolved in that glowing amber head had dealt a tortured death to tens of millions. Yet beneath that taut, unyielding skin had also breathed a man who had, against incredible odds, inflamed such passion and loyalty in his people that a vast and diverse country had united and, with almost no material resources, had overthrown the foreign superpowers that threatened it.

The embalming of Mao's corpse had been an anxious affair, according to his personal physician, Li Zhisui, who recorded the procedure in his book The Private Life of Chairman Mao. The problem was that neither Li nor anyone else in China had attempted to preserve human flesh before. Li himself had visited Stalin's and Lenin's remains some years previously and had noted that the bodies were shrunken. He had been told that Lenin's nose and ears had rotted and had been rebuilt in wax and that Stalin's mustache had fallen off. The medical team played for time by pumping Mao's corpse full of formaldehyde.

"We injected a total of twenty-two liters," Li wrote. "The results were shocking. Mao's face was bloated, as round as a ball, and his neck was now the width of his head. His skin was shiny, and the formaldehyde oozed from his pores like perspiration. His ears were swollen too, sticking out from his head at right angles. The corpse was grotesque."

The terrified medics—who could have been executed for desecrating the semidivine cadaver—tried to massage the liquid out from the face and down into the body, where the bloating could be covered with clothing. One of them pressed too hard and broke a piece of skin off Mao's cheek. In the end, they managed to restore his face to something approaching normal proportions, but then the Chairman's clothes wouldn't fit on his body, and they had to slit the back of his jacket and trousers in order to button them up.

Before carrying out the permanent preservation of the body, Li sent two investigators to Hanoi to find out how Ho Chi Minh's body had been treated. When they arrived, however, the Vietnamese officials refused to divulge their secrets and wouldn't allow them to see the corpse—though someone revealed confidentially that it hadn't been a great success. Ho's nose had already decomposed, and his beard had fallen off.

In the end, Li worked out a method whereby he removed Mao's internal organs and filled the cavity with cotton soaked in formaldehyde while another group worked day and night building a pseudocorpse out of wax just in case it all went wrong and they found themselves in need of a fake.

I wondered whether the body that lay before me was in fact the real cadaver or the waxen substitute. It was nearly thirty years since Mao's death; the pickling process had clearly been experimental at best. It seemed entirely possible that the real corpse could have long since rotted away and been quietly replaced with a skillfully crafted effigy.

But I wasn't allowed to linger. A dark-suited official insisted that the line of pilgrims keep moving. Silently, I filed with the busloads of fellow tourists out of the dim mausoleum of the past and into the bright white light of contemporary Tiananmen Square.

"Follow me! Quick-a-ly!" A Chinese man dressed in a slightly soiled sweatshirt, baggy black jogging pants, and scuffed pumps hollered at a white-haired Western tourist who stood in the line that snaked around the cubic concrete mausoleum. Amid the bedlam of loudly jabbering, camera-wielding daytrippers, the tourist nervously clutched his bag to his hip. The Chinese clasped the shoulder of the tourist's jacket and tried to pull him out of the line. The tourist looked terrified.

He needn't have worried; I had been through the same charade just a few minutes earlier. Bags were forbidden in the mausoleum, and the left-luggage office was on the other side of one of the busy roads that flanked the square. Seeing my bag, the man had grabbed me.

"Follow me! Quick-a-ly!"

We had hurtled through the square, dodging anorak-clad couples and fraught family groups. I was already struggling to keep up when Pumps had thrown himself into the multiple lanes of traffic that thronged the perimeter road. I had balked.

"Quick-a-ly!" Pumps had shrieked across the belching fumes and honking horns.

Fearing for my life, I had followed as speedily as I could until, a few yards further on, we had reached the checking room.

Pumps had grabbed my bag.

"Ten yuan," he had said. "Quick-a-ly."

I had fished it out.

"And ten yuan for me," Pumps had commanded.

This was the new China, a place where you had to move fast, because time was money. It was a world that Mao, had he woken in his mausoleum a short distance away, would never have recognized. Gone were the communes; the "iron rice bowl"—the state system that guaranteed lifelong employment—had been melted down and sold for scrap. In its place came "socialism with Chinese characteristics," where the entrepreneurial spirit was not only permitted but actively encouraged. "To be rich is glorious," Mao's successor, Deng Xiaoping, had pronounced. After the famines and fear of recent years, the Chinese had leapt at the opportunity to create wealth.

Copyright © 2005 by Polly Evans.