Huaminglou Hometown of Liu Shaoqi 花明楼刘少奇故里

About Huaminglou Hometown of Liu Shaoqi

The grounds cover 1,300 mu and are run as a single administration. At their centre is the former residence itself, a part-thatched, part-tiled farmhouse of earth and timber listed as a national key cultural heritage protection unit. About 250 metres to the south stands the memorial hall, planned from 1984 and opened in 1988, with eight exhibition rooms, an audio-visual hall and two memorial pavilions in a main building of 3,100 square metres; on the hillside to its south-west is a bronze statue of Liu Shaoqi 7.1 metres high, a four-metre figure on a base of 3.1 metres. The complex has been designated a national first-grade museum, a national patriotic education demonstration base and a national AAAAA tourist area.

The collection runs to more than 3,000 items, of which nearly 800 were used by Liu Shaoqi himself: household and office objects, farm tools from his youth, and the bed, straw hat, spectacles and briefcase from his investigation visit to his home district in May 1961. Among the pieces the provincial heritage bureau singles out are an otter-skin coat worn on a visit to the Soviet Union, a pocket radio and a pair of sponge pillows he used until his death; more than a thousand photographs accompany them. Other buildings on the site include a hall on his life and work, a thematic museum on his involvement in the labour movement, a conservation centre and the old schoolrooms of Tanzichong School, which he attended, while the landscaped parts of the grounds take in the Huaminglou tower, the Xiuyang Pavilion, the Wande ding, an aircraft he used, two lakes and a folk culture village. The site lies about 30 kilometres from Changsha and the same distance from Shaoshan, where Mao Zedong was born.

What to look for

• The former residence, a part-thatched, part-tiled earth-and-timber farmhouse protected as a national key cultural heritage unit
• The memorial hall of 1988, with eight exhibition rooms in a main building of 3,100 square metres
• The bronze statue on the hillside south-west of the hall, 7.1 metres high including its base
• Personal belongings in the collection, among them the straw hat, spectacles and briefcase from the 1961 home-district investigation
• The old buildings of Tanzichong School, which Liu Shaoqi attended, within the grounds

Location & getting there

Getting to Huaminglou Hometown of Liu Shaoqi

Check which interiors and courtyards are accessible. Active places of worship and protected monuments may have different visitor rules.

• Search for 花明楼刘少奇故里 with 长沙市 and 宁乡市.