Anwu Youth Training Class Memorial Hall 安吴青训班纪念馆

About Anwu Youth Training Class Memorial Hall

The class was founded jointly by the Youth Work Committee of the CPC Central Committee and the Northwest Youth Association for National Salvation and opened in October 1937 at Doukou farm, which Yu Youren had founded; the first term, of 150 young people, began there on 11 October 1937 and ran for two weeks. Feng Wenbin was director and Hu Qiaomu deputy director. A second term had to move to the town god temple at Yunyang, and early in 1938 the class moved to Anwu fort, where several courtyards given by the Wu family and other wealthy households and older buildings including Yingxiang Gong could take a thousand teachers and students. It was renamed the wartime youth training class in April 1938. The Shaanxi Daily report counts 14 terms, 127 companies and more than 12,000 students trained for the Communist Party over the two and a half years to April 1940, when the class moved back to Yan'an; the municipal party-history office says eleven of those terms were held at Anwu fort, and this record states the two figures as the two pages give them. Teaching covered politics, the united front, mass movements and guerrilla tactics, with Feng Wenbin, Hu Qiaomu, Liu Ruilong and Zhang Qinqiu among those who taught in person and with Zhu De and Lin Boqu coming to give reports.

The memorial hall is built in the East Court of the Wu compound, a three-courtyard quadrangle. During the class's years there the Wu family's front rooms became the security section and offices, the reception hall became the class headquarters' meeting room, and the east and west wings held the office of Liu Ruilong, the director of studies, and the general affairs office. A 1988 plaque inscribed by Hu Qiaomu reading 安吴青训班旧址 hangs on the door of the principal room where the family's matriarch Zhou Ying had lived; the Shaanxi Daily report records that Zhou Ying, a salt-merchant widow, was the model for the heroine of the television series 那年花开月正圆, and that her adopted son Wu Huaixian gave the East Court to the Communist Party. East of the memorial hall is Yingxiang Gong, which held the class's staff brigade, medical section and youth bookshop and whose stage served the students for entertainment and publicity; in August 1938 Zhu De, then honorary director of the class, gave a report on the war situation there and inscribed 学好本领上前线, which the students enlarged and cut into the wall. Northeast of the memorial hall lies the Wu family cemetery, which the class used as an open-air classroom because its size and its stands of cypress made a natural air-raid shelter. The site's designations include a national key protected cultural relic of the seventh national group and a national third-group red tourism classic scenic area, along with provincial and municipal education bases.

What to look for

• The three-courtyard East Court quadrangle itself, with the wartime room conversions the report lists: front rooms as security section and offices, the reception hall as the class headquarters' meeting room, and the wings as the director of studies' office and the general affairs office
• The 1988 plaque reading 安吴青训班旧址, inscribed by Hu Qiaomu, on the door of the principal room where Zhou Ying lived
• Yingxiang Gong east of the memorial hall, whose stage served the students for entertainment and publicity and where Zhu De spoke in August 1938 before inscribing 学好本领上前线
• The Wangyue Lou, a two-storey Sino-Western building Wu Huaixian put up in the early Republic for the family to enjoy the moon and cool off, which held the director's and deputy director's quarters below and the Northwest Youth Association's offices above
• The Wu family cemetery northeast of the memorial hall, the class's open-air classroom under its cypresses

Location & getting there

Getting to Anwu Youth Training Class Memorial Hall

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

• Search for 安吴青训班纪念馆 with 咸阳市 and 泾阳县.