China: 30 years after his death, Mao's home town is a place of pilgrimage, reports Clifford Coonan.
Hunan Province is Mao country and Shaoshan is the town where the former Chinese supreme leader was born, went to school and started on his revolutionary path.
"Mao is the pride of Shaoshan. He went from this poor town to the Forbidden City and became one of the 10 most famous people in the world. Everyone here idolises him. I welcome every guest here as a guest of Chairman Mao," says Tang Ruiren, who owns Mao's home restaurant in Shaoshan.
Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong, seen abroad as an evil dictator responsible for the deaths of millions in the disastrous agricultural collectivisation reforms of the Great Leap Forward and the terrible purges of the Cultural Revolution. But in the Great Helmsman's home town, and in large areas of China, there is widespread affection for Mao.
Ms Tang met Mao back in 1959 and the photograph of her holding her son during that secret visit is on prominent display. Visitors are given a laminated version to keep.
She is Mao's great-aunt, even though she was decades younger than the Chinese leader who was 64 when he made his trip home. The baby she is holding in her arms in the picture went in his early teens to fight in China's war against Vietnam. He was Mao's uncle.
"I was holding my son in my arms, and his name was 'Little Mao'. Mao Zedong told me he should have a grown-up name, and we should call him Mao Jingjun," she says.
The sprightly 77-year-old has just overseen the serving of the restaurant's signature dish, Chairman Mao's Favourite Pork, a hot-pot of fatty pig's knuckle in a spicy red soup with a sweet aftertaste.
"We were the first family he saw when he came home. Mao Zedong asked if my husband was at home, and I told him my husband was a soldier, just like my father and just like my son was going to be. He told me I was a model citizen," says Ms Tang.
Still a fiery if charming ideologue, Ms Tang barks out orders to the wait staff as they serve up "All of China is Red" fish head, an equally piquant dish that looks like a map of China in 1949, with the self-ruled Taiwan boldly marked out at the dish's edge.
She is moved to tears when asked what she was doing when the news came through in 1976 that the Great Helmsman was dead.
"I was at a meeting discussing how to implement the One Child Policy when we heard the funeral march music on the radio. I sat down and lost consciousness, and when I came around I cried for hours. I dreamt about him many times, I saw him in the sky and said to him: 'Why did you leave us?'," she says tearfully. "He said: 'It'll be fine. And you have a son ahead of you." For Ms Tang, it has indeed worked out very nicely. She prayed for him and his ancestors at a Buddhist temple. And when the economy began to open up in the 1980s, she set up a restaurant with a tiny capital and now has a chain of 120 restaurants, with 18,000 employees. She pays tax of €6 million a year, most of which she says she gives to a foundation supporting the education of 500 orphans.
"It's not my money, it belongs to the people of China. I just distribute it to the people," she says, walking with a cane since she fell and broke her hip but otherwise incredibly fit.
Down the hill, Mao's childhood home - a completely renovated courtyard house, solid and ringed by bamboo, and with soldiers posted in every room - is a place of pilgrimage thronged with tourists. In the kitchen, you can see where he gathered the whole family for meetings "to devote themselves to the cause of the liberation of the Chinese people". You learn that Mao's father was a "hard-working, thrifty, smart and crackajack man", while his mother "delighted in Buddhism and to help others". This would have been a rough and ready, if reasonably prosperous, farmhouse shared with another family and numerous livestock. Now the whole area has been landscaped and there are loudspeakers blaring out tales of the chairman's diplomatic triumphs, meetings with world leaders, the respect he was held in by Zhou Enlai, and how much he loved reading.
Further up the hill, stalls are set up with a bewildering array of Mao memorabilia, mass produced statues, portraits, cigarette lighters, magnets and at one scenic spot, you can have your picture taken with a cardboard cutout of Mao, sitting in his favourite armchair.
Mao came back to Shaoshan in 1966 on a secret mission and the villa he stayed in has also been transformed into a shrine. The wooded walkway up to the villa is lined with calligraphy by famous Chinese leaders, including poems and epigrams. In the villa, there is a nuclear bunker built for the chairman's short two-week stay and an earthquake-proof room which is now lined with medals. The villa also has a table-tennis table, testament to the ping-pong diplomacy which signalled the start of China's slow opening up to the world.
"Mao was a great man, I admire him," says Jian Jun, a 23-year-old TV promotions executive. "I've taken a lot of friends up here to Shaoshan."
Published last month, Mao's Last Revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, is an eloquent and damning description of the destruction wrought by the Cultural Revolution, while Jung Chang and Jon Halliday blasted Mao as a power-crazed despot in their recent biography Mao: The Unknown Story. But Chinese people are much more ambiguous about Mao's contribution. Chinese textbooks only briefly mention the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. The communist leadership describes the Cultural Revolution as a catastrophe for China and has reassessed the Great Helmsman, saying he was 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad.
Many taxis have Mao statues on the dashboard and his political legacy is still enormous - his face is on the banknotes, a portrait of this shrewd son of Shaoshan still gazes out over Tiananmen Square in Beijing and there are still statues being erected in his memory, including in Tibet.
"As someone born in the 1980s, I have only a vague impression of Mao - his era is a bit remote, I don't have the direct experience that my parents have," says Wu Feihong.
"I respect Mao and I don't like to hear negative things about him. He's like an idol. And if it weren't for Mao, I probably wouldn't be here - I'm the fourth girl in our family and he always encouraged people to have lots of children," says Ms Wu.
Shortly before leaving Hunan, we again sample some of Chairman Mao's favourite dishes in a swish designer restaurant in a shopping mall in Changsha, which looks like it was fitted out by Terence Conran and has a chef from Hong Kong. It's the kind of place that couldn't have existed during Mao's lifetime. And yet, on every table, there is a complimentary copy of the famous Little Red Book containing the "Thoughts of Chairman Mao". Even in this bastion of boom town New China, some things never change.