For Comrade Peng Dehuai
(A Six-Character Poem)¹
(October 21, 1935)²

The mountains are high, the roads are long, the gullies are deep,³
Huge forces gallop through in every direction.
Who is it dares to ride on horseback with drawn sword?
None but our great General Peng!4

This poem first appeared in the August 1, 1947, issue of the Hebei-Shandong-Henan
People's Liberation Army paper, Zhanyou, and was reprinted in the April 1957 issue of
Jiefangjun wenyi. We have translated it from the Shici duilian, pp. 61-62.
1. This is another occurrence of a poem by Mao in other than the ci form. The
six-character poem [liuyan shi] is a classical verse form with six characters to a line, in
which the rhyme scheme, number of lines, and tonal patterns are not as strictly defined as
they are in "regulated verse."
2. This poem is usually dated simply October, but the Nianpu, Vol. 1, p. 481, states
that Mao wrote it immediately after Peng's forces had smashed the Guomindang cavalry
on October 21.
3. According to the editors of the Shici duilian, when the Central Red Army's
Shaanxi-Gansu Detachment (commanded by Peng Dehuai) reached Wuqizhen on the
border of the northern Shaanxi base area, they were pursued by the cavalry forces of Ma
Hongkui (1892-1970) and Ma Hongbin (1884-1960). Both these men were generals in
the Guomindang armies; Ma Hongkui had formerly been chairman of the Ningxia
provincial government, and Ma Hongbin had been chairman of the Gansu government. In
1934, they had combined with Ma Bufang (1903-1975) to establish the power of the
so-called "Ma Family Clique" in the northwest, and in September 1935, Ma Hongbin, as
commander of the Guomindang Thirty-fifth Army, had participated in an attack on the
Red Army in north Shaanxi. Mao and Peng composed a telegram advocating a
counterattack on the Ma family forces. The telegram, which is not available to us,
contained a sentence describing the Shaanxi and Gansu terrain as being full of "high
mountains, long roads, and deep gullies." Using a different word for "gullies," Mao took
that description as the first line of this poem.
4. According to Peng's autobiography (Peng Dehuai zishu [Beijing: Renmin
chubanshe, 1981], pp. 206-7), when he received this poem from Mao, out of modesty he
changed the last line to read: "None other than our heroic Red Army," and sent it back to
Mao. (The version of the poem as given in Peng's autobiography also has several variants
from the published text.) The editors of the Shici duilian quote reminiscences of Zhang
Aiping (1910-) to the effect that in August 1947 Peng Dehuai scored a crucial victory in
the battle of Shajiadian, at which point Mao wrote this poem again for him, with the last
line as in the original.