(October 1935)

The Red Army fears not the trials of a distant march,
Makes light of ten thousand rivers and mountains.
To them the Five Ridges² meander like gentle ripples,
And the majestic peaks of Wumeng³ roll by like balls of clay.
Warm are the cloud-topped cliffs lapped by the waters4
of the Golden Sands,5
Cold are the iron chains that span the Dadu River.6

This poem was first published in the January 1957 issue of Shikan. We have translated it
from Shici duilian, pp. 52-54.
1. Prior to 1949, Mao's poetry was written almost exclusively in the form of ci, with
"tune titles." Apart from couplets and quatrains, the only known exceptions in earlier
years are two poems of 1915 and 1918, which appear in Volume I, pp. 63-64 and
164-66. This is the first occurrence in our edition of one of his qilü, or regulated verse
with seven characters to a line.
2. The reference is to five mountain ridges crossed by the Red Army in October and
November 1934, during the early part of the Long March: Dayu, Qitian, Mengzhu,
Dupang, and Yuecheng, located in the provinces of Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, and
Guangxi.
3. The Wumeng Mountains straddle the two provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan. The
Red Army passed through this area on the Long March during May 1935.
4. Mao had originally used the word "waves" here instead of "waters," and his own
note to this line reads as follows: "The change from 'lapped by the waves' to 'lapped by
the waters' came about as the result of a suggestion from a friend with whom I am not
acquainted. He said the word 'waves' should not be used twice in one poem, and I think
this is right." The other occurrence of "waves" (lang in the original) here is what we
have translated in the third line as "ripples." According to the editors of the Shici duilian,
the suggestion was made in a 1952 New Year's letter to Mao from Professor Luo
Yuanzhen of the History Department at Shanxi University. Mao's emendation had already
been incorporated by the time the poem appeared in Shikan.
5. This refers to the Jinsha Jiang, or "River of Golden Sands," which is a stretch of
the Yangzi that flows from Yushu xian in Qinghai to Yibin xian in Sichuan.
6. The Dadu River is in Sichuan Province. "Iron chains" refers to the Luding Bridge
over the Dadu in Luding xian, crossed by an advance party of Red Army soldiers in late
May 1935 in one of the most celebrated episodes of the Long March. The bridge consisted
of thirteen chains supporting wooden planks, but the planks had been removed by the time
the Red Army soldiers crossed it.