Snow
(To the Tune "Spring in [Princess] Qin's Garden")
(February 1936)

Behold the scene in that northern land:
A thousand leagues sealed in ice,
Ten thousand leagues of whirling snow.
Within and without the Great Wall,
One vast expanse meets the gaze.
Upstream and downstream,
The torrential flow of the great river¹ has suddenly vanished,
Mountains dance like silver snakes,
Highlands² gallop like waxen³ elephants, 4
Striving to vie in height with heaven's lord.
Should the day be fine,
See the white-clad beauty adorned with red,
Fascinating beyond compare.
Drawn by these manifold beauties of our land,
Countless heroes contended to bow in homage.
Alas, Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi,
Were somewhat lacking in culture,
Tang Taizong and Song Taizu,
Had modest literary talents,
And Genghis Khan, favored son of heaven for a time,
Knew only how to bend his bow to shoot great vultures.
Now all are gone.
To find men of untrammeled spirit,
We must look rather to the present age.
We have translated this poem from Mao Zedong shici ji, pp. 68-73. It also appears in
Shici duilian, pp. 63-66, and we have cited some notes from that source as well. In the fall
of 1945 when Mao was in Chongqing he wrote out this poem and presented it to Liu Yazi
as a gift, and told him in an accompanying letter (dated October 7) that he had composed it
"when we first arrived in Northern Shaanxi and saw the Great Snowy Mountains." According to Nianpu, Vol. 1, p. 510, this took place during the first ten days of February
1936. The poem was published on November 14, 1945, in the evening edition of
Chongqing's Xinmin bao. Subsequently other papers published various versions of it, and
on January 8, 1951, Mao's original handwritten poem given to Liu was reproduced in the
supplement to Wenhui bao. The first official publication of the poem was in the January
1957 issue of Shikan. Mao's own annotation to the poem reads as follows: "Snow":
Opposing feudalism, criticizing a reactionary side of two thousand years of feudalism. As
for 'culture,' 'literary talents,' and 'great vultures,' it can only be this way this is composing poetry, after all! Otherwise, how could one hurl invectives against such figures?
Any other explanation is wrong. The last three lines refer to the proletariat."
1. The Yellow River, which at this moment the First Front Army was about to cross
from Shaanxi into Shanxi.
2. Mao's own note here reads: "This refers to the highlands of Shaanxi and Shanxi."
3. The editors of Shici duilian indicate that Mao originally had here a different
character, homophonous in Chinese with the word for "waxen" (la), meaning
"Cambodian," and that the emendation was at the suggestion of Zang Kejia.
4. The editors of the Shici duilian suggest that these two lines may allude to a poem
by the Tang dynasty poet Han Yu, "On Snow, presented to Zhang Ji," which also refers to
snakes and elephants.