In October 1935 the weary Long Marchers finally reached the dusty yellow earth of Shaanxi province, where a Communist base had been founded in the small city of Bao’an. Of the more than 80,000 who started out, only around 7,000 reached their destination: the others had died, or had to abandon the trek in the face of hostile armies and immensely difficult terrain including marshes, mountains, and swamps. But the end of the Long March was a crucial staging post for Mao’s rise to paramount power. Up to that point, Mao had been an important member of the party (he had been at its first congress in
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