Fenshuitang: A village where first sparkles of Chinese Communism originate

More than a hundred years ago, in a small village in east China’s Zhejiang Province, a young man buried his head in two versions of the same document, one in English and one in Japanese, working around the clock to translate them into Chinese. So concentrated was he that he mistook the ink for a bowl of red sugared soup his mother had brought him, and after realizing the mistake, he murmured to himself, holding a mouthful of ink : “So that’s the taste of truth, so sweet.”

The young man is Chen Wangdao, and the pamphlet he was working on is the Communist Manifesto, which was to guide and shape China’s history in the century to come.

On November 1, 2022, the “A Date with China” international media group visited Chen Wangdao’s hometown, Fenshuitang Village in east China’s Zhejiang Province, and took a tour around the basic study room that had given birth to the first sparkles of Communism in China.