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Thanks to the subsequent career of its dean, Mao Zedong, Guangzhou's Peasant Movement Training Institute , on Zhongshan Lu (daily 8.15-11.30am & 2-5pm; Y2; Nongjing Suo metro), is the city's most frequented revolutionary site. It still looks like the Confucian Academy it was for six hundred years, before Peng Pai , a "rich peasant" from Guangdong, established the Institute in 1924 with Guomindang permission and 38 students. Courses were brief, but included lectures by Sun Yatsen followed by a practical session of organizing in the country. The school lasted just over two years, with Mao, Zhou Enlai and Peng Pai taking the final classes in August 1926, eight months before the Communist and Guomindang alliance violently ended in Shanghai. A quick turn through the grounds gives a good idea of the students' spartan regime and, in the Chinese labels, a dose of sycophantic Maoist stories linked to the little stone bridge, the canteen and his carefully austere room. More poignant are the photographs of alumni who failed to survive the years following the Shanghai Massacre and the subsequent 1927 Communist Uprising in Guangzhou. The scene of the latter event lies farther east along Zhongshan Lu at the Martyrs' Memorial Gardens (daily 8am-7pm; Y3; Lieshi Lingyuan metro). It was near here, on December 11, 1927, that a pathetically small and ill-equipped Communist force under Zhang Teilai managed to take the Guangzhou Police Headquarters, announcing the foundation of the Canton Commune . A "soviet" was appointed, industries nationalized, and workers were given control of production, but expected support never materialized, and on the afternoon of the second day Guomindang forces moved in. Five thousand people were killed outright or later executed for complicity. Today, the memorial gardens are one of the cleanest, quietest spots in the city. There's a small lake, some trees and a lawn, and the paths are lined with flowers, while on the western side is a small museum with English captions (Y1), worth a trot through to see how chaotic the Guomindang were in those days. Out along the paths you'll see a strange rifle-like monument to the events and the grassy mound where the insurgents lie buried.
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