Dean King hikes China to retrace Chinese Communist Army perilous journey

How far would you go to research a book? Richmond, Virginia author Dean King recently released his latest book Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival, where the author tells the story of the 30 women of the 1934 Long March, the epic journey of the 86,000 Chinese Communist Army that lasted one year and covered more than four thousand miles of brutal terrain across China. Some of the survivors went on to become leaders in today’s China.

Dean King, an avid hiker, went to China and retraced the treacherous steps of the soldiers and interviewed a number of survivors to research Unbound: A True Story of War, Love, and Survival. He gives an account of the less-than-friendly terrain, the people he encountered and the food in an article for Outside’s Magazine, titled In the Land of the Human-Sucking Bogs.

I'd come here to retrace one of the trail's most harrowing stretches for a book I was writing on the 30 women and their fight for survival. In 2006, I had interviewed the last surviving female First Army veteran of the Long March, Wang Quan­yuan, then 93, whose journey had taken a twist when she was captured by Muslim warlord Ma Bufang's troops and forced to be a sex slave for two years before escaping.

Over the next ten days, guided by Ed and Xiao, their assistant Mike Tan, 40, and puckish Tibetan wrangler Jiacuo, 46, we intended to follow in Mao's footsteps, ascending Dagushan on the highest pass of the Long March and crossing the zigzag continental divide (between the Yangtze and Yellow river basins) three times. A team of ten horses handled by four local Tibetan cowboys would carry our gear. We would switch teams in the Maoergai River Valley and cross the caodi, a stretch of high-altitude grassy bogs, where the Long Marchers had vanished by the dozens in inky pools that, as one Red Army soldier put it, "stank like horse piss."

We would cover about 90 miles in all, almost always above 10,000 feet, in a place rarely visited by Westerners. That is, if we could actually get there."

Hiking the trail provided a new respect for the Long March survivors and this chapter of Chinese history. Check out Dean King's lastest Unbound and the trek that went into his work.

For additional information, visit the author's site at http://www.deanhking.com.

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