Many cemeteries, such as this one, had been torn up by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Nearly every headstone had been toppled, and many of them had been smashed. Cemeteries used land that could be productive agricultural land, and thus were deemed wasteful. The Communists had required that all people be cremated after death, to avoid such wasteful use of land. Not only that, ancestor worship was one of the Old Ways of Thinking that the Cultural Revolution sought to uproot. This cemetery contained graves of prominent people from before the Communist revolution of 1949, including the grave of Li Dazhao, one of the cofounders of the communist party, who was captured and executed in 1927.The graves of Li Dazhao and his wife, and a few others, had recently been restored, but most other graves were still as the Red Guards had left them. It was Qing Ming, the festival of mourning, and nearby a group of soldiers had just visited the grave of Li Dazhao, and were receiving a history lecture.
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