In the autumn of 1921, a merchant named Tao Shuqing built a modest brick-and-wood residence at Qingshuitang No. 22. Surrounded by vegetable gardens and two ponds—one clear, one muddy—the house sat quietly in Changsha’s northeastern suburbs. This isolation saved it from the devastating 1938 Wenxi Fire, leaving it the city’s sole surviving revolutionary structure.

Behind its blue brick walls and black roof tiles, the house holds the echoes of a profound transformation. In late 1921, Yi Lirong signed a seven-year lease for 7.2 yuan a month, securing the property as the secret headquarters for the earliest provincial branch of the Chinese Communist Party. It also became the first marital home of Mao Zedong and Yang Kaihui.

The two-courtyard, three-bay layout provided perfect cover. The central hall welcomed ordinary guests, while a concealed room in the northwest corner hosted clandestine meetings. Here, in the summer of 1922, Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi met for the first time. From this hidden command center, early leaders orchestrated over a dozen major labor strikes. They mobilized railway workers in Anyuan, miners in Shuikoushan, and 6,000 masons and carpenters in Changsha, turning Hunan into a highly active center for the labor movement.

Human traces linger in the 112-square-meter space. In the right-hand bedroom, a red-lacquered carved wooden bed and a simple desk sit beneath hollow-carved wooden windows. On cold winter nights, Yang Kaihui prepared a bamboo hand-warming basket for Mao as he wrote political essays by the glow of a kerosene lamp. She managed the committee’s confidential files, storing them in a custom-made wooden pillow box she slept on, ready to flee at a moment's notice. Her mother lived in the adjacent room, helping raise their two young sons, Mao Anying and Mao Anqing, while providing a layer of domestic camouflage.

Before leaving for Shanghai in late 1923, Mao penned the poem "Farewell to a Friend" within these walls, capturing the heavy sorrow of leaving his family for the revolution. Today, the preserved floorboards and quiet courtyards offer a direct physical link to those tense, formative years. The house stands exactly as it did a century ago, a quiet witness to the birth of a movement that reshaped a nation.