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Jianshui Jianmin Middle School
Honghe, Yunnan, China
In October 1949, armed Nationalist police surrounded a school at No. 130 Chaoyang North Road, giving its students exactly two hours to pack their lives and leave. This sudden eviction marked the end of the first era of Jianmin Middle School.
Founded in August 1938 by Liu Baoxuan, an educator who resigned his post at Yunnan University to teach in his hometown, the school operated under the cover of local merchants like Ma Yimei and Huang Meizhi. It quickly became a secret sanctuary for resistance. In the shadow of the 1941 Japanese air raids, which shattered six hundred local homes, students gathered in secret societies like the Danxin She to read banned texts. They printed wall newspapers on rough bamboo paper and sang the "Yellow River Cantata" to crowds on the cobblestone streets. Over eleven years, the school trained 1,567 students, producing over one hundred underground Communist Party members. More than thirty teachers and students died for their cause.
Today, the campus is a state-protected cultural relic and an active public junior high school. Modern classrooms stand alongside the old courtyards of the former Chongwen Academy. Students still walk past the Spring Breeze Pavilion and the bronze statue of Liu Baoxuan, studying the same local history from specialized school textbooks. Visitors can touch the restored wooden pillars, feeling the same grain that sheltered young rebels decades ago, a quiet space where the echoes of morning revolutionary songs still linger in the mountain air.