Chen Qingrui was fishing by the sea when he was swept away by a rip current while trying to save someone from drowning. When he opened his eyes again, it was 1926 in Longdong.
Warlords were at war, and a three-year drought had left the land so barren that even tree bark and grass roots had been eaten. A defeated soldier returning home, he had dozens of starving refugees who could barely walk under his command. Taking over a dilapidated temple was enough to give them a base.
One of his men asked, “Commander Chen, what are we supposed to fight Tan the Devil’s militia with?”
He weighed the Mauser rifle in his hand. “Our wits.”
First, he faked a surrender to trick the enemy into giving him a hundred rifles. Then he disguised his men as drill instructors and seized their stronghold. He used rolling logs and rocks, and set ambushes in the mountain passes, always catching the enemy off guard. More and more refugees gathered, and his force grew with every battle. When people asked him the secret, he said:
“The poor have to stick together. Once we do, even the Son of Heaven has to make way.”
Then a woman named Xu Ziqing came to see him. She said she could make guns, smelt iron, and turn these gullies in the Loess Plateau into an industrial hub for the northwest. He believed her. Only later did he discover that she was hiding an even greater secret: she and he had both been swept from the same sea into this turbulent age.
“Then let’s finish what we started here.”
A poverty alleviation worker’s path to prosperity through farming begins in a dilapidated temple.
