Does it matter?

[The Long March] was the 8,000-mile trek by the fledgling Communist party and its armed forces that was to become the founding legend of communist China, a symbol of endurance and courage. Only a fifth of the 200,000 marchers survived the ordeal that began in 1934, when the Red Armies had to leave their bases in southern China - where Mao Zedong had been the leader of a short-lived communist government - to escape annihilation by Chiang Kai Shek's nationalist forces. Of the 40,000 who reached the march's end two years later in China's barren north-west where the communists regrouped, fewer than 500 are believed to be alive today, and they are in their 80s and 90s.

The Red Army...had large numbers of young recruits, the Little Red Devils, most in their early teens. No one is sure of their number. Wang thought it was 5,000 or 6,000 out of 100,000 in the Fourth Army, and roughly the same number in the First Army. Li Wenying was 14 at the time of the march. She had been sold as child bride, and found herself trapped with a cruel mother-in-law. Like so many Little Red Devils, she joined up for a square meal and some pork now and then. "When I was small, we saw pigs running about, but never knew what they tasted like. Only the landlords could afford it."

Following the Long March route, I came across a report in an archive in Sichuan. It was compiled by Nationalist officials, detailing Red Army stragglers abandoned in their particular county. My heart ached as I ran down the list, so young, half of them in their early teens, the youngest only nine years old. In the remote Sichuan grassland, I found one of them, Sangluo, now an old man in his mid-80s. He was 13 when he joined He Long's army far to the east in Hunan province, but in the grassland he could not keep up with the marchers. One morning when he woke up, the troops were gone. They had left behind more than a thousand sick and wounded, and the young. "I screamed and screamed. The Red Army was like my parents. How could they abandon me just like that?"

His youth saved him: the Tibetan families of the grassland relished a son, or took pity on the children. He was taken in by a lama, whose mother looked after him. Isolated for most of his life on the pasture with no other Han Chinese, he can no longer speak Chinese, nor remember his home village. The man before me looked completely Tibetan, his wrinkled face the same dark red as his robe, his fingers bent from the rheumatoid arthritis that plagues the nomads. He was grateful for his life: most of those abandoned with him died of hunger or were killed by the local people. As I said goodbye, I asked him whether he felt Chinese or Tibetan. He replied, "Does it matter?"