The son of a poor farmer who became a guerilla chief and leader of the Communist Party before being imprisoned for 16 years during the Cultural Revolution was cremated on Thursday with full party honours.
Xi Zhongxun's last rites at the Babaoshan cemetery in western Beijing were attended by almost the entire party leadership, including President Jiang Zemin, National People's Congress Chairman Li Peng, Premier Zhu Rongji, Vice-President Hu Jintao and the PLA's top commanders. Xi died on May 24 at the age of 88.
The event was the top story the next day in the People's Daily, which devoted almost the whole of its back page to a eulogy of Xi and featured photographs of China in the 1930s and 1940s, when he made his name.
One photograph showed a gawkish Xi in March 1932, already a Communist Party member for four years, on one of his first assignments when he joined the Kuomintang army and led a mutiny to turn its troops into communist guerillas.
Xi, born on October 15, 1913, was the son of a poor farmer in Fuping county, Shaanxi province. In 1926 he joined the Communist Youth League, just five years after the party was set up. In 1928 he was arrested by the Kuomintang government for revolutionary activities and, while in prison, joined the Communist Party.
From March 1932 he became a guerilla leader and set up 'revolutionary bases' on the Shaanxi-Gansu border. He fought Kuomintang armies and was involved in campaigns to seize land from landlords and give it to farmers who had none. Xi was imprisoned by the communists in September 1935 but later released.
It was to these remote and barren areas of northern Shaanxi that the communists fled after the Long March across China.