Madame Mao was not wrong. The Great Helmsman was already involved with the railroad nurse on his special train. She did sterling service as they travelled around the country. In Shanghai, he paraded her publicly, taking her to the exclusive Jinjaing Club which was the preserve of top Party officials. The Shanghai authorities knew of the Chairman’s passion for female companionship, so they laid on the city’s top actresses and singers. But they were too sophisticated and worldly for the proletarian Mao. The Shanghai authorities learnt quickly and began providing young dancers who were more to Mao’s taste.
At the time, the Cultural Work Troupe of the Twentieth Army were in the area. The young girls from the troupe would swarm around Mao, vying with each other for the privilege of a dance with the Great Leader. He would stay out dancing until two in the morning, then return to his train with his nurse.
Chiang Ch’ing’s suspicion of nurses was confirmed after his sixty-fifth birthday banquet, which was held in Guangzhou. That night, Madame Mao had trouble sleeping. She called for the nurse to get a sleeping pill and got no response. So she got up and went to look for her.
When she found the duty room empty, she stormed into Mao’s bedroom and found the nurse there. In the ensuing row, Chiang Ch’ing accused Mao of sleeping with a former servant who had visited recently. Mao had encouraged the woman to get her daughter an education and given her three thousand yuan to enroll in school. Madame Mao accused him of sleeping with the daughter too.
Mao’s response to these accusations was to head back to Peking, leaving his wife behind. Chiang Ch’ing quickly realized that she risked losing him. As an apology she sent him a quote from the famous Chinese folk story, Monkey. In it, a Chinese monk is travelling to India in search of a Buddhist scripture. But Monkey makes him angry and he leaves him behind in a cave behind a waterfall.
“My body is in the cave behind the waterfall,” Monkey says to the monk, “but my heart is following you.”
Mao accepted the apology — he realized that it meant he now had his wife’s tacit permission to sleep with whoever he chose.
On one trip into Chiangxi province, the director of a new hospital provided four energetic young nurses for one of Mao’s dance parties. A musical and dance troupe had also been laid on. Soon Mao was sleeping with a young nurse and a member of the dance troupe. He did little to hide the fact, but he was thoughtful enough to phone Madame Mao and advise her not to meet him there, as arranged. He would join her after his meetings were over.
As time went by, Mao grew careless and she caught him in flagrante delicto several times. There was nothing she could do about it. Once, Mao’s doctor found her crying on a park bench just outside Mao’s compound. She said through her tears that, just as no one, not even Stalin, could win a political battle against him, no one woman would win his heart completely.
Mao and Chiang Ch’ing eventually came to an understanding. In return for playing the public role of his wife, while tolerating his infidelities in private, Mao pledged not to leave her. As Madame Mao was more interested in power than sex, she agreed.
After that Mao made no attempt to hide his infidelities. At the Bureau of Confidential Matters, he met a young, white-skinned clerk, with delicately arched eyebrows and dark eyes. She told Mao that she had stuck up for him at primary school and been beaten up for her pains. Mao began a very public affair with the woman, spending night and day with her in Shanghai. Mao would dance with her until two in the morning, only stopping when his young companion was exhausted. The young woman was so proud of the affair that she tried to befriend Chiang Ch’ing. By this time, Chiang had accepted the situation, and she was warm and friendly in return.
In the 1960s, Madame Mao emerged as the power behind the Cultural Revolution and a threat to Mao. They became estranged — she even had to apply in writing to see him. Mao’s dance parties were stopped and his favourite opera, the decidedly counterrevolutionary The Emperor Seduces the Barmaid, was banned.
“I have become a monk,” Mao cried despondently.
But he soon found that even the Cultural Revolution had its perks. As chaos reigned throughout the country, three of Mao’s girlfriends turned up, claiming they had been denounced as imperialists and thrown out of their housing to wander the streets. Mao said: “If they don’t want you, you can stay with me. They say you’re imperialists? Well, I am the emperor.”
While the fanatical Red Guards tore China apart, Chairman Mao amused himself with these three pretty young women. One of them even became pregnant. Mao sent her to a hospital reserved for the highest cadres and she gave birth to a baby boy. Everyone was jubilant that Mao had a new son. Neither Mao, nor his doctor, mentioned that Mao was sterile.
His sterility did not bother him. What did concern him was potency. Already he was suffering bouts of impotence and he was determined to remain sexually active until the age of eighty. Like the old emperors of China, he believed that the more sexual partners you had the longer you lived. The first emperor of China, the father of the Han race from whom all the other Chinese are thought to be descended, is said to have made himself immortal by making love to a thousand virgins. The Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, founder of the Qin dynasty, sent a Taoist priest and five hundred virgin children across the sea in search of the elixir of immortality. According to the legend, the Japanese are their descendants. But of all the emperors, Mao thought that Sui Yangdui (AD 604-618), the architect of the Grand Canal, was the best. He lived a decadent, opulent life full of women. He would even have his pleasure boat pulled upstream by beautiful young girls attached by silken cords.
Doctors injected Mao with ground deer antlers — an old Chinese remedy for impotence. It did not work. A Romanian formula called H3 was also pumped into him for three months. That did not work either.
His physician then decided that the problem was more psychological than physical. He noticed that Mao’s sexual potency waxed and waned with his political power. During the Great Leap Forward, he was insatiable. One of his bedmates told his doctor: “He is great at everything — it’s simply intoxicating.”
His appetite also seemed to increase with age. So the doctor started giving him a placebo — a concoction of ginseng and glucose which he told Mao was a bodybuilding tonic.
During the late 1960s, when Mao was at the height of his power, although he was in his early seventies, he had no problem with the young women. As he grew older, they grew younger — it was a formula the emperors had used before him.
Mao would spend much of the day in one of the huge beds that he now favoured. He read voraciously and loved exotic literature. His great favourite was The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese classic set in feudal times. In it, a young man called Jia Baoyu falls in love with a woman, but his family refuse to let him marry her. Alienated from society, his rebellion takes the form of pleasure seeking and the seduction of young women. Mao saw himself as Jia Baoyu. Even his compound in the Forbidden City, which was called the Garden of Abundant Beneficence, was modelled on Jia’s family home.
Mao kept healthy by eating oily food, rinsing his mouth with tea and sleeping, mostly, with country girls. Like the ancient Han emperors, he sought to overcome death with the Taoist method of sex. He would often give new girls a copy of the Taoist sex manual classic of the Plain Girl’s Secret Way. According to Taoist. theory, for good health and longevity, a man must preserve the yang essence found in his semen. At that same time, he must absorb as much yin essence as possible from the yin shui, or virginal secretions of a woman. Consequently, he must have as much sex as possible, with as many partners as possible, without ejaculating.