Wang Quanyuan was 21 years old, tall, beautiful and full of party spirit when she and 86,000 other troops set out for the hinterlands of China. It was late in 1934, when Mao Zedong and other party leaders decided to retreat from Chiang Kai-shek’s forces, who had them nearly surrounded.

Surely that young woman or the 30 others who went with her did not know that they would be marching nearly 4,000 miles over some of the world’s harshest terrain, and that a year later they would have completed one of the defining events of the 20th century, now known as the “Long March.”

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