Portraying Mao President Mao Zedong in Northern Shanxi is a huge oil painting (140x280 cm) by Gao Hong. The picture is taken from La Chine, 15, 1959. The text says the painter entered the People's Liberation Army in 1939, at the age of thirteen; this work was finished in 1957. The painting depicts the encounter between a unit of the People's Liberation Army and president Mao Zedong, "the beloved chief of the revolution", near the border between Shanxi and Gansu. The Party's Central Committee had left Yanan in the second year of the civil war against Jiang Kaishek (1947).