YEN-AN

Pinyin Yan'an, town in northeastern Shensi sheng (province), China. It became famous as the wartime stronghold of the Chinese Communists from the mid-1930s to 1949. The area around the town is a heavily dissected plateau of loess (windblown soil) that is deeply etched by gullies. Yen-an stands on the south bank of the Yen River in a basin surrounded by hills and is a road junction in northeast Shensi. It was a strategic town in historical times, being located near the borderbetween the part of Shensi where agriculture is practicable and the arid Northwest, which merges into the Ordos Desert. The name Yen-an was first given to the commandery set up there by the Sui dynasty (581618). A vital frontier post under the T'ang dynasty (618907), and a part of the defenses of the Sung dynasties (9601279) against the northwestern Hsia dynasty (10381227), it was the scene of a crucial victory by Mongol armies over the forces of the Juchen dynasty in 1221. Since the 15th century, the importance of the area has declined. It was badly affected by Muslim uprisings of 186475; by droughts and famines of the 1870s, which decimated the population; and by the almost equally disastrous droughts of the 1920s and '30s, which depopulated whole counties in the area. The Communist armies, driven from their bases in the Kiangsi Soviet areas by the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) in 1934, eventually reached Yen-an after their epic 6,000-mile (9,600-kilometre) Long March (193435). They made the town their headquarters during the war of resistance against the Japanese (193745) and during the civil war that brought Communist victory in 1949. Yen-an has thus come to represent a symbol of the heroic phase of the Chinese Communist Revolution, when the leadership of Mao Zedong was firmly established and the Communists mastered both guerrilla warfare and the peasant-based reform policies that were to bring them to power in 1949. Remote Yen-an stands as a national shrine for the Communist government, which recalls the spirit and example of its pioneer period. The town itself is a relatively minor place. The original walled settlement was ruined by Japanese bombing in 193839. Modern Yen-an is the centre of a district that has suffered seriously from soil erosion, but it has begun to be reclaimed as part of the vast scheme for the development of the Huang Ho (Yellow River) drainage region. The surrounding area has been increasingly devoted to livestock, and the town has a long-established woolen-textile industry. The whole area lies in a rich coal- and oil-bearing plain. Oil was discovered at Yen-ch'ang about 22 miles (35 km) to the east early in the 20th century, and a small amount was produced in the 1930s. The oil field has been further developed since 1949 but still remains small. Pop. (1990) 113,277.