Local Culture
The local Xiang Opera, accompanied by drums, is well known for its relaxed, light-hearted liveliness. The area is known for its shadow puppetry, dancing, folk songs and humorous love songs.
Handicrafts
Hunan is famous for its embroidery and porcelain. The Xiang embroidery uses bold colours and exciting subject matter- lions and tigers – and you can visit the studio where it is made. The porcelain is blue and white, and tight in the hand. There are factories and studios in Changsha itself, and outside the city to the southeast, is the Liling Ceramics Centre, where deposits of kaolin were found in the Qing dynasty by a Guangzhouese potter who set up a temple to his old pottery master. He produced blue-and-white folk-style porcelain with under glaze decoration. The factory closed in the ig3os and was reopened after 1949.
Changsha is also renowned for its umbrellas.

Practical information in Changsha Travel
Shopping
In the vicinity of May First (Wuyi) Square and Road are an arts and crafts store, a foreign-language bookshop, a large department store and a branch of the Bank of China.

Hotels
Hunan Bin guan
Yingbin Road (compound on outskirts of city)
Tel. 263 31
Has a shop and post office

Xiang jiang binguan
Zhongshandong Road
Tel. 26261
More centrally located and recently built, with a friendship store and a postoffice
Food
Hunanese food is hot, and the staple diet of ordinary people is rice and fish.
The local spirit, in a gourd-shaped bottle, is made from spring water and called baisha jiu.

First Normal School of Hunan Province
Many of the places to visit in Changsha, including this one, are closely linked to the activities of Mao Zedong. The somewhat Florentine-looking building with its shutters and arches was where the young Mao came to study and later to teach. He took the examinations herein the spring of 1913, when he was twenty, and graduated in 1918. During his time at the school he seemed a lively and critical student who took an interest in Western philosophy, and his classroom contains photographs of his books. In the summer vacation of 1917he took a walking holiday in the local countryside, visiting villages. Behind the school is the well or pond where Mao would come every day for a cold dip; he always considered physical exercise of great importance, and wrote an early essay about it. Also during his time here he became involved in various revolutionary activities. In summer 1918 he went to Peking, where he worked in a library.

Today the school is still a teachers’ training college; it was rebuilt in the mid-1960 s, having been burnt in the fire of 1938; it accommodates some 1300 students and 170 teachers. At the entrance is Mao’s slogan: ‘To be a teacher of the people, one must first be their pupil’. The school is close to Jiang-xiang Road, just south of Laodong lu.

Changsha Tours