Wen Jiyan poses with a porcelain badge with the portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong in his hand. Above are various designs of Mao badges. (China Daily) Photo Gallery>>>

    BEIJING, Dec. 10 -- In antique stores in Leshan, Southwest China's Sichuan province, most porcelain badges with the portrait of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong sell for around 40 yuan ($6). But some go for as much as 10,000 yuan and are much sought after by collectors from home and abroad.

    For Guo Zhiquan and Wen Jiyan, these badges are an important memory of their youth.

    Guo and Wen, both 67 and Leshan natives, have known each other since they began working at the State-run Leshan Qinghua Porcelain Factory in 1962, in the small city noted for housing the world's tallest stone Buddha.

    Guo was tasked with making the white porcelain while Wen painted the wares. Sharing a common interest in art and literature, the two soon became good friends.

    Little did they foresee that they would be drawn even closer, but also separated, by the national icon Chairman Mao.

    When the "cultural revolution (1966-76)" began, they both became Red Guards, Mao's loyal soldiers.

    "We believed Chairman Mao was set to change the world, and so were we," says Guo, who calls the 10-year turmoil "an era of political illusion".

    His worker-family background and rebellious spirit helped Guo thrive. Soon he became the leader of a Red Guard faction and took over the management of the factory in 1968.

    Eager for a breakthrough, Guo locked his eyes on Mao badges. It had become fashionable to wear and collect Mao badges after the leader met the Red Guards in Beijing in August 1966.

    The first metal badges were followed by plastic, bamboo and porcelain, with porcelain being the most precious, Guo says. "I realized that this was our opportunity."

    In July 1968, Guo led a team, that included Wen, to learn about making porcelain badges at the Jianxiang Porcelain Factory in Changsha, Hunan province.

    During their three-week apprenticeship, Guo and Wen visited Mao's birthplace in Shaoshan county. They took a picture in front of his home and Wen even brought back a bottle of earth and rubble he had scooped up from the courtyard.

    Back in Leshan, Guo set up a special team called the "badge platoon" dedicated to making badges.

    A piece of clay had to go through more than 20 procedures, like crushing, grinding, mud-washing, molding, polishing, decaling and firing before it became a badge.

    The best one was "as thin as paper, white as jade, bright as a mirror, and produced a musical sound when flicked", Wen recalls.

    "Our work was a serious political task," says Guo. "We didn't say 'make' badges, but 'produced badges with full respect'; and people didn't 'get a badge', but 'greeted a badge'."

    After he had passed on what he learned in Hunan to colleagues, Wen was fired from the team. This came as no surprise, given his business-family background. The fist batch of 40,000 badges was released in September, 1968, but more than 80 percent had defects.

    Sand from the workplace had worked its way into the clay, causing pinhole-sized pores on the surface of the badges, recalls Guo. "I was dumbfounded, and some women colleagues began to cry, not out of fear but in regret. It was a sin to distort the leader's image."

    But a corrected lot was produced in 10 days and the best ones were stuck on a wooden board, forming the character "zhong" (loyalty).

    Guo led a team to the Leshan county government to show off their work.

Guo Zhiquan (L) and Wen Jiyan take a picture in front of late Chairman Mao Zedong's birthplace in Shaoshan county, during their apprenticeship learning about making porcelain badges in Hunan province in 1968. (China Daily file photo) Photo Gallery>>>

    "It created a sensation. Everyone across the county began to talk about it," Guo says.

    He was selected as a delegate from Sichuan province for the National Day celebrations in Beijing in 1968. There, he had a chance to see Mao in person.

    Guo remembers clearly the moment he saw Mao at the Great Hall of the People.

    "He was much taller than I thought and his hands were very soft," Guo recalls. "I was so nervous that I couldn't stop trembling when shaking hands with him, as if I was sick."

    The demand for the Leshan plant's badges soared and the number of workers it employed grew from 300 to more than 500. More than 30 kinds of Mao badges were made in 1969. The leader's images and quotations also began to appear on other products.

    "Even the jars for pickles were painted with slogans like 'With the Helmsman, we sail on the seas; with Mao Zedong Thought, we undertake the revolution'," Guo says.

    The badges were not meant for sale, but mainly for honoring "heroes from different fields". A special office under the local government, known as "Mao's Office", was put in charge of badge distribution.

    But the factory's prosperity came to an abrupt end with an order from the central government in June 1969 to stop producing the Mao badges to avoid wasting materials, especially metal.

    By then, the Leshan Qinghua Porcelain Factory had churned out more than 100,000 badges. The number nationwide exceeded 8 billion.

    Guo now had to figure out how to store the badges, including the defective ones.

    "Mao's portrait was on them, we couldn't bury or abandon the badges. That would be a political mistake," he says.

    The "Mao's Office" was also not much help. A desperate Guo eventually ordered a few workers to put all the defective badges in several big bamboo baskets and load them on a small boat.

    "They dumped the badges into the Dadu River at night. Only a few factory officials knew about it. That's the best solution we could figure out," says Guo.

    But an end to making Mao badges did not signal an end to those tumultuous times.

    Both Guo and Wen were jailed twice before 1972 in fights among Red Guard cliques. They were both tired of the endless political struggles.

    "It was dangerous. You could be in heaven one moment, and hell in the next," says Guo.

    In 1974, Guo abandoned politics and enrolled at the Sichuan Academy of Arts.

    "My family didn't understand, but I realized that only those with skills would survive," he says.

    Four years later, Guo returned to the factory, and began working with Wen as a painter.

    The next few years marked a turning point in China: Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping began to steer the country toward reform and greater openness in the late 1970s. This gave Guo an opportunity to change his fate.

    "Intellectuals regained their respect in the 1980s and talents were sought out. My college diploma changed my life," says Guo.

    He held his first painting exhibition in Luoyang, Henan province, in 1983 and three years later, became the first dean of the art department at Luoyang University. He moved his whole family there.

    "I didn't change the world. It changed me," says Guo, whose landscape paintings have been selected as gifts by China's Foreign Ministry for foreign guests.

    In 2004, Guo returned to Leshan, and busied himself with painting, calligraphy and writing. Few know about his association with Mao badges.

    "Thirty years ago, I thought my value lay in making Mao badges. Now, I have found it in helping others and being useful to society. That is enough."

    Guo's old friend, Wen, has had a simpler life. He didn't leave Qinghua except for a three-year training stint in Chinese language at a local college in the 1980s. He retired from the factory as a general manager in 2002.

    Wen plans to write a book on the modern history of Leshan, which begins with the Mao badges.

    "History needs be recorded, the past should not be forgotten," says Wen, whose cherished possession is the bottle of sand from Mao's birthplace, though its rusted cap can no longer be opened.

    He also has a "memory box" that contains a few of the Mao badges he once wore.

    The badges became popular in China once again in the 1990s -- as a collector's item. It is estimated that some 300 million badges have survived and that there are more than 2 million badge collectors on the Chinese mainland.

    "People today are more practical. The badge may mean money for some, but for us, it represented a belief," says Wen.

    (Source: China Daily)