1. Yang Kaihui was the second wife of Mao Zedong, whom he married in 1920.
18 Facts About Yang Kaihui
2.
Yang Kaihui had three children with Mao Zedong: Mao Anying, Mao Anqing and Mao Anlong.
3.
Yang Kaihui's father was Yang Changji, the head of the Hunan First Normal School and one of Mao's favorite teachers.
4.
Yang Kaihui was a distant cousin to Yang Youlin, another instrumental member of the Chinese Communist Party.
5.
Yang Kaihui was born in the small village of Bancang in Changsha, Hunan Province, on 6 November 1901.
6.
Yang Kaihui Changji gained a professorship at Peking University and had moved his family to the city when Mao came to Peking in September 1918 with several like-minded friends from Hunan.
7.
Yang Kaihui later related that she had "fallen madly in love with him already when I heard about his numerous accomplishments" but did not make her feelings immediately known.
8.
Yang Kaihui kept "hoping and dreaming" that he shared her feelings and decided that she would never marry anyone but him.
9.
Yang Kaihui joined the Chinese Socialism Youth League in the second half of 1920 as one of the first members in Hunan.
10.
Yang Kaihui married Mao Zedong that winter, without any wedding ceremony or other celebrations.
11.
Yang Kaihui joined the Chinese Communist Party in the beginning of 1922.
12.
In 1925, accompanied by Mao, Yang Kaihui went to Shaoshan to organize peasant movements, while caring for her husband and educating their children.
13.
Yang Kaihui sorted through the large amount of investigation materials and neatly copied them down.
14.
Amid the great difficulties and dangers, Yang Kaihui wrote many letters to her cousin Yang Kaihui Kaiming, asking him to take good care of her children and mother if she met a sudden death.
15.
Yang Kaihui's captors wanted her to publicly renounce Mao Zedong and the CCP, but she refused to do so.
16.
Yang Kaihui was executed in Changsha on 14 November 1930 at the age of 29.
17.
In spring 1957, Li Shuyi, a friend and comrade of Mao and Yang Kaihui's, wrote a poem in memory of her own husband, Liu Chih-hsun, a member of the Red Army who had been killed in 1933.
18.
Yang Kaihui wrote poems to express her loneliness and her longing for Mao.