Red Army veteran Quan Shengxiang told the reporter the "secret" hidden in the newspaper in front of the original site of Hadapu Post Office.(Photo by Wang Yanxiang)

　　In September 1935, after crossing Dalashan, the last snow-capped mountain peak of the Minshan Mountains, the First Front Army of the Red Army arrived at Hadapu Town in Dangchang County, a famous historical and cultural town situated at the east foot of the Minshan Mountains. It was here that the Central Committee of the CPC learned from the Kuomintang's newspapers that there were Red Army troops and the revolutionary base areas in northern Shaanxi. The Red Army then made the important decision to march towards the northern Shaanxi and took northern Shaanxi as the final destination of the Long March.

　　Hadapu was a renowned medicinal material collection and distribution center. In order to enable the merchants engaged in medicinal material business to keep abreast with the latest trade information, the Hadapu Post Office sold the newspapers published in various parts of the country. At today's Hadapu Red Army Long March Memorial Hall, the reporter saw a copy of Ta-Kung-Pao (newspaper) dated on September 12, 1935. It was this piece of newspaper, which impelled the Red Army troops to change their advance direction. The headline on the front-page of the Ta-Kung-Pao reads: "With the change of military situation in northern Shaanxi, Liu Zhidan and Xu Haidong tend to join the forces."…. Though the whole page was bursting with the clamor of suppressing the "bandits", Mao Zedong, by reading between the lines, came to know that the Red Army had been very active in northern Shaanxi.

　　Quan Shengxiang, a native of Dangchang, traveled from Mianyang in Sichuan Province to his hometown to visit his relatives, he told the reporter: "What place should be the proper destination of the Red Army? It was a question that had been on Mao Zedong's mind throughout the course of the Long March. At the Ejie Conference held right after the Red Army crossed the grassy marshlands, the Central Committee once decided to go to an area bordering on the former Soviet Union. It was this piece of newspaper that told the Red Army what place should be their proper final destination."

　　While leafing through the materials in the memorial hall, the reporter saw the following statement from a document issued by the State Council of the People's Republic of China to declare Hadapu as a key state-level cultural relics unit: "Hadapu is the place where an important decision was made to decide the fate of the Long March of the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army."