The Original Sin: Long Asian road trip with a mission

There is a school of thought that finds Mao Tse-Tung the most important personage of the entire 20th Century. Certainly, if the criterion for that status is a positive impact on the greatest number, this unlikely choice makes more sense, given that his native land still today holds off India in its position of having earth's greatest number of human inhabitants at nearly a billion and a half at last count.

Mao was the eldest son to survive infancy of Mao Yichang, a prosperous farmer of the Shaoshan Valley in the southern Hunan Province, so it was unlikely he came to glory as the dedicated MarQist-Leninist who would emerge to lead the famed Long March of 1934-35 away from the Civil War with Chiang Kaishek's Nationalists in the south. As a result from the sanctuary he reached in the northern Shaanxi mountains where the Sino rice-civilization had devolved as much as two and half million generations earlier, Mao was the clear choice to assume the leadership of his Communist Party in the Chinese Revolution that followed World War II to finally restore the prosperity and self-esteem of the most populous people on earth who for decades had been effectively colonized by the West.