The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh

The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh, by Agnes Smedley (Monthly Review Press 1956), is an unfinished biography of Chinese Communist leader Zhu De.

Smedley died in 1950, with the work unfinished. Edgar Snow as her literary executor had trouble getting it published. He got a Japanese translation published in 1955, which had modest success. It was published in English in 1956 by the independent Marxist Monthly Review Press, with an introduction by Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, but did poorly.

It remains the only major English-language biography of a military commander who played a major role in Chinese history. In China, it is regarded as a classic. A Chinese translation has sold millions.

The biography includes an account of how he was a radical in the 1911 Chinese Revolution, but shared in the general corruption and failure of the warlord area. And how he remade himself as a believer in Leninist Communism.

There are gaps in the story. But it included Zhu's own account of the Battle of Luding Bridge. This differs slightly from that told in Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China. It seems that the earlier failure of a Taiping army at this same bridge had been told to Zhu when he was a child:

The river is Tatu River in Red Star Over China and Dadu River in current transliteration. Zhu as translitterated by Smedley also speaks of "Lutinchiao" rather than Luding Bridge. And he mentions the man who led the attack and was first to die:

...
Wikipedia