Luo Yigu

Who was Luo Yigu?

Luo Yigu, a Han Chinese woman, was the first wife of the future Chinese revolutionary and political leader Mao Zedong, to whom she was married from 1908 until her death in 1910. Like Mao, to whom she was distantly related, she was from the area around Shaoshan, Hunan in south central China, and came from an impoverished local landowning family.

Most of what is known about their marriage comes from an account Mao gave to American reporter Edgar Snow in 1936, which Snow included in his book Red Star Over China. According to Mao, he and Luo Yigu were the subject of an arranged marriage organised by their respective fathers, Mao Yichang and Luo Helou. Luo was eighteen and Mao just fourteen years old at the time of their betrothal; although Mao went through with the wedding ceremony, he was unhappy with the marriage, never consummating it and refusing to live with his wife. Socially disgraced, she moved in and lived with Mao's parents for two years before her death from dysentry, while he moved out of the village to continue his studies elsewhere, eventually entering communist politics.