Staging History | Icons and Symbols | Sacred Sites | Monument to the People's Heroes

The Monument to the People's Heroes is the central feature of the Square. Built in the late 1950s to commemorate those who had died for change and revolution in China from 1840, its northern face has a calligraphic inscription by Mao Zedong which reads: "The People's Heroes Live On Forever". Around it, in bas relief, is an iconographic representation of highlights of the Chinese Revolution.

Simon Leys on the Monument: "[T]his insignificant granitic phallus receives all its enormous significance from the blasphemous stupidity of its location. In erecting this monument in the center of the sublime axis that reaches from Ch'ien men to Tien-an men, the designer's idea was, of course, to use to advantage the ancient imperial planning of that space, to take over to the monument's advantage that mystical current, which, carried along rhythmically from city gate to city gate, goes from the outside world to the Forbidden City, the ideal center of the Universe. The planner failed to realize that by inserting his revolutionary-proletarian obscenity in the middle of that sacred way he was neatly destroying precisely the perspective he wanted to capture for it."