Xi Jinping makes rare visit to Yanan, China's revolutionary base where he lived as young man

China's first family made a rare visit together to a remote village near Yanan, the symbolic base of the revolution and also where President Xi Jinping began his political career.

Observers said the trip was aimed at further projecting Xi's image as inheritor of the Communist Party's "red roots" and his connection to Mao Zedong and other early leaders. But the visit was also apparently an informal family affair, and came just ahead of today's Valentine's Day.

Photographs posted online showed Xi and his wife Peng Liyuan visiting Liangjiahe, in Shaanxi, where they offered Lunar New Year greetings to the villagers and brought gifts for the president's "old friends", Wang Xianping, deputy head of a local traffic police division, told Hong Kong-based news website Ifeng.com.

Mingze, who turns 23 this year, was previously attending Harvard University, but she remains out of the public spotlight, and the only available pictures of her are from the 1990s.

Dubbed "the cradle of the red revolution", Yanan was where top party leaders - including Mao, Zhou Enlai, and the president's father, Xi Zhongxun , forged the ragtag Red Army into a populist guerilla force and honed their socialist ideology.