A RARE article about the reclusive daughter of Chairman Mao's second wife, He Zizhen, claims she is living in poverty on 400 yuan (about HK$373) a month in a courtyard house near the Forbidden City.
The Nanfang Daily said Li Min, 53, was in poor health and was unable to walk downstairs from her second-floor flat.
'As a princess who endured so many hardships and was once envied by everyone else, she should live more comfortably and affluently than ordinary people.
'Yet her life is still quite hard,' the article said.
It described her living alone in quarters described as 'common' and furnished with filthy, old furniture.
Ms Li is believed to be the only one to survive of six children of the marriage between Mao and He Zizhen, who accompanied her husband on the exhausting and dangerous Long March.
The others are thought to have died or been left in the keeping of peasants. He Zizhen was sent to the Soviet Union where she lived during World War II while Mao took up with Jiang Qing. She was later diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and after she returned, Mao rarely saw her.