Strolling down the street, the director of the local Bureau of Commerce carried a human leg on his shoulder, which he was taking home to boil and consume. On the leg there still hung a piece of a man's trousers.
For page after stomach-turning page, the Chinese writer Zheng Yi describes this and other scenes which took place in the picturesque countryside of Guangxi province in the late 1960s.
Thousands of class enemies were murdered and eaten under the leadership of Communist Party officials at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Rumours of these events reached Zheng in Beijing, and 20 years later he set out to investigate whether they could possibly be true.
In Scarlet Memorial, he describes how he travelled through the small towns of Guangxi interviewing both the relatives of the victims and some of the cannibals themselves.
Along the way he gains access to accounts of the horrible events in internal party documents, some of which are based on investigations and trials staged after 1979. The sheer mass of horrific detail as one reads the book expels any doubt that such events, more gruesome than anything conceived in any horror film, really took place.
As he overcomes his own scepticism, Zheng, who was once a fanatical Red Guard himself, describes his own revulsion and bewilderment.