Kitsch and awe thriving in the home of the Great Helmsman

Shaoshan , a town of 100,000 about 90 minutes by car from the provincial capital Changsha, was chosen to host a leg of the Olympic torch relay for just one reason: it is the birthplace of Mao Zedong - officially the founding father of ' New China'.

More than 30 years after his death, Chairman Mao lives on in the minds, if not the hearts, of China's 1.3 billion people, and continues to influence the policies and perceptions of today's rulers. Almost every top leader for the past three decades has paid at least one visit to the pilgrimage site. The photos of them - looking solemn and awestruck as they stand before a larger-than-life bronze statue of Mao - hang on a slightly stained wall under the roof of a long open hallway.

The only party leaders to have skipped the ritual were Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang - both of them were purged in the 1980s because of their interest in reform.

Just opposite sits Mao's childhood home - a collection of mixed brick and earth-walled houses. It was a typically bleak, rainy day in spring, but thousands of visitors were queuing up outside.

They were a mixed bunch. Some of the older visitors wore jackets or suits, but there were plenty of people in their 20s or 30s, as well as students, schoolchildren and a few foreigners.

This is the country that celebrates the 30th anniversary of its market-based economic reforms this year and is supposed to have left Mao worship behind. But as the tour guide says, the annual number of visitors over the past decade has almost tripled to 2 million. The cult of Mao is strong, despite the unflattering biographies out there.

'Chairman Mao is perhaps not perfect, but still a great man,' says a 47-year-old tourist from Shanxi , who gave his surname as Yuan.