Mao craved sex, and he believed it prolonged his life. He practiced droit du seigneur on a grand scale, taking countless awe struct peasant girls into his bed, sometimes several at once. Not that he cared about them. When Dr. Li discovered that Mao was carrying a venereal disease, the chairman refused treatment. “If it’s not hurting me, then it doesn’t matter,” he said. Dr. Li writes: “The young women were proud to be infected.”
In many ways, Mao remained a peasant. He never bathed, considering it a waste of time. And he never brushed his teeth, preferring to rinse his mouth with tea, as farmers did. Li reports that “his teeth were covered with a heavy greenish film.” But this telling court portrait makes it clear that Mao was not just a revolutionary. In his outsize ego, his opulent lifestyle and his gargantuan appetites, he was also China’s last emperor.
