This is some sort of underground museum, it turns out. Not secret, literally underground, lit by orangey halogen lamps. He goes up to the counter for a ticket (priced in both ringgit and baht). The woman there also tries to entice him into buying some incense.

“I didn’t know you Communists were religious.”

“We’re not, but you might be.” She smiles at him. “The tourists kept asking for an Earth God shrine, so we set up one down the hill. It’s a Malaysian-Chinese thing: wherever they go, they want to pray to the local gods.”

He refuses the incense, and instead browses a rack of memorabilia—khaki caps with red stars on their crests, postcards of old propaganda posters. A little Mao statue seems like the perfect gift for Janet, and if it annoys Winston that’s a bonus.

Xiongmin is waiting just inside, and is expecting him. They shake hands gravely. “I mostly look after the archives,” he says, “but Gaolan says you’re a special visitor, so I thought I’d show you round myself.”

They walk down the tunnel, which Xiongmin explains was built as a refuge. “We had to hide from the bombs, and what if the army came? So we dug this with nothing, just a changkol blade and baskets to clear the soil away. We had to go back out every half hour for air, or we’d have fainted.” Henry pats a packed-earth wall as he walks past. It is cool and firm, like a real cave. There are alcoves for sleeping in, storage niches, and even a larger chamber with a peaked roof. “The radio room,” says Xiongmin. “We had a wire leading up to the surface.”

There is a whole warren of these underground passageways, now fitted with information boards and displays. A map marked with different colours shows how the area occupied by the Ma Gong shrank over time. There are entire walls of propaganda materials, posters and pamphlets emblazoned with revolutionary youths. And photographs, some posed, some candid—the comrades doing surprisingly ordinary things.

“Are those people…gardening?” It seems so unlikely.

“Yes,” says Xiongmin. “You mustn’t think it was just fighting all the time. We went amongst the Thai people, you know, helped them with their weeding and housework, sorting out domestic issues. The Thai police knew we were here, but they didn’t do anything. Everyone trusted us. When we told them we were leaving, some of them held onto us and cried, but we had to go. The struggle was over.”

They walk on a bit farther, in silence. The exhibition is amateurishly designed, the grammar imperfect in both English and Chinese. They have obviously done it all themselves, with no outside help. Four decades of fighting, and this is the only residue. There are newspaper articles too, including Revathi’s famous one in the Herald. Xiongmin points at it with some pride. “That’s my mother,” he says, “That’s her, in the photo. I didn’t see that till years later, but I was happy to have that. I never saw her again.” He says it without loss, as a fact. Henry thinks of mentioning that he knows the journalist, but what for? Another meaningless point of connection.