Skip to content
History–Tours
19194 May 1919 · Beijing

May Fourth Movement

The red-brick Red Building of Peking University in Beijing, where the May Fourth students gathered in 1919
Photo: N509FZ. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On 4 May 1919 some 3,000 Beijing students marched to Tiananmen to protest the Paris Peace Conference's decision to hand Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan. Strikes and boycotts spread nationwide. The protests became the banner of a wider New Culture Movement for vernacular writing, science and democracy, and drew several of its leaders towards founding the Communist Party.

Sites

  1. Site 1: Red Building of old Peking University (Beijing New Culture Movement Memorial)The university building where the students gathered, now a museum of the movement.Map ↗
  2. Site 2: Tiananmen and the Monument to the People's HeroesWhere the marchers assembled; a relief on the monument shows the day.Map ↗

Guides who take you there

History-only · order never for sale
We haven't found an independent history guide for this yet. Guide here? Tell us about your tours.

Also in Beijing

More from the Interwar

Read more: reference. Summary written by History-Tours.com.