Tree Sparrow
£295.00
Acrylic on Chinese 1 Yuan banknote
62 x 131 mm
Chairman Mao in 1958, as part of The Great Leap Forward, issued an edict to destroy all the sparrows of China, as they were eating the rice crop, and this was duly carried out in villages throughout the land. This created a catastrophe, as the insect pests the sparrows also consumed ravaged the crops. The edict had to be swiftly reversed, but too late to stop the Great Chinese Famine, in which tens of millions of people died of starvation.