Mao Zedong was born in 1893 to a farming family in Hunan province, with little to suggest the role he would come to play in reshaping China. This first installment of a DW three-part series follows his political awakening through the 1911 Revolution that ended imperial rule, his introduction to Marxism after the 1917 Russian Revolution, and his rise as a co-founder of the Communist Party of China. The film traces the escalating civil war against the Kuomintang and the brutal retreat known as the Long March, the episode that became the founding myth of the later Mao cult. Historians and eyewitnesses appear alongside archival footage to track his ascent through the party ranks up to the Communist forces' arrival in Beijing. The series as a whole continues into the founding of the People's Republic and the Cultural Revolution, but this chapter stays focused on the making of the revolutionary, from rural obscurity to the edge of national power.