On October 22, 1936, the main forces of the Red Army met at Jiangtaibao, a town in the south of what is now Ningxia, and the long retreat that had begun in 1934 came to an end. The meeting joined the first front army, which had reached northern Shaanxi a year earlier, with the second and fourth front armies that had marched north by other routes. It is the date usually given for the completion of the Long March. The march was over.
The three armies had set out from different base areas. The first had left Jiangxi in October 1934 and had reached Shaanxi in October 1935, and the second and fourth had moved through the south west and then turned north through Sichuan and Gansu, in country that was hard to cross and where supply was poor. The fourth army had taken a long detour and had crossed the grasslands more than once. The road was hard. The losses along the way were heavy, and the numbers who arrived were much smaller than those who had set out.
The meeting was a political as well as a military event. It confirmed the leadership that had been settled at the Zunyi meeting and put an end to the split that had developed within the party and the army during the retreat, and it left the forces concentrated in the north west. A base was built around Yan'an, which became the headquarters of the party from 1937 and the centre from which the war against Japan and the later civil war were directed.
The date is marked each year, and the meeting place at Jiangtaibao is preserved as a memorial site. The site is kept. Historians have argued for decades about the numbers who took part and about the decisions that were made along the way, and the estimates of the losses differ widely. What is agreed is that the survivors of the march formed the core of the army that later won the civil war and founded the People's Republic in 1949.