Far from the political theater of China's Communist Party Congress in Beijing this week is a cave that the country's next leader once called home.
Just 15 at the time, Xi Jinping was sent by his family in Beijing to the remote rural village Liangjiahe in the hills of Shaanxi Province, hundreds of miles away, where for seven years he lived in a cave scooped out of the yellow loess hillsides.
He arrived there in 1968, after his father, a revolutionary fighter and former vice premier, had fallen from political favor.
"Many kids were leaving Beijing and being seen off by their parents," says historian Tan Huwa from Yanan University.
"Their kids were crying about leaving their lives in Beijing. But he was smiling when he left because leaving was his only way out," Tan says. "His father's situation was such that if he stayed, he wouldn't even amount to anything."
Enlarge Louis Lim/NPR
Xi lived in the cave house on the far right, in Liangjiahe village in central China. After his father's political downfall in Beijing, his parents sent him there when he was 15 in 1968.