How China came to worship the mango during the Cultural Revolution

Now the 18-month-long episode, which came at the height of the Cultural Revolution, has been unearthed by a new exhibition.

The mango mania began in the autumn of 1968 when Pakistan's Foreign minister arrived in Beijing and presented Chairman Mao with a case of the fruit.

In turn, the Great Helmsman decided to use the exotic fruit, then utterly unknown in most of China, to make a political statement.

He sent the case, containing roughly 40 mangoes, to a group of workers occupying the campus of Tsinghua university.

Astonished by the miraculous gift, they decided to send one mango to each of Beijing's most important factories.

"It was propaganda, but the thing to remember is that it started with real enthusiasm," said Alfreda Murck, a scholar at Beijing's Palace Museum whose work forms the basis of the exhibition at Zurich's Reitberg museum.

"When I interviewed one worker and asked him about the mangoes, his face lit up at the memory," she added.

The mangoes were held up as a symbol of Chairman Mao's love for the workers and quickly became holy relics themselves, such was the cult of personality around the Chinese leader.

A poem in the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the party, ran: "Seeing that golden mango/Was as if seeing the great leader Chairman Mao ... Again and again touching that golden mango/the golden mango was so warm".

At the Beijing Textile Factory, "the workers held a huge ceremony ... then sealed it in wax hoping to preserve it for posterity," recorded Li Zhisui, Mao's personal doctor. "The wax-covered fruit was placed on an altar and workers lined up to file past it, solemnly bowing as they walked by".

When the mango began to rot, however, it was delicately peeled and then boiled in a huge vat of water. "Another ceremony was held, equally solemn ... Each worker drank a spoonful of the water in which the sacred mango had been boiled," wrote Dr Li.

Meanwhile, the Number One Machine Tool Factory decided to send its mango to its sister factory in Shanghai. "They specially chartered an aeroplane just for the mango," said Mrs Murck.

Wang Xiaoping, 70, a worker at the factory, recalled the fascination. "What is a 'mango'? Nobody knew. Few had even heard the word, let alone seen one," she said in a recording for the exhibition.

"Knowledgeable people said it was a fruit of extreme rarity, like Mushrooms of Immortality. It must be very delicious. Its appearance nobody could describe. To receive such a rare and exotic thing filled people with a surge of excitement."

"That day was indeed a festive one for the factory. People were wild with joy ... everyone held their wax model of the sacred fruit solemnly and reverently. Someone was even admonished by senior workers for not holding the fruit securely".

Plastic, wax and papier mache facsimile mangoes were sent out on special lorries to tour the provinces, while enamel mugs, washbasins and plates were decorated with mangoes. Fake mangoes in glass cases were handed out to thousands of workers in Beijing to display in their homes.

Mango-brand cigarettes were a bestseller, and huge baskets of mangoes were the central floats of the 1968 National Day parade.

One dentist in a small village, who dared to compare a touring mango to a sweet potato was put on trial for malicious slander and executed. But the madness only lasted 18 months before the masses moved on, according to Mrs Murck.

Two years ago, however, Wang Xiaoping went on holiday to Vietnam and said she had been reminded of the episode by stands selling mango milkshakes. "I told my story of the mango to my younger colleagues in their 20s.

Incredulously they responded: 'It's only a piece of fruit! People of your time! Really!!'".

The exhibition Mao's Golden Mangoes opened on Feb 15 and runs until June at the Rietberg Museum in Zurich. It will then go to Germany and may transfer to the UK after that

Additional reporting by Valentina Luo