In the spring of 1941, under the leadership of Brigade Commander Wang Zhenbrigade, the officers and men of the 1359th Brigade of the 120 Division of the Eighth Route Army, responding to Mao Zedong's call of "do it yourself", "plentiful clothes and sufficient food", opened up Nanniwan in response to the slogan "a hoe and a gun to produce self-supporting Party Central Committee", and carried out reclamation and self-saving production. It took only three years to turn Nanniwan, a wilderness and uninhabited area full of thorns, into a good south of the Yangtze River in northern Shaanxi Province where crops are everywhere and cattle and sheep are everywhere.