It may not have been accidental that Mao introduced Jiang Qing to the political stage just as his private life was taking a different turn. Less than a month after Jiang Qing made her public debut, Mao was smitten by Zhang Yufeng, the woman who would later become his closest female companion. I had first seen them together in Changsha, Hunan, at an evening dance party arranged in Mao's honor by the new provincial party chief, Zhang Pinghua. The stewardesses on the train, including Zhang Yufeng, were invited, too, and after a few dances, Mao led her by the hand to his bedchamber in the guesthouse, sending the other young women who had accompanied him to the party back to the train. Mao stayed with Zhang in Changsha for another two days, and when the train journey resumed had her transferred from the staff dining car to become an attendent in his own compartment.

Mao was not monogamous. Several women surrounded him whenever Jiang Qing was gone, and he never stayed with one for more than a few days at a time. Even on the first and following trips with Zhang Yufeng, he often left her on the train when we stopped. He alternated as we traveled between the train and his villas, and in his villas, he would be joined by other females from his entourage. That fall of 1962, two confidential clerks were his favorites. In Shanghai, the two women joined him at the western suburbs (Xijiao) guesthouse—the magnificent complex of villas that Ke Qingshi had had constructed for Mao and other top leaders in the early 1960s, in the midst of the economic disasters. Set amid rolling fields crisscrossed by running brooks, the property had once belonged to a Shanghai industrialist. The lovely Japanese house the man had built for his Japanese concubine was still there. One of the new buildings was Mao's residence and the other his place of recreation, with a dance hall. Mao's pattern in Shanghai, though, was to spend most of his waking hours in the newly refurbished Jinjiang Club downtown, in the center of the old French quarter. Shortly after he woke in the afternoon, we would go there in his bulletproof Soviet-made ZIS, where he would peruse the documents that came to him daily and play with the young women until well after midnight, returning to the western suburbs through deserted, darkened streets at about two or three in the morning.

I always accompanied Mao to the Jinjiang Club, and so did the two young clerks, sitting together in the last of Mao's three-car cavalcade. Jiang Qing was also in Shanghai then, but she stayed behind in the villa and was asleep when the Chairman returned. Their schedules were so different that they rarely saw each other. By now, Jiang Qing must have known what her husband was doing with the young women who were always by his side. He returned to his villa only as a way of saving his wife's face. I had come to believe that Mao and his wife had reached some sort of understanding that in return for a public role as Mao's wife and a renewed pledge not to leave or divorce her, Jiang Qing agreed not to interfere with the growing number of young women around her husband. Mao had every reason to trust his wife politically. Without her husband she was nothing. And Jiang Qing could at last fulfill her political ambitions.

Years would pass before Zhang Yufeng established herself as Mao's most important confidante. He did not fully trust her at first. Zhang was from Mudanjiang county, in Manchuria's Heilongjiang province, where her “father” was a railway worker. But that area had been occupied by the Japanese in the 1930s, and Zhang Yufeng once told Mao that she had been born, in 1944, of a liaison between her mother and a Japanese dentist for whom her mother worked as a servant. Believing that Zhang Yufeng was half-Japanese, Mao also suspected that she was a Japanese spy. I never did know the full story behind Zhang Yufeng's parentage, but Mao's trust was long in coming.

My own relationship with Zhang Yufeng was rocky almost from the start. Our first minor altercation took place just after the Hangzhou meetings in May 1963 where Mao began pushing the socialist education campaign in the countryside. We were on the train back to Beijing when Mao called me into his compartment.

He was in bed, wearing nothing but his robe, and Zhang Yufeng was standing close beside him. Mao pointed to the left side of his chest and complained of an ache. “I don't feel well,” he said.

There was a bright red pimple the size of a rice grain on Mao's left chest, but his temperature was normal and the nearby lymph nodes showed no sign of infection.

“Did he get it from scratching?” I asked. Mao had a long history of itchy skin and often scratched and pinched himself so hard that the skin broke. He often asked his female companions to scratch him, too. I suspected that this was how the infection had begun.

With her back to Mao, Zhang Yufeng winked at me, letting me know that the pimple had been scratched.

The problem was minor. I applied an antiseptic ointment and covered it with sterile gauze. “It will be fine soon,” I assured Mao. “You don't need any medicine or a shot.” But I told him not to touch the infection. I advised applying a hot compress. Mao refused.

That evening, he called me to his compartment again. The gauze had disappeared and the pimple had ruptured and grown to the size of a soybean. Clearly, someone had squeezed it. The surrounding tissue was red and hard. A pink line extended from the small wound to his left armpit, and his lymph nodes were swollen. He was running a fever.

Mao resisted when I insisted on giving him a shot of penicillin. He wanted me to cut out the pimple instead. But it was too early for an incision. To drain the pus would make matters worse. But I convinced him to take some U.S.-made tetracycline capsules and told both him and Zhang Yufeng not to touch the spot again.

I was worried. Mao had told me that Zhang Yufeng had squeezed the pimple for him, and the infection was spreading. I could not trust either of them to leave the pimple alone, and I was afraid that the infection might worsen. I called Shi Shuhan, the director of the Central Bureau of Health, in Beijing. Shi too was worried, and immediately informed Zhou Enlai of Mao's condition. Zhou wanted to dispatch other physicians to help me treat the Chairman.

Another doctor was hardly necessary from a medical perspective, but Wang Dongxing insisted that the problem was more than medical and accused me of being inflexible and naive. “You told the Chairman not to squeeze, but he squeezed anyway. He may ignore you again now. Let the other doctors come. They can share responsibility with you. If anything goes wrong, you can support each other. Words alone will be no defense. Believe me, this is not simply a question of medical technique.”

Finally, I had to agree. I told Mao that Beijing wanted to send another doctor to treat him, too. He agreed that Ji Suhua, who ran Beijing Hospital, could come. Dr. Ji flew immediately to Nanjing and boarded the train when we stopped.

By now, Mao's condition had worsened. The pimple had grown to a walnut-size abscess dotted with five or six spots of pus. Below the abscess was a carbuncle the size of a small peach. The lymph nodes under Mao's left armpit had swollen further.

Ji Suhua was nervous. He had never met Mao before. Mao tried to engage in his usual banter. He invited Dr. Ji to sit next to him and inquired about his name and birthplace. The doctor's surname was rare, and Mao wondered whether he had been related to a famous Qing dynasty writer and historian named Ji Luqi. Dr. Ji did not know.

“So you're just trying to be a good doctor, not paying so much attention to affairs of your clan?” Mao said, trying to put the doctor at his ease.

Dr. Ji was still nervous. His forehead was covered with perspiration and his hands were trembling. His nervousness only grew as his examination of the Chairman continued.

“Someone has squeezed this,” he blurted out as soon as he looked at the abscess. Mao and Zhang Yufeng were suddenly silent.

“This is serious,” Dr. Ji whispered to me when the exam was complete. We knew we would have to make an incision to drain the pus from the abscess, but the carbuncle made surgery risky. The infection could easily spread, causing potentially life-threatening septicemia. It was the most serious medical problem I had faced with Mao.

Mao's train compartment was too crowded to set up medical equipment, and I felt we should delay surgery, continue to administer tetracycline and apply hot compresses to Mao's left chest and armpit. Both Mao and Dr. Ji concurred, and we waited until the next day, when the abscess had softened somewhat, to undertake the first incision.

Our train arrived in Beijing shortly afterward. In another five days, the abscess had softened further, and a second, larger, incision was made. A large amount of pus drained out. The lymph nodes, however, did not improve, and three days later a third incision was performed on Mao's lymph nodes. Only then did Mao's recovery begin. By then it was the end of June.

By mid-July, the incisions were healing well, but the wound was still not completely closed. No one was happy with me. Jiang Qing was irritated because I would not let Mao go to Beidaihe with the top leaders. I was afraid that if Mao were to swim, the wound could become infected again, and I knew that no one could prevent Mao from swimming at Beidaihe. Jiang Qing grumbled that none of the other leaders would go without Mao. They could hardly go on vacation while Mao was still ill in Beijing. What if Mao wanted to meet with them? The whole summer, she said, was lost.

Mao, too, was upset because I had not foreseen how serious his situation would become. “Now you are telling me that everything is fine,” he said after the incisions had begun to heal. “But when we were on the train, you told me that the problem was not serious and then it became serious. As a doctor, you have to anticipate both the good and the bad so you won't be caught short. First you said the incision would take only a few days to heal, and now ten days have passed and it's still not healed. You should have told me in the beginning that I could either become seriously ill or quickly recover. That way, you would have been well covered.”

I promised that in the future I would be alert to both possibilities.

Zhang Yufeng was upset with me because I refused to exonerate her as the source of Mao's illness. I knew that she must have squeezed the pimple without washing her hands. Mao blamed her, too, until his death. But because I was his doctor, the ultimate responsibility was mine, and I never forgave Zhang Yufeng for undermining my instructions. I never let her off the hook, and our relations were never good.