Scatological Trivia About Someone Important: Mao Zedong

Here's a scatologically riveting passage from The New Emperors: Mao and Deng, A Dual Biography, Salisbury, Harrison E. (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), pp. 19-20:

Mao's bodyguards knew his bowel problems intimately. Often he was so constipated they had to put their fingers up his anus and pry his feces out. Mao preferred to go out to the fields alone to relieve himself. Toilets were "too stinky," he complained. His chief bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, noticed that when Mao went into the fields he often picked up a piece of human sewage, which was used as fertilizer, and smelled it before squatting down. The guard couldn't understand Mao's action.

"Well," Mao told him, "I like to sit and think while I'm relieving myself. If it smells too bad i can't think."

It took a good battle, Mao used to say, to loosen his gut. In Yanan when after eight or nine days Mao's frustration came to an end, word would spread: "The chairman's bowels have moved! He has had a good shit!" But Mao's trouble seemed to ease after a great upholstered chair encasing a western porcelain toilet bowl was installed in his quarters at Zhongnanhai.

I wouldn't want to be one of his bodyguards.