Jiao Yulu, the Party secretary of Lankao County in Henan, suffered from liver disease. To stop the pain while he worked, he pressed one end of a hard object against his liver and the other against the back of his rattan chair. In time, a large hole was worn through the right side of the chair. Retellings name different objects, among them the knob of a teacup lid and a clothes brush.
In February 1966, Xinhua released a long report on him, A Model for County Party Secretaries, by the reporters Mu Qing, Feng Jian and Zhou Yuan. The chair is kept at the Jiao Yulu memorial park in Lankao. In 2026, Xinhua wrote that its story “moved almost everyone who has seen it.”