The British ambassador to China has paid a rare visit to a Chinese communist heartland where President Xi Jinping performed hard labour as a young man.

Ambassador Peter Wilson on Wednesday visited Yanan in the northwestern Chinese province of Shaanxi along with Lu Kang, vice-minister of the Communist Party’s International Department, the department said.

State newspaper China Daily said Wilson made the trip at the invitation of the International Department.

The two men toured the former revolutionary site at Yangjialing, the Yanan Revolutionary Memorial Hall, which is an important part of Beijing’s domestic ideology messaging but rarely visited by Western envoys.

The city was a safe haven for the Communist Party during the civil war, enabling forces led by Mao Zedong to recover before defeating the Kuomintang forces.

The pair also visited Liangjiahe village, where Xi spent seven years in hard labour during the Cultural Revolution, another site considered significant to Beijing’s ideological education.

Wilson, son of a former governor of Hong Kong David Wilson and a Chinese speaker, said in January that Britain wanted to build a relationship of “mutual respect and trust” that allowed both countries to take the relationship to “a new level”.