Hu Shi and his father Hu Chuan

Text/Liu Yiqing

On April 8, 1958, Hu Shi, who had been wandering overseas for many years, finally returned to Taiwan and settled down. Hu Shi claimed to be half Taiwanese, and Taiwan was the beginning of his enlightenment in reading and literacy, and it was also the place where he settled down in his later years and buried his soul.

Hu Shi's historical relationship with Taiwan begins with his father, Hu Legend. To trace Hu Chuan's return and Hu Shi's way, not only across the Taiwan Strait, but also through more than a hundred years of historical smoke and clouds, reliving major historical events in China's modern history. The historical fate of Hu Chuanhu's father and son condenses the vicissitudes of the family and country and the great changes in history.

Jixi Hu clan engaged in business for the family to read and serve the country

We may wish to first look at the appearance of Hu Shi's father, Hu Chuan. Hu Shi described his father this way: "His face is purple and black, his beard is a little short, and his eyes are mighty, so that people dare not look at him." "I lived outside the Great Wall for a few years and sunburned my face like a baolongtu." Black, iron man, zhi pu xue, a life of trouble, for the official near harsh, sexual pleasure can be hard, "emblem camel" to investigate the frontier, defend Taiwan died of resistance, this is a portrait of Hu Chuan.

Hu Chuan, formerly known as Shou Shan, character Shou San, also spelled Tie Hua, number blunt fu. In 1841, Hu Chuan was born in Shangzhuang, Jixi County, at the foot of the Huangshan Mountains. He was born during the First Opium War and died in 1895, after the end of the Sino-Japanese War. The shadow of war hung over Hu Chuan's life. Luck? Living in the late Qing Dynasty, where internal and external troubles and turmoil were turbulent, this was the stage of Hu Chuan's life as a small local official in the Qing Dynasty. Shinoya!

Shangzhuang is one of the largest villages in Jixi, inhabited by ethnic groups and has a history of more than 700 years. The scenery of Shangzhuang is beautiful, "in front of the bamboo pole peak, the mountains and rivers gather, the Yanglin Bridge, the chess pieces are scattered", which is the praise of Liu Ruji, a Qing dynasty. The geographical environment of Shangzhuang can also be described by borrowing a poem by the Southern Song Dynasty poet Yang Wanli's "Guiyuanpu": "Ten thousand mountains do not allow a stream to run, and the sound of the creek is noisy day and night." At the foot of the qiantou mountain, the Tangtang Creek flows out of the former village. In 1946, Hu Shi hand-wrote this poem to the clan hu Wenyu.

Hu Chuan was born in Huizhou, and his life was passed down from Huizhou's cultural genes. "No emblem is no town", doing business everywhere is the survival secret that Huizhou people have passed down from generation to generation. The Hu family has been doing small business for generations, dealing in tea. One of Hu's ancestors once ran a small tea shop in a small town near Shanghai called Chuansha. Later, another branch was opened in Huajie (urban area) in Shanghai. Hu Chuan's father, Hu Kuixi, opened several small shops in Shanghai, including taverns and stacks. In addition to Shanghai, Hu Kuixi also opened up business in Hankou and bought land in his hometown.

The life of the Huizhou people is not peaceful. In 1861, the Taiping Army entered the Hui Territory, and Hu Chuan joined the militia to fight against the Taiping Army. He single-handedly captured three members of the Taiping Army. Hu Chuan has a detailed record of southern Anhui between 1860 and 1864, and the disasters such as burning, massacre, and famine in these four years were all recorded by Hu Chuan.

Hu Chuan learned guns, arrows, swords and spears at an early age, had martial arts, liked to read, and loved poetry. In 1865, when he entered the school as a showman, he was already twenty-four years old, but he has tried to sell it many times since then. After the taiping war, Hu Chuan went to Shanghai to study, and from 1868 to 1871, he studied the history of the classics with Liu Xizai, a famous scribe in Yangzhou, at Longmen Academy. At this time, the academy was equivalent to the university hall and institution of higher learning that would be born in the future. Every day, students complete the "schedule" and study "diary" for learning in the printed coursework, recording the doubts and reflections, reflections and discoveries of scholars. The end of the printed volume is printed with red quotations, which are the mottos of Song Ru Zhu Xi and Zhang Zai and others. "In order to learn, we must not doubt where we are, we must make progress!" Later, Hu Shi saw that the end of his father's scroll was printed with Zhang Zai's motto of governance, and he very much agreed with this sentence and gave full play to it: "When doing learning, we must have doubts where there is no doubt, and we must treat people with doubts." ”

While studying at Longmen College, Hu Chuan met his classmate Zhang Huanlun (the founder of modern primary education). Because of the great powers, students encouraged each other, and it became a common practice to study frontier geography and extraterritorial geography. Later, Hu Chuan traveled all over the northeast and Hainan Island to conduct field investigations. His interest in the geography of the frontier began at Longmen Academy. The teaching of Longmen Academy is no longer a study behind closed doors, teachers and students open their eyes to see the world, concerned about the study of the world related to the national economy and people's livelihood, Hu Chuan and Zhang Huanlun have in-depth study of geography and military science. These three years of knowledge reserves and academic training laid a solid foundation for Hu Chuan to go out of Huizhou and travel to the northeast ten years later.

Six years of staff Iron Flower Bloom Patrol Frontier Hardship Brigade

In the era of the imperial examination, all the readers always had a dream of home and country: self-cultivation and family rule the country and the world. A reader like Hu Chuan, in Jixi, is a squire and a talent. If you want to become an official, you have to climb up step by step. For readers, the middle lifter is like a distant dream in the sky, so at that time, if you want to get the opportunity to be recognized or play the stage of talent, most of them start from being a staff member.

Before Hu Chuan left his hometown, he had already started a family.

In 1860, Hu Chuan was ordered by his parents to return to his hometown and marry the original Feng family. The wedding day was not peaceful, and the war scorched his honeymoon. Hong Xiuquan's Taiping army captured the county seat of Jixi county and occupied his homeland several times, and the family lived in the torment of war, plague, and hunger, and Hu Chuan once led his family to take refuge in the neighboring county of Xiuning, suffering from upheaval and displacement. There were always innocent people dying in the war, and unfortunately, Hu Chuan's wife, Feng Shi, died during the second invasion of the Taiping Army in the summer of 1863, and was the only victim of their family's twenty or so families, and did not give birth to any children. Around 1865, Hu Chuan succeeded Cao Shi (曹玉环), a native of Wangchuan, Jixi County, ten miles from Shangzhuang. Cao gave birth to three sons and three daughters for Hu Chuan. Possibly frail due to excessive fertility, Cao died of tuberculosis in 1877.

Before Hu Chuan left his hometown to go out and wander, after the qi family's experience, his talents were tempered. From 1865 to 1876, Hu Chuan was busy diligently in order to build an ancestral hall and repair the family tree. In the "Oral Autobiography of Hu Shi", it can be learned that the construction of the Hu Ancestral Hall in Shangzhuang was a hugely expensive project. Hu Shi commented on his father's role in the project: "Not only was he the main planner and executor of the project, but he sometimes had to persuade and restrain the opposition of the conservative elements of the clan. ”

In 1881, Hu Chuan had reached the age of no doubt. He borrowed money from the clan Bohu Jiayan and wrapped it in a hundred silver rounds to prepare for a trip. Hu Chuan, a Han warrior, a warm heart to serve the country, will he meet someone who appreciates him? What kind of life and death test will you face when you investigate the northeast border?

Hu Chuan went all the way north, first to Beijing. However, Beijing was not the end of his trip, and in Beijing, he received two letters of introduction, one of which belonged to Zhang Peilun (Zhang Ailing's grandfather), and went to Ningguta in Jilin to find Chincha Wu Dayi and serve as his staff. Ninguta, then the place where felons were distributed. Why did Hu Chuan choose Ninguta as the destination for his travels? The answer is given in the "Family Biography of Mr. Hu Tiehua": "The northeast of the bitter northeast is like a zhizhi, so I want to travel to the three eastern provinces and consider their situation, in case of emergency." Tang Degang lamented in the "Oral Autobiography of Hu Shi": "Hu Chuan, a forty-year-old Jiangnan scholar who was poor in his hometown and had a dead wife and children, actually left his hometown and left the well, went into debt, and went out for forty days to serve as an aide to a sanpin petty official, Wu Dayi. "It's really a decision that a very human person can make. Judging from Hu Chuan's choices and actions, he is a person who is physically and mentally strong enough.

In March of the eighth year of Guangxu (1882), Hu Chuan was sent by Wu Dayi to the primitive mountains bordering Ningguta and Hunchun to investigate the terrain and water conditions of the Thirteen Gaga River Basin and the number of permanent residents in the mountains. In this field forest survey, Hu Chuan discovered through practice that the doorway for catching thieves in the snowy fields of Linhai - the road is in the trees - thieves hide in the forest marked by the marks of axe axe trees. In the investigation report, Hu Chuan very constructively proposed that the "watang" could be transformed into fertile land. More than a hundred years later, the "rightists" and intellectuals who reclaimed the northern wilderness with the confidence that people will conquer the heavens will think of Hu Chuan?

The above is an excerpt from Celebrity Biography, No. 6, 2014