Chuanguan News reporter Yu Rubo
In the old park of Shifang City, LiuChun Garden, along the winding path, careful visitors will find a stone stele with a height of 3 meters and a width of 1 meter standing in a corner of the park, and the text on the stele has been somewhat mottled.
Stone tablets are not uncommon, but what makes this stele special is that its inscription was written by a county official to the county residents. The inscription records that in the 20th year of Qing Jiaqing (1815 AD), the then Lingji Dakui of Shifang County praised the county resident Liao Dabing for his meritorious deeds in building bridges and controlling water for the people, and erected this monument to achieve the purpose of exhortation and encouragement.
What exactly did Liao Dabing do? Ji Dakui's "Preface to the Monument of Good Deeds" is summarized in concise words: building bridges, building ferries, placing righteous tombs, giving coffins, helping orphans and the poor, collecting waste, giving tea, donating medicine... The list goes on. In addition, the text also records a specific good deed: one summer, the Duck River swelled, washing away the righteous tombs on the riverbank. Seeing this scene, Liao Dabing could not bear it, so he "purchased more than ten acres of land" and recruited workers to relocate to the funeral at the beginning of the second year.
Liao Dabing's good deeds have been passed down because of the inscription, and Ji Dakui, who wrote the inscription, is also a well-known figure.
Ji Dakui was a native of Longxi, Linchuan, Jiangxi, who was raised in the forty-fourth year of Qianlong (1779 AD) and served as a transcript of the Siku Quanshu, a Historian, Writer, and Scholar of Science in the Qing Dynasty. He has served in many prefectures and counties, and wherever he serves, he can be honest and love the people, lightly and thinly endowed, and is deeply loved by the people. In the eleventh year of Jiaqing (1806), Ji Dakuifu was ordered to go to Shifang County to renzhi county, that year he was already 60 years old, and then the old man worked in Shifang for ten years.
At the beginning of his term of office, someone advised him: "The people of Shu are strong, fearful of power and not merciful, and the king does not demonstrate at all, and wants to be educated with virtue, I am afraid that I will not be able to bear this task?" However, Ji Dakui believed that it was necessary to use virtue to educate the people, not to use authoritarianism to deter. In Shifang, he quelled the years of water disputes between Shifang and Mianzhu and Guanghan, curbed the monopoly and regulation of the tobacco market, cut down tree tumors at night to crack superstitions, personally led the ya to suppress cults, and even personally compiled the 54-volume "Shifang County Chronicle".
A few years ago, Shifang created the Sichuan opera "Grass Shoe County Order" based on Ji Dakui's life deeds, starring Chen Zhilin, winner of the Chinese Drama Plum Blossom Award "Second Degree Plum". At the end of 2019, the play landed in the auditorium of the North Campus of the Central Party School, and in October this year, it was selected for the 17th China Drama Festival held in Wuhan. The "Ji Dakui Monument of Good Deeds" that still stands in Liuchun Garden clearly shows that he has always been a good official and a clean official in the hearts of the people of Shifang.
Photo courtesy of the Propaganda Department of the Shifang Municipal CPC Committee