The rolling silt river leaves Caowan Village and twists and turns towards the bridge.
From Caowan to Yuqiao, you have to pass through a small village called Tanzhuang. Allow me to pause here and express my gratitude to Mr. Wang Anmin of Tanzhuang.
On May 5, 2021, Lao Ge and I began to explore the old road of the Silt River. Because his eyes were black, he accidentally hit Tan Zhuang first, fortunately, he met the enthusiastic Wang Anmin. Holding a red brick, he drew a map of the flow direction of the old silt river on the cement floor, pointing out the direction of our investigation.
Mr. Wang Anmin is sketching the flow direction of the old silt river.
In the process of investigation, there are many enthusiastic people like Wang Anmin, who either point out the way, or provide information, or help us reason and analyze. For the sake of narrative convenience, their names are not written in the text, only "villagers" are mentioned. I would like to thank these enthusiastic people.
Of course, not everyone is enthusiastic. Some people are curious about our investigation, some people are puzzled, and some people are alert. The last time I went to Tanzhuang, I went to the easternmost end of the village alone to observe the bend of the river, and a few villagers who were eating cast wary eyes. It's not surprising to think about it. A very remote corner, serious people who will go there to walk around.
The old road of the silt river at the easternmost end of Tanzhuang. This section flows northeast, not far ahead to the southeast.
When we investigate, villagers often ask: Where did you come from and what did you do? These issues are difficult to articulate in three words. Even if they can be clear, it will make them more confused: everyone is engaged in the economy, why are there any people interested in these ditches and ditches? Later, Lao Ge devised a set of sayings: We are from the county and are studying a topic about the silt river. The word "subject" is very intimidating, and the villagers' doubts are immediately dispelled.
The third stop is at the bridge
YuQiao, as the name suggests, most of the villagers are surnamed Yu, and there is an ancient bridge in the village, and the ancient bridge is built on the silt river. "Yuqiao" is both the name of the village and the name of the bridge.
Yu Bridge
Like other ancient bridges on the old silt river, the building materials for "Yuqiao" are also made of large bluestone. The bridge has a dragon head in the west and a dragon tail in the east, which is the same as the Zhangwan Bridge, symbolizing the river flowing west to east.
The tap on the west side of the bridge.
"Yu Bridge" is a three-hole stone bridge, each bridge hole is made of curved stone strips around the arch, regular and orderly. In this way, the force can be evenly directed to the pier, which greatly enhances the stability of the bridge.
Stone arch inner wall
According to the oral tradition of Yuqiao villagers, "Yuqiao" was built in the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, with a history of more than 400 years. If this is true, the history of "Yuqiao" is even longer than that of Lao Wangpo's "Big Stone Bridge".
Yu Shuyin, a teacher at Yuqiao School, said that when he was a child, he had seen a bluestone on the edge of the pit in the southwest corner of the bridge, with words on it, which was suspected to be the inscription of "Yuqiao". Lao Ge and I went to rummage several times, but unfortunately we didn't see any trace of the stone tablet.
In the southwest corner under the bridge, no stone stele with characters was found.
Another villager said that there was a stone on the east side of the bridge with inscriptions, including the word "Jiajing".
This claim cannot be confirmed either. In the 1980s, in response to the needs of economic development, the east side of the "Yu Bridge" was widened by two meters. The stone with the word "Jiajing" engraved on it (if there is a word) is no longer possible to show its face.
The side with the guardrail was widened by two meters.
On the afternoon of January 17, 2022, Lao Ge and I went to Yuqiao again and got a new message: behind Yuqiao Village, there is a stone stele, which may be related to "Yuqiao"
Stone stele behind yuqiao village
We found this stele by a pond. Rinsed with water, the stone stele reveals its true appearance: at the top is a Bagua diagram, and below are all personal names, involving dozens of surnames such as Yu, Chen, Li, Qin, Ren, Xue, Zhang, Cai, Tian, Cao, Xu, Zhou, Wang, Chang, Zhao, Fan, and Sun. Because I was unable to turn over the stele and could not see the text on the other side, it was impossible to determine the origin of the stele.
Graphics and text on the stele
Was "Yuqiao" built during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty? It's still a mystery. But judging from the villagers' importance and pride in the bridge, the bridge is definitely a cultural relic, and it is quite precious.
During the "WG" period, the village cadres at the time made up their own minds and decided to move the main road in the village east to Xiaomazhuang and build a new bridge there. In order to raise stone for the new bridge, the three-hole ancient bridge was demolished. The villagers dared to be angry and could only find ways to remedy it. The removed stone could not be retrieved, so a hole was repaired with red bricks.
Red brick bridge holes.
When the bridge deck was widened in the 1980s, the original dragon tail was built into the bridge body in order not to destroy the structure of the old bridge. The dragon head on the west side is still there, how can there be no dragon tail on the east side? A solution came to mind: on the outside of the new bridge, a dragon's tail shape was remade with cement.
To be honest, the workmanship of this new dragon's tail is very rough. But it is already very reassuring that the villagers of Yuqiao can have this heart. The dragon is the totem of the Chinese nation, and the reverence for the dragon is the reverence for the ancestors and the reverence for nature.
A dragon's tail made of cement
I went to Yuqiao four times in succession, and each time there would be villagers who proudly emphasized: "This road above Yuqiao" used to be an "official road"!
"Official" is a high-frequency word we hear during our inspection.
On the afternoon of October 8, 2006, I took the students of the eighth and fifth classes of Quanzhai Middle School to inspect the source of the silt river, passing through Hezhuang Primary School, and the villagers pointed to the small asphalt road by the Heihe River and said that this place used to be an "official road", connecting Wugou Camp in the east and North Wudu in the west, and the traffic was extremely convenient.
Quanzhai town on the map of Hezhuang Village
In February 2021, Lao Ge and I inspected the "Big Stone Bridge" in Lao Wangpo and learned that the "Big Stone Bridge" was also an "official road" above, connecting luohe and shangcai, as a traffic fortress.
"Big Stone Bridge" in the Flood Detention Area
Villagers in Luohe Command Village said that the north-south road in the middle of their village used to be an "official road" and left many legends.
Command the village
Villagers in Songji Zhangwan also said that the north-south road of "Dongzhuang New Village" was also an "official road." The scene of the traffic in that year is still everyone's talk after tea and dinner.
Dongzhuang New Village
The so-called "official way" is also the way of official cultivation. Compared with natural roads, "official roads" are wider and longer, and are more suitable for traffic needs. Therefore, since ancient times, where the "official road" passes, merchants and merchants have gathered, and travelers have woven together, a prosperous scene.
Has this "official road" in Yuqiao Village ever had such a prosperous scene?
On the afternoon of January 17, Lao Ge and I interviewed the 85-year-old Yu Guozheng.
Elder Yu Guozheng was interviewed.
The old man told us that the Niuhang Street of Luohe was once famous, radiating more than a dozen surrounding provinces, and those southern merchants who went to Luohe for livestock trading must take the "official road" of the bridge. The clever Yuqiao people opened many hotels and shops on both sides of the "official road", eating by the road, and living a tasteful life.
The home of the old man Yu Guozheng is on the side of the former "official road". He pointed to a house and said, "The restaurant that my grandfather opened was right in that place." ”
The "Official Road" of Yuqiao Village
When the old man is a child, he is just in time for the "old age". The "old days" behaved and dressed like in the movie, wearing military hats embellished with several drapes, carrying long guns to show off the market, chasing chickens and dogs, robbing property, and the people were deeply affected.
In order to facilitate the dispatch of troops, "Lao Ri" built a new "qi road" to Luohe in Damazhuang (dialect, referring to the road that does not have to step on mud when it rains, and the word "qi" has no corresponding Chinese characters). Behind Da Ma Zhuang Village is the Silt River, and "Lao Ri" has specially erected a wooden bridge to connect the north and south banks.
The predecessor of this road in the picture is the "Qi Road" built by the Japanese army in Damazhuang.
The load-bearing capacity of the wooden bridge is limited, and it can only pass people and cannot cross the car, and heavy equipment such as tanks must walk on the "official road" of the bridge. Elder Yu Guozheng had seen the tanks painted with sun flags rumble past the "Yu Bridge". The degree of solidity of the "Yu Bridge" can be seen from this.
The wooden bridge that the Japanese army used to build behind the village of Damazhuang was in this position (standing on the south bank and shooting north). Villagers have dug cypress bridge stakes here.
The Chinese army stationed in Xiping at that time was Tang Enbo's army reserve eleventh division, which was referred to as the "eleventh division" by the people. When the Eleventh Division was circling the bridge with the devils, the common people hid in the slope behind the village to escape the chaos of the war. Elder Yu Guozheng, who was still a teenager at the time, ventured to the camp of the Eleventh Division, solicited leftover rice pots from officers and soldiers, and then risked sending them to the field to distribute to adults.
The Eleventh Division's wind evaluation was not good, and the reasons are difficult to say, but this army was unambiguous in its anti-Japanese resistance. In the Battle of Southern Henan in 1941, the officers and men of a company of the Eleventh Division fought fiercely with the Japanese army for two days and nights in Xiaoyangzhuang, West of Xiping City (belonging to the special inspector Chen Village), and more than 100 soldiers were killed. Villagers in Dongguan, the county seat, collected the remains of the martyrs and buried them next to the pagoda of Baoyan Temple.
On September 26, 2015, Mr. Chen Changjun, director of the "Anti-Japanese War Celebrity Memorial Hall" in Ningbo, came to Xiping Festival to visit the memorial cemetery.
In the 1960s, the Preparation Road (the predecessor of national highway 107) was completed, and the "official road" of Yuqiao and the "qi road" of Damazhuang were abandoned, and the prosperity of Yuqiao Village was no longer prosperous, and it was restored to an ordinary village.
Yuqiao people do not regret it, because they have enjoyed the dividends of national development. The floodway excavated after the founding of the People's Republic of China is within easy reach; the newly completed botanical garden is adjacent to each other; and the old silt river in front of the village has been renovated to become a park waterfront. With beautiful scenery and convenient travel, the happiness index of Yuqiao people has reached a record high.
New look of Yuqiao
End
In Yuqiao Village, many villagers talked about drainage. Like Cao Wan, when the flood season comes, the water in Yuqiao Village has nowhere to drain and can only flood the fields. The root cause of this phenomenon is that the old silt river has been abandoned for many years, and the end is seriously silted up, and it has lost its drainage capacity.
The old silt river behind Damazhuang village is no different from the slope (above), with only a narrow and shallow ditch at the end, connected to the floodway by a miniature sluice (bottom).
At present, the new silt river dredging and widening project is under construction. After completion, the river flood capacity will be greatly enhanced, and the phenomenon of backfilling of river water similar to that encountered in Caowan will no longer exist. If the relevant departments put the treatment of the old silt river on the agenda, open up the ends of the old silt river with the new silt river, and then dredge and green the river, the old silt river with a long history will surely regain its youth.
The new silt river is being dredged.