The Spring Festival is coming. A few days ago, in the process of searching for the "New Year's Taste" of Jiangcheng, the local media put their perspective on the area of Bapu Street in Baishazhou.
Today's Bapu Street, due to the construction of Metro Line 5, the old street houses have been demolished a lot. Fortunately, the rest of the part still retains a trace of fireworks similar to history in the process of busy preparing for the new year.
In the past hundred years, the prosperity that Baishazhou and Bapu Street once had in history has disappeared. Among them, there is a unique folk custom "carrying a dog for rain" that has also been annihilated in time. This article is a few strokes, talk about a grid.
The "Hunan Gang" of Baishazhou
In 2008, in an interview with local media, an old man surnamed Ke on Bapu Street recalled that before the founding of the People's Republic of China, there was a unique custom of "carrying dogs for rain".
Every year during the Dragon Boat Festival, local dignitaries disguise themselves as dogs, sit on a chair, and be carried up to the streets by a few strong men. People on the street threw water on him to pray that the wind and rain would be smooth that year.
This custom is unique, not only in other places in Wuhan, but also in Hubei Province. Its origin may need to be traced back to the "Hunan Gang" in the history of Baishazhou.
Baishazhou was formed in the Ming Dynasty. In the third year of the Qing Dynasty (1864), the government mobilized merchants and residents living near Baisha Chau to donate money to repair the barrage of the riverside, which was still in the river. After another twenty years, Baishazhou was officially marked as a place name on the "General Map of Streets Inside and Outside the City of Hubei Province" in the ninth year of the Qing Dynasty.
After the construction of the Wujin Causeway in Zhangzhidong at the end of the Qing Dynasty, most of the Baishazhou was enclosed in the embankment, and it was parallel to the Jinshazhou, and was connected with the land outside Wuchang At that time, collectively known as "Baishazhou". However, as a sandbar, it has already existed in name only, leaving only place names such as "Bapu Street" and "Wang Hui Bridge".
Since the late Qing Dynasty, there have been many Hunan and Jiangxi people in Baishazhou and Jinshazhou who have come up to operate bamboo businesses. At the beginning of Jiaqing in the Qing Dynasty, Jinshazhou was gradually connected to Wuchang City, and Baishazhou became a bamboo trade market and a settlement for merchants in Jiangxi and Hunan.
After the expansion of the scale of operation, some of the platoon workers stayed on the continent to engage in starting and unloading. After a long time, the number of people left behind multiplied and began to fill in the piers and build houses on the white sandbar. After that, large families built ancestral halls (Tao Family Ancestral Hall, Tang Ancestral Hall, etc.), merchants built guild halls (Qiyang Guild Hall, Yiyang Guild Hall, etc.) based on their place of origin, and in the early Republic of China, there was also the "Fourth Primary School of Hunan School in Hubei Province".
Since then, The White Sands Has changed from a temporary anchorage to a permanent municipality. The people of Wuchang used to refer to the residents of other provinces in this area as the "Hunan Gang" and the "Jiangxi Gang".
The area around Bapu Street is one of the core areas of the historical Baishazhou Town. The custom of "carrying a dog for rain" was probably introduced here by Hunan merchants – readers may ask, "Why not Jiangxi merchants?" ”
Let us continue to trace the historical origins of this custom.
Cultural remnants of "Wuxi Man"
The origin of the festival of "carrying a dog for rain" comes from the historical "five streams".
The so-called "Wuxi Man" refers to the general name of the people of all ethnic groups in the area where the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Song Dynasty distributed in the upper reaches of the Yuan River at the junction of present-day Western Hunan and the three provinces of Qian, Sichuan and Hubei, and several major tributaries flowing through it. Its location roughly includes the people of all ethnic groups in the Sichuan Emirates area, Chongqing Xiushan area, Guizhou Tongren region, Qiandongnan region, Hunan Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture, Huaihua region and Shaoyang area.
Due to the long-term common life and cultural exchanges, the Wuxi area has formed some unique folk customs, "carrying the dog for rain" is one of the unique folk customs widely distributed in the Wuxi area in history, and its cultural roots are the "myth of the hammer" and the "myth of the sacred dog" widely spread in this area, and the resulting "worship of the sacred dog".
In the upper reaches of the Yuanshui River, a Neolithic site more than 4,000 years ago once unearthed a statue of a god dog with a height of about 30 centimeters of "double-headed conjoined belt seat", and many "town tomb beasts" were also unearthed in the Chu tomb, some of which were wood carvings, some of which were pottery figurines, and the form was often a monster of "almost no appearance", "mouth extending tongue". Some scholars believe that this is an exaggerated performance of dogs.
Therefore, we can generally think that the "carrying dogs for rain" festival of Bapu Street originated from Xiangxi, Huaihua, Shaoyang and other places in Hunan, which originally belonged to the Wuxi region, and was introduced to Wuhan by Hunan Pairen as an intermediary.
To this day, the custom of "carrying the dog for rain" or "carrying the dog festival" is still widely present in the settlements of different ethnic groups such as Jianhe, Songtao, Shiquan and Shibing in Guizhou, and it is still preserved in Xiangxi, Hunan. These places also happen to be the areas radiated by the Wuxi culture in history.
Interestingly, these places "carry dogs", carry real dogs, and do not have people dressed as dogs like Bapu Street.
For example, In Songtao County, Guizhou, it is to choose a fat and strong adult male dog, put on a woman's clothes, wear a child's hat, use two chairs to form a simple palanquin, carried by two prime-aged men to visit the village, and then carry the dog to the river, adults and children holding washbasins and other utensils in their hands, scooping water to water the dogs.
The ceremony of "lifting the dog to ask for rain" in Shiquan County, Shibing County and other places is roughly similar to this, some carrying male dogs, some carrying female dogs, in short, they are to change into bright flower clothes, carry the streets, and then people pour water and pour them into "falling water dogs". During the whole process, people laughed and barked, and they were extremely happy.
How many traces can the old street leave?
Today's Bapu Street, what is lost in the historical itinerary is not only the festival of "carrying the dog for rain".
According to the local old people's recollection, the largest of the historical Eight Shops Street is eight shops, including a butcher shop, a grain store, a grocery store, a clothing store, a lees shop, two rice shops, and a liquor seller.
In addition, historically, eight shop street side restaurants, tea houses, and theater buildings were lined up. Every day, people sell their agricultural goods early, sit in a tea house until noon, and then bring some food back. Therefore, Bapu Street is also known as "a street for eating, drinking and having fun", which is very much the meaning of the "Fall Street" near the universities now.
By the 1960s, Bapu Street had begun to decline compared with its historical peak, but it happened that there were exactly eight shops left, including small grocery stores, firewood shops, tofu shops, rice shops, large grocery shops, barber shops, wreath shops, and coffin shops.
Previously, it was reported that Baishazhou Street planned to use the old brand of "Eight Shop Street" to integrate the historical and cultural resources of Baishazhou and build a characteristic cultural style street. Nowadays, the subway passes through the streets, and the surrounding environment has changed a lot. Whether this old street can still have the opportunity to embark on the road of "cultural style street" and leave more historical and cultural features remains to be seen.
Resources
"Baishazhou Present and Past", Wuhan Literature and History Materials, 1994.12.30
"Eight Shop Street Wants to Find The Prosperity of the Past", Chu Tian Jin Bao, 2008.11.12
"The Anthropological Significance of the Folk Ritual of "Carrying Dogs for Rain" in the "Wuxi Man" Area", Guizhou Ethnic Studies, 2014.02.25
"Jianhe Jiaobang Village Held "Dog Raising Festival"", Qiandongnan News Network, 2016.08.15
"Baishazhou: Looking for Warm Winter Colors in Wuhan", Yangtze River Daily, 2022.01.19