The setting sun has not yet set, and the moon has jumped into the sky.
I was still a step late, and the janitor of the Jade Emperor Pavilion had just left on an electric car.
I climbed the steps, stood in front of the locked mountain gate, and looked back at the ancient city area of green bricks and gray tiles that I passed when I came, Zhangjiakou Fort, which is the birthplace of Zhangjiakou City.
Zhangjiakou Fort was founded in the Ming Dynasty, has a history of nearly 600 years, once had the reputation of "Wucheng", is an important military castle on the defense line of the Great Wall. With the prosperity of Zhangku Avenue on the "Northern Silk Road", Zhangjiakou has become an important channel and distribution center for material trade between China, Russia and Mongolia from "wu" to "merchant". At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Zhangjiakou became the second largest commercial port in northern China after Tianjin.
Upper Clearwater River, one afternoon in April
Scavenger boy with his cat
In the evening, the men in the barbecue shop
An old worker stood on the roof of an old house, brandishing a broom in his hand to clear the weeds between the tiles, and the dust that rose up drifted into the air, forming a misty smoke, part of which fell on the newly decorated red lanterns on both sides of the alley. Barrel-shaped plastic red lanterns are particularly red against the background of green bricks. On the roof of another building in the distance, a worker is installing antique tile-eaves spotlights that, at night, illuminate the old tiles of the roof.
I looked at my watch, not sure if I could wait for the ideal light. I decided to wait.
"Mom, it really is—the 52nd order." A chubby girl ran up the steps, panting and shouting. She was followed by her petite mother. "Mom counted it when she was a kid." They stood beside me and peered through the crack in the door into the Jade Emperor's Pavilion. The little girl is about 10 years old, with a bag of snacks in her hand, and she is still panting as she sits on the steps. The mother wears a slim little leather coat and muffin shoes with a black face and a white background.
I asked them if they lived nearby, and the girl's mother told me that they had moved away long ago, but often brought their children here because the children loved it.
The woman led the child down the steps, and as if she remembered something, she suddenly turned and shouted at me, and there was a temple of wealth behind her. She gestured and told me how to walk.
Curiosity drove me to stand up. Turning through an alley and passing through the hidden north gate of the city wall, you will see the Gokokuji Temple, known as the "Temple of Wealth", and the gate is also locked.
Further north is the old mansion that has not yet been repaired and is even more desolate. Some of the houses and courtyard walls have been poured down. From the cross-section of the broken wall, it can be seen that at that time, the house wall mostly adopted the brick sandwich adobe construction method, which saved bricks and kept warm. A few stray dogs chased each other in the alley, and when they saw strangers with their tails between their legs, they entered the home of a family with a broken door. Some of the courtyards still have quotations from the "Cultural Revolution" period on the shadow walls, "Great", "Strength", "Long Live"... The years have eroded these handwritings to a mottled and blurred place. There are no red lanterns or spotlights. If it weren't for the new surveillance probes and new public toilets at the intersection, I doubted that there were still people living here.
In the fort, looking out the window at the child
Qingyuan Bridge, a man holding a green onion
People's Park, the season of peach blossoms
In this old street full of vicissitudes, no building has a new public toilet, they are pasted with matte gray decorative panels, and one appears every time you walk. Near the archway in the fort, I went to one, and the left and right curtains were printed with opera cartoon characters, "official" on one side and "lady" on the other.
When the wind blew, I put on the hood of my sweatshirt and returned to the Jade Emperor Pavilion.
Red lanterns rattled in the wind. A chill lingered in the air. The wind from the Mongolian plateau often blows between the valleys of Zhangjiakou, and Zhangjiakou is probably the most important thing is the wind, and I remember a joke that the locals often make: "Zhangjiakou has two winds a year, and one blows for half a year." ”
I didn't wait for the ideal light in the cold wind, but I waited for my stomach to grumble.
Walk out of the fort and come to Xinhua Street. A barbecue restaurant was brightly lit and full of customers, so I walked in. A young man in a duck-tongue hat led me inside to a small table near the barbecue, pushed the clutter on the table aside, and found me a stool from outside.
Several tables were skewered by a family, and a few women were smoking.
The meat skewers are grilled just right, the outside is scorched and tender, and the lamb is produced in the nearby Grassland on Zhangbei Dam.
There is a quartz clock hanging on the wall at the door of the barbecue room, and the second hand is constantly rotating. Four hooks were glued to under the bell, and a plastic bag hanging from it contained various pills and a CT tablet.
The young man took off his coat and walked into the barbecue room in his sleeveless shirt. An elderly bald man came out of the barbecue room and stood at my desk wiping the sweat from his forehead, his finger wearing a striking gold ring. He was the owner of the barbecue shop - the boy's father.
"I just have a sore neck." He smiled at me.
The lad grilled meat skewers were not as thick as his father's, and the peppers and spices were thickly sprinkled.
After 8 o'clock, the noise in the barbecue shop faded, the boss lady who was no longer busy sat at the door staring at the bill, and the small speaker did not report the amount paid by the guest scanning the code. She has a flower mirror on the bridge of her nose and shiny gold jewelry on her hands and neck. I asked her how many years this store had been open, "18 years", and she was quick to talk.
"We're all good here except for the poor!" The young man suddenly leaned out of the barbecue and shouted at me.
The bald boss pulled out a box of "Great Rivers and Mountains" from the pile of debris on the table, lit one, and took a deep breath.
Madoldi Street, drying white sneakers
A van parked on the side of the road
Drum towers downstairs, chatting with women
Baozizi Drama Club, weekend cross-talk special
"Great River and Mountain" is the inscription on the Dajing Gate at the northern end of Zhangjiakou. DajingMen gate is the starting point of the former Zhangkou Avenue [Zhangjiakou - Ulaanbaatar (then called Kulun)], and now it is a landmark of Zhangjiakou as a scenic spot. Yesterday I went there for a walk, and at the gate stood two bronze statues of armored guards with spears in their hands. The shops on both sides of the pedestrian street are newly built antique buildings, and most of them are still in the state of rent. In a large open space in the square on the east side of the scenic spot, a large series of reliefs are laid out to show the past and present of Zhangjiakou. Because the reliefs are huge and have no angle of inclination, to see the whole picture, you must climb the wooden ladders. However, under the unobstructed scorching sun, no one wants to waste energy, so they simply step on the body and face of the statue to watch. A middle-aged couple stopped in front of a group of statues embraced by soldiers and civilians, and this history was painted in red paint in chiseled handwriting: On December 24, 1948, the Chinese People's Liberation Army liberated Zhangjiakou, and the people will forever become the masters of the mountain city.
At night, when I returned to the fort again, the red lanterns lit up, creating a warm and nostalgic festive atmosphere. A group of children ran and jumped under the drum tower, chasing the bamboo dragonflies swirling in the night sky. Three young men in black T-shirts, spitting smoke rings on their chins under street lamps, pretending to be old-fashioned. I think of a row of elderly people I saw on a street corner in the afternoon, sitting motionless outside the welfare lottery station, only their eyes slowly moving with passing vehicles and pedestrians.
The alleys are silent, with the occasional sound of swaying red lanterns. The workers piled the grass from the roof in a corner and pressed it with bricks, but there were still a few tufts that were blown by the wind and rolled on the ground. There are always some insignificant things in life that are quietly changing, and in the early morning I took a picture of the grass growing on the house, and at night the grass was gone.
In the fort, the girl who painted gold for the milk tea shop signboard
The Great Realm Gate, the old two under the city wall
At night, Drum Tower North Street, children who spend time
At night, a man playing cards in front of the Jade Emperor's Pavilion
The Clearwater River is clearing its course, and the river is being intercepted in sections upstream. Bare silt and a trickle glowed on the riverbed. I walked along the river bank toward the inn.
The steep wind whispered in the ears, and the begonias full of branches emitted a faint floral fragrance. A speed skating sculpture on ice stands on the riverbank, and five athletes with different shapes and faces are struggling forward with their arms, and the stainless steel countertops supporting them are really cold. The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics snow project will be held in Zhangjiakou, and publicity posters related to it will be seen on the street from time to time. On the embankment on the opposite bank is a set of cartoon murals of snow sports made of spheres and cylinders: the round ball is the head of the athlete, and the curved cylinder is the body. Armed with ski poles, pedaling skis, and decorated with Chinese elements such as auspicious clouds, flames, seawater cliffs and five stars, they galloped and flipped on the defaced white walls.
It was getting darker, and the mountains were hidden in the depths of the night. The neon on the commercial building and the tower flowed radially in different directions, as if melting the solid reinforced concrete, leaving only the dazzling lines and patterns hanging in the night sky and trembling.