Jiading, which is more than 800 years old, has experienced countless vicissitudes of life. In fact, the history of Jiading can be traced back even further – thousands of years ago, it has become a land. Our ancestors braved the wind and rain, calloused hands and feet, and tenaciously lived on this land. It was not until December of the tenth year of jiading in the Southern Song Dynasty (January 1218) that the county was officially established.
Mulberry fields in the sea, sand into land
About 10,000 years ago, the land now known as Jiading slept quietly on the bottom of the East China Sea.
The ancient Yangtze River, from thousands of miles away, is mighty, wrapped in a large amount of mud and sand, rushing towards the vast sea. Sunrise and sunset, the tidal waves are not willing to be lonely, day and night, and the Yangtze River is passionately blended day after day. The two magical forces of nature, interacting inside and outside, have accumulated a large amount of sediment and the remains of marine shellfish in this area, gradually accumulating in this area, and about seven thousand years ago, a sand embankment at sea level was erected here, which is the prototype of the alluvial plain, and later formed several parallel sand belts.
▲Gang body map
After several changes, the ancient coastline has long been stable in the northwest to the southeast, and since ancient times, people usually call it "Gang Body", also known as "Gang Body Belt". The outer edge of this gang body starts from Loutang in the north, passes through Jiading City and Nanxiang, crosses the Wusong River, passes through zhuzhai in present-day Minhang District, Yujiatang and Xinshi in Fengxian District, and reaches Garlin in the south. It is 130 km long, about 4 to 10 km wide, and about 4 m above sea level.
According to archaeological excavations, it can be roughly determined that the Line of Loudang, Jiading and Nanxiang is the east edge of the Gang body, and from east to west, there are five shell sand belts of Donggang, Qinggang, Waigang, Shagang and Asaoka, and with the change of years, with the frequent human activities, most of the Gang body has become flat, and most of them only retain these place names with the word "Gang". Nowadays, Jiading only has a tufu called "Ma'anshan" in the north of Waigang Jimingtang, which is the remnant of the Gang body belt, and people can still faintly see the appearance of the Gang body.
Fire ploughing water, the field is continuous
Since ancient times, The city has been another name for Jiading. The word "疁" is relatively cold and uncommon, according to the explanation of Xu Shen's "Explanation of Words in The Sayings": "疁, burn seeds also." ”
It can be recalled that a long time ago, when the ancestors of Jiading carried out hunting activities west of Gangshen, they usually used fire to expel wild beasts, and often burned the hunting ground full of wild grass and weeds into open space, thus opening up a suitable place for farming. Much like the scene described in the Poems Daya Dry Foothills: "The people are burning", after the first fire ploughing in the raw wasteland, the fire cultivation will continue on the cultivated mature wasteland.
Due to the west of the gang body, it was originally a swampy area that passed through the siltation into land, turned into a paddy field, and it is conducive to the use of water piper, "fire cultivation water pipe" in ancient Jiading is an advanced farming technology. Before the widespread use of iron farming tools, the fields in the Yangtze River Delta were probably more advanced than in the Yellow River Basin. Wu Guifang, an expert on local history in Shanghai, spoke highly of The Village, saying in his article "Lou Huating Shanghai" that the city was "the concentration area of the fields". In this way, Jiading's Qitian and Qiaocheng were no later than the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, perhaps earlier. Sima Qian also has a saying in the Records of History that the land of Chu Yue or fire cultivation.
▲Da Ding of The City of Qicheng
Because the temple became a city, the pattern began to appear
It is not known when Lianqi City got its name. But it is certain that as early as the Xiaoliang period of the Southern Dynasty, Lianqi City became a city because of the Huguo Temple, this city is very small, equivalent to today's bazaar, only a commercial tax management agency, not a local administrative agency, therefore, Lianqi City has a long history of fifteen hundred years, it is seven hundred years before jiading was founded. There are two earliest written records that clearly record the city of Lianqi: one is that the Qing Guangxu "Chronicle of Jiading County" has a record that "at the end of the Tang Dynasty, Zhenhai Jiedu made Zhou Bao's widow guard Lianqi"; the other is the "Epitaph of Zhou Zhirou's Wife Yang's Wife" in the stele gallery of the Confucius Temple in Jiading, which was excavated in 1958 in the west of Xiangjing outside the West Gate of Jiading, and the epitaph states that the Yang clan died of illness in the sixth year of Jiading (1213) and was buried in Liangjiabangdong, Lianqi City, Chunshen Township, Kunshan County on February 25.
▲Lianqi River
After Ming Zhengde, Lianqi City was renamed "Zhouqiao City", the eastern part was called "East City", and the West Gate was called "West City". After the Qianlong Dynasty, Zhouqiao City was renamed "County Town" and "Urban Area". As far as the streets and alleys are concerned, the Ming and Qing dynasties laid the basic pattern of today's urban area, according to local chronicles, more than forty neighborhoods appeared in Lianqi City, densely populated, the market was prosperous, and the two sides of Lianqi and Hengli presented a beautiful scenery of "small bridges, flowing water, and people's homes".
▲ Old photos on both sides of the Lianqi River outside the West Gate of Jiading
The establishment of county rule, "Jiading" was born
On the ninth day of the first month of December (January 7, 1218) of the tenth year of the Southern Song Dynasty, the imperial court approved the performance of Zhao Yanlan and Wang Tang, decided to demarcate the five townships and twenty-seven capitals in the eastern border of Kunshan County, and agreed to name the new county with the era name "Jiading", and from then on, "Jiading County" was born in the ancient land of Qiaocheng.
In ancient times, the county yamen was the political center of a county, in order to save land costs, Gao Yansun, who was good at feng shui, avoided the densely populated western part of Lianqi City, and selected the Jiading County Bureau at the former Junmasi WineRy in the east of Lianqi City (on the south side of the present-day Funing Lane in the city), and decided to "make a new Yi in the hui of Lianqi" (Gao Yansun's "Record of Chuangxian"), which is located at the center of the junction of the two rivers in the east of the Hengli River and the South of the Lianqi River.
The Jianya Bureau must have funds to spend, and Gao Yansun, who is sympathetic to the people's feelings, specially declared to Pingjiang Province, demanding that the abnormal zero and two taxes on Jiading for eight years (1215) and nine years be temporarily shelved. The abnormal zero and two taxes refer to the abnormal zero tax arrears deliberately retained by the local governments in the Song Dynasty when collecting taxes, such as a household that pays silk and only urges to pay eight or nine feet, and the abnormal zero tax arrears are left for others to pursue, so that the people of Jiading can breathe a sigh of relief. Then, he applied to leave Jiading's ten-year tax of 14,000 taels of copper coins in the locality, and the imperial court allocated 5,000 taels, and Pingjiang Province gave 10,000 taels, a total of about 30,000 taels, which was used as a cost for the construction of the county yamen, so that the construction of the county yamen did not cause additional burdens to the people of Jiading.
▲ Ming Zhengde's "Lianchuan Tuji" contains the map of Jiading County
The chief administrative officer of the county office is the governor of the county, who is in charge of the general administration, civil affairs, nongsang, litigation and prison, as well as household registration, conscription, money and grain, relief, and payment. The county office also set up a county clerk, a main bookkeeper, and a county lieutenant, and the county clerk was in charge of water conservancy and trade; the main bookkeeper was in charge of cashiers and official goods, and the book of the collar was noted; and the county lieutenant was in charge of reading the security of soldiers and horses. At the beginning, there was no full-time official in the county school, and the deputy post of the county bureau was concurrently held, until the third year of Jingding (1262), when the main school was established, in charge of the county school education, and later set up teaching positions such as academic politics, academic records, and teaching instructions.
From Guangxu's "Jiading County Chronicle", it can be found that the county Yamen covers an area of about 27 acres, about 120 houses, all county-level offices are located in Yamenli, for more than 700 years, although the Yamen has been continuously repaired, slightly increased, but the overall pattern has not changed until the Republic of China. From the Ming Dynasty scholar Du Mu's compilation of the "Lianchuan Tuji", we can see its approximate shape, its gate is in the south of the present-day Denglong Square, the north side of Chengzhong Street, the east boundary is North Avenue, and the west boundary is Chayuan Lane. Until the "8.13" Songhu War in 1937, the county was blown into ruins by Japanese aircraft.
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Spring and Autumn Series: A City Gifted by the Sea
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Source: Shanghai Jiading