Then to share my travel story, today we went to the Egret Village in Gannan to visit.
In the mountains of southern Jiangxi Province, there is a quiet ancient Hakka village. During the Northern Song Dynasty, the ancestors of the Zhong clan led their families to migrate here from Yingchuan, Henan, and chose this place with beautiful mountains and rivers and many egrets to establish a village. For more than 870 years, the Zhong family has flourished here, passing on their unique customs and culture from generation to generation. Today, there are still more than 2,000 descendants of the Zhong family living in Egret Village, enjoying a quiet and indifferent rural life.
In the more than 60 years since the founding of New China, there have never been any violations of law and discipline in the village, and all this has benefited from the family rules and ancestral precepts left by the ancestors of the Zhong family. The Hakka family has a strict family style of respecting the ancestors and respecting the sages, and each family sacrifice is to express the respect for the ancestors and warn the clan to behave and do things. The ancestral texts conceal the admonitions of the ancestors of the Zhong clan admonishing future generations, which are sacred and cannot be violated.
Accumulate virtue and flow fang, and often stay good and celebrate in future generations. Since ancient times, the village of Egret has been known for its charity. In the Gannan area, there is a saying that "there are no starving flowers in Egret Village, no children who cannot afford to go to school, and there are no old people without coffins".
The descendants of the Zhong clan in Egret Village are also respected by the locals, all of which originated from a woman known as Lady Wang. There is still a shrine of Madame Wang in the village of Egret, which is extremely rare in the feudal society where men are inferior to women. This is the idol of Mrs. Wang, and it commemorates her doing good deeds and doing many good deeds. There is a warehouse in the back called Yicang, and here are orphans, children who have no money to go to school, she takes them in to study here, and asks teachers to teach them to read.
Lady Wang was originally a concubine of a family surnamed Zhong during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, but although her family was well-off, she was very frugal. On weekdays, he wears cloth clothes, eats vegetarian food, uses the savings to administer medicine to the sick, gives food to the poor, and even gives coffins and proper burials to the widows and lonely people who die in the village of Egret. Until her deathbed, Mrs. Wang also explained to her son that there must be a thousand stones of millet in the righteous warehouse every year, and all of them must be distributed that year and must not be retained.
If people have good thoughts, heaven will repay them. Under the words and deeds of Mrs. Wang, her four children and grandchildren were very outstanding, obtained meritorious names, and continued to do good deeds during their official period, benefiting the people. After the story of Madame Wang spread, the Qianlong Emperor was deeply moved and was crowned Madame Wang three times. The clan members built an ancestral hall for Lady Wang in front of her righteous warehouse. Since then, mrs. Wang's ancestral hall has become a place for bailu village to rescue the poor and has lasted for more than 200 years.
The 85-year-old Zhong Yishan read books in the "Yixue" in Mrs. Wang's ancestral hall when he was a child. We don't need money when we go to school. After graduating from primary school, there will be 150 pounds of millet rewards, and middle school students will add 150 pounds. After graduating from high school, there are more prizes, with 500 pounds of millet rewards. Not to help me alone, everyone is the same. In the traditional saying of Chinese, one woman can influence three generations of a family. A virtuous woman can prosper a family for a long time, and Mrs. Wang has used her kindness to shade generations of future generations.
In Chinese culture, a person's life path is correct and incorrect, and his value in life is to contribute to society. One of the most basic things is whether you are good or not. This person you can see that although she is just a concubine, a woman and a Taoist family, she does not have a high social status. She has the weather, the pattern, and dedicates all her possessions, so she has formed a kind of atmosphere in this village. After she died, even people built ancestral halls, and it can be said that she was immortal.
People adapted the story of Mrs. Wang's education of her children and grandchildren into the East River drama "Machine Room Godson". For more than 200 years, on festival days, the ancient singing voice has been singing in the village. The old people are immersed in the familiar dialogue and singing voice, and the children are attracted by the witty and humorous plot, and the ancient singing voice brings people countless times of joy and emotion, and also subtly affects the descendants of the Zhong family.