The greatest pleasure of winter is ice. In the old days, everyone from the highest officials and nobles to the common people liked to play on the ice. Liu Ruoyu of the Ming Dynasty recorded the scene of the Three Seas Ice Drama in Xiyuan in the "Zhi Zhongzhi": "Frozen in winter, the bed can be dragged, the bed can be handed over on a wooden board or recommended, one person leads the rope in front, two or three people can be pulled, the ice is like flying, the snow is cloudy, and the embellishment is picturesque." ”
In the Qing Dynasty, the Ice Festriel Ceremony was also an important celebration in the royal winter. From the first year of Shunzhi, the imperial court held a unique military competition every winter to maintain its lasting combat effectiveness, called "big parade skates". Every year on the sixth day of the "March 9th", the emperor led hundreds of civil and military officials to Beihai to review the "Eight Flags Skate Camp" and hold a huge exercise performance. During the Qianlong period, ice frolic was officially established as a military ceremony, and every winter a grand ice event was held in Tailiu Pond to parade the Eight Banner Soldiers.
After entering the Republic of China, ice activities were in full swing. On August 1, 1925, Beihai Park was officially opened to the public. In the winter of that year, a man named Wen Shiquan, who claimed to have "learned to skate since childhood, when he was twelve years old, he had prepared ice for the ice in front of empress dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor", and he opened an ice rink on the ice in front of the Yilan Hall in the north of the Beihai White Pagoda, and the crowd was surging for a while. That ice rink also became a good place for ordinary people to play on the ice in the winter.
Since then, as soon as the winter ice is frozen, the major ice rinks in Beijing have opened, especially the Beihai Ice Rink, which is the most popular, all because the ice rink is maintained: after closing every night, the staff uses a large bamboo broom to clear the ice ballast, and then replenish a layer of water, after a night of freezing, the ice surface becomes flat as a mirror. At that time, the Beihai Ice Rink gathered a group of the best skaters in Beijing.
On January 31, 1926, a masquerade skating conference was held in Yilan Hall of Beihai Park. According to the records, the conference "had thousands of spectators and more than 130 people competing." Chinese and foreign men and women are half, strange costumes, no wonders, or overstretched, or waist is large, and there are nine western women decorated with horses, cows, sheep and rabbits, and the viewers are all hilarious. The strangest ones, decorated with hot pot, cabbage, lotus, butterflies, steamboats, Indian women, etc., make people desperate. Since then, this tradition has continued at the North Sea Ice Rink. In this or delicate or peculiar figure, many handsome men and beautiful women are married because of ice and snow, giving birth to a romantic story.
On January 25, 1935, the 19th North China Games Ice Performance Conference was held in Nanhai, Zhongnanhai Park, and Xiao Shufang, a Beijing (then known as Beiping), won the women's figure skating championship. Participating in the competition were representative teams from seven provinces and cities, including Beijing, Hebei, Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang and Rehe. There are 3 major events and 16 minor events in speed skating, figure skating and ice hockey. Xiao Shufang can be said to be China's first women's figure skating champion, and her sister Xiao Shuzhuang represented the Hebei team and won the fourth place. Xiao Shufang's graceful and heroic posture in the competition was published on the inside page of the famous "Good Friend" (January 1935 issue 101) in Shanghai.
In 1929, Xiao Shufang was at the North Sea Costume Skating Conference
The Xiao sisters have an indissoluble relationship with the North Sea Ice Rink. The Xiao sisters are the nieces of Mr. Xiao Youmei, the founder and pioneer of Chinese music education, and the most prestigious of the sisters is the painter Xiao Shufang. Born in Tianjin in 1911, Xiao Shufang moved to Beijing with her father Xiao Bolin in 1920 and entered the Department of Western Painting at the Art College of National Peking University in 1926.
During her studies in Beijing, Xiao Shufang would take her skates and brush to Beihai Park to sketch every winter. When you are tired of painting, you will slide on the ice for a while. Tired of slipping, sit down again to sketch. She and her sister Xiao Shuxian, her younger sister Xiao Shuzhuang and Xiao Shuxi are regular guests of the masquerade skating conference. In January 1931, the masquerade skating conference held by the Beihai Ice Rink, Xiao Shufang, Xiao Shuzhuang and Xiao Shuxi all came to participate, and Xiao Shufang and Xiao Shuzhuang won the second and third places respectively.
Until her later years, Xiao Shufang still kept the skates she wore that year, and her favorite show was also a figure skating competition. She often laments that today's athletes are extraordinary, "We were just a few steps and a few postures." ”
In the 1950s, Xiao Shufang successively painted a number of works with the theme of skating: oil painting "Beihai Skating", "Shichahai in Beijing Winter", Chinese painting "Beihai Skating", Chinese painting "Beihai Skating", watercolor painting "Beihai Park in Winter", watercolor painting "Skating" and so on. Xiao Shufang's paintings are mostly about young girls galloping on the ice, which must be her deep memories and emotional sustenance for her youth.
At the ice performance conference of the 19th North China Games in 1935, when Xiao Shufang won the championship, it was Xia Chengyao who won the second place in the figure skating men's group. Xia Chengyao was the sixth son of Xia Renhu (a member of parliament of the Beiyang government, acting minister of finance, and secretary general of the State Council during the late Qing Dynasty). Xia Chengyao, who was a reporter for the World Journal at the time, was a sports fan, and he knew everything about skating, billiards, and volleyball, and the best of them was skating. Xia Chenglin's seventh brother Xia Chenglin was also good at skating, and on January 30, 1937, at the second Ice Games in Beijing, Xia Chenglin and Xia Chengyao brothers won the men's figure skating championship and runner-up respectively.
On January 6, 1935, the World Pictorial published a group photo of Xia Chengyao and Xia Chenglin brothers on the North Sea Ice Rink (the person wearing the suit was Xia Chengyao)
It is the specialty of skating that makes Xia Chengyao get closer and closer to a woman.
In 1934, at the age of 16, Lin Haiyin was admitted to the Peking Journalism College founded by Mr. Chengshe, and during his time at the school, he studied and worked as an intern reporter at the World Journal. During this time, he became acquainted with Xia Chengyao, the editor of the World Journal, and after graduating in 1937, Lin Haiyin officially served as a reporter for the World Journal. During her work at the World Journal, Lin Haiyin was full of affection for Xia Chengyao, a skater. Later, in the exchange, I learned that both of them lived in Nancheng and were alumni of the First Affiliated Elementary School of Normal University. Xia Chengyao's family lives in Yongguang Temple Street, and Lin Haiyin lives in Jinjiang Hall in Nanliu Lane, which is a ten-minute walk away. When Xia Chengyao was a student, he had to go through the Liuli Factory every day when he went to school, and often went to the Commercial Press and the Zhonghua Bookstore to read books and buy books, and these two bookstores were also the places where Lin Haiyin, a literary and artistic girl, often went. Therefore, the feelings of the two people naturally deepened.
In 1939, Lin Haiyin was at the Beihai Park Ice Rink
Since then, every winter, Lin Haiyin has accompanied Xia Chengyao to the North Sea to skate. In addition to them, Xia Chenglin and his lover Zhou Guoshu will also dance together on the Beihai Ice Rink. Whenever these two couples flip lightly on the North Sea Ice Rink, they always attract crowds of onlookers. Over time, people's honorific titles for the Xia brothers "Xia Liu" and "Xia Qi" did not go away in the Beihai Ice Rink.
Because of the "harmony of work and like-mindedness", on May 13, 1939, Xia Chengyao and Lin Haiyin held a new-style wedding ceremony in the auditorium of Peking Union Medical College Hospital. That year, Xia Chengyao was 29 years old and Lin Haiyin was 21 years old. After marriage, the two often went to the North Sea Ice Rink to skate together.
In her later years, Lin Haiyin fondly recalled her attachment to the Beihai Ice Rink in "Bitter Thoughts of Beiping": "After the last outing of the year, autumn is deeper. The young man went to test the cold in the shadows of the Beihai Yilan Hall again. Walking on thin ice? So we picked up the skates we had rested for a year under the bed, dusted them off, polished them, and waited for the fire to go, when the foreign stove was already installed. Autumn is far away. ”