Text/Li Chuanmin Editor| Swallow Photo | Network
In the 1950s, on the Dongfanghong Street in today's Heze City, across the road, a tea-green stone arch with a height of 16 meters stood. This is the Guo Paifang of the Ming Dynasty Wanli Year Hubu Shangshu Guo Yunhou's family, known as the "Four Dynasties and One Product" Workshop. At that time, it could also be called a landmark building in Heze City. The archway raised the amount of "Four Dynasties and One Product" because Shangshu Guo Yunhou Jin Guanglu Dafu Jia Gong Bao, gifted to the Fourth Emperor, is an honorary title given by the imperial court. It is said that the first three characters of "Four Dynasties and One Pin" were written fraudulently by Duan Yunxiang, a great calligrapher of the Ming and Qing dynasties in Caozhou, after being drunk with wine by Guo Shangshu, and the latter word was supplemented by others, and calligraphy experts can see at a glance that the strength and style of the last "pin" character are very different.
Regarding the legend of fierce temperament, no power, and refusal to ask the title, when I was a child, in my hometown, after dinner every summer night, under a thousand-year-old locust tree on the street, I took a cold, and in the sound of a sizzling dry cigarette bag, I had long heard the old people say it over and over again. After listening to this paragraph, another person continued that paragraph. Often without listening, I leaned into my grandfather's arms and drifted into a sweet sleep. When I woke up, I was already lying on the bed of my own mud house.
Duan Yunxiang's former residence is in our village, which is today's Changtun Village of Yuecheng Office of Heze Development Zone. The west end of the village is the former site of duanzhai, which is now inhabited by the surname Yu in the village. A mile north of the village is the Duan clan ancestral tomb, which is separated from my family's LiShizu tomb by a field path, which was lost in the 1980s under the reinforced concrete building complex of Heze power plant. Next to an ancient well in the west of the village, a two-meter-long stone trough is the Duan family's drinking manger, and later the women in the village have used the drinking manger as a washing pool for generations. There is a "rebuilding the Guandi Temple Monument" written by Duan Yunxiang in the west of the village, and later made a bridge slab on the village trench (the ditch outside the wall of the village), when I was a child, I also read the inscription on the bridge deck, I only remember that there are many names engraved on it, and the amount of money donated by the patrons. The trench has long been leveled, and the stone stele is probably still buried in the ground in front of the village.
Duan Yunxiang's life is not recorded. I only know that he had a legend of refusing to write the title "Four Worlds and One Product", and the "Selected Poems of the Caozhou Dynasties" compiled by Zhang Zhenhe and Huang Aiju of the present day has selected three ancient poems by Duan Yunxiang - "Nine Days to Climb fengqi mountain to read wutai", "Bian Zhongzhen" and "Shuishui". The author's profile calls Duan Yunxiang a Qing Dynasty man, a man of various lives, and his life is unknown. Guo Yunhou was a jinshi in 1607 (the thirty-fifth year of the Wanli Dynasty), and the cultivation of the "Four Dynasties and One Pin" Workshop was later, probably in the late Wanli Dynasty. From the Ming Wanli to the Qing Shunzhi, the gap between them is only more than twenty years, so it is entirely possible that Duan Yunxiang was born in two historical dynasties. An intellectual of a former dynasty, faced with a new historical dynasty ruled by a foreign nationality, had a difficult to accept the psychology of resistance, which made him issue such sad and ancient sighs in his poems as "Chasing the drama horse for a thousand years, and the heroes of this ancient era only cut off their intestines", "Who can be stingy and stingy, and always make the floating revolution", "Nostalgia for the Ancestors of the Han Dynasty, Rise of Dragons and Dragons", which is also very natural. This is why I say that Duan Yunxiang was a Ming and Qing calligrapher. Of course, his circulating works are mainly poetry. Qianlong's twenty-one years of revision of the "Chronicle of Caozhou Fu" lists six of his poems, and the newly revised "Chronicle of Heze City" lists three of his poems. Although his academic qualifications were not very high, he was only a student of the xiucai level, and he did not have a prominent official position. But in terms of local culture, there is still a certain status. In the folklore, some of his stories are even full of legendary mythology.
In the village, duan Yunxiang not only writes well, but also paints with a magic pen. It is said that Duan Yunxiang married a girlfriend and married to a rich man's family in a neighboring village. He did not accompany the dowry and did not accompany the place, only accompanied by a few boxes of calligraphy and paintings. The rich man was so annoyed that he ordered the people to burn the calligraphy and paintings on the spot in the courtyard. Before one painting could burn, it was blown aside by the wind, and the long-time worker who fed the cattle picked it up and pasted it on the bed of the cow house. After the wheat was cut, one clear morning, the rich man ordered a long-term worker to go to the field to spread the wheat. The long worker said no, it may rain today. The rich man thought that the long-term worker was lazy and lazy, and forced a large cart of wheat to be pulled into the field. The wheat had just spread out, and a dark cloud came up, and a heavy rain drenched a wheat. After two days, the long-term workers were afraid that the wheat spread at home would sprout mold and sprout, so they went to dry the wheat again. The rich man saw that the sky was not good, and hesitated not to let him dry. The long worker said it was all right, and the day would be sunny in a moment. Sure enough, it caught up with a scorching sunny day. The rich man praised the long-term work as a god, and the long-term worker pointed to the unburned painting at the head of the bed of the cow house and told the reason. It turned out that the upper part was an umbrella, and the umbrella was closed on a sunny day, and the umbrella was opened under rain, which was more accurate than the current weather forecast of the Central Meteorological Observatory. The rich man suddenly realized that the dowry brought by his daughter-in-law was a treasure. The rich man of the land went so far as to cheekily ask his daughter-in-law to plead with her mother-in-law to make up the burned calligraphy and paintings, and his stupid request to disrespect knowledge and talent was naturally rejected.
As for how the Duan family fell, the old people in the village also have magical legends. We northerners used to be prejudiced against Southerners, both hateful and reverential. It is said that some southerners understand feng shui and know the dragon vein. However, if anyone chooses a yin house (cemetery) or a yang house (courtyard) with dragon vein qi for others, and the emperor and nobleman are born, his own eyes will be blind, because he has leaked the heavenly opportunity, God will punish him, and if he is blind, he will no longer be able to eat this bowl of rice. People say that Duan Jiazu is a feng shui treasure in our area, as high as the moat outside Caozhou. When the Yellow River broke, refugees from all over the world fled here to avoid the flood, calling this place "Huangtai". The Duan family somehow offended the southerners who watched feng shui, and this feng shui master went to the Duan family's ancestral home and found that there was a towering cypress tree in Yingdi, shaped like an umbrella cover, and the smoke cage was surrounded by fog, sheltering the Duan family. Mr. Feng Shui secretly looked for someone, and in the middle of the night when the wind was high, he sawed off the root of the cypress tree, and the bright red blood water came out of the saw. The feng shui was broken, and the son of the Duan family who went to Beijing to take the exam did not go to the capital, and he died in the middle of the road because of the bad sores on his back. Since then, the Duan family has been in a state of collapse, people have perished and the family has been defeated, leaving only a string of distant and poignant legends for hundreds of years. I think that the vicious feng shui gentleman who killed people and exterminated the clan may not be able to escape the punishment given to him by God that is worse than blindness.
Duan Yunxiang once used such a verse to hang Bian Qi, the loyal prime minister of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Today, I would also like to borrow these two poems to pay tribute to this magical legend who has fascinated the historical and cultural elite of my hometown that is both distant and close to my life. Although he could not be compared with the old loyal prime minister of the Jin Dynasty who sacrificed his life for righteousness, Bian Xi.
(End)
Author: Li Chuanmin, pen name Lei Zefeng. Male, born in 1945, from Heze City. Retired construction engineer of Heze Foreign Trade Grain, Oil and Food Company. He is a member of the Poetry Society of Shandong Province and Heze City.
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