The Geological Survey, the Tsinghua Institute of Chinese Studies, the Institute of History and Linguistics, and the China Construction Society are the four peaks in the history of modern Chinese culture, and they are also the forerunners of scholars to go out of the study hall and into the field. From the Beiyang government to the National Government, from the "Northern Expedition" to the "Central Plains War", from the "918 Incident" to the "July 7 Incident", the country is constantly changing, and the times are changing rapidly. In the cracks of the chaos, the scholars worked silently and tirelessly. They are an unprecedented generation, not only ushering in a new era of scholarship, but also changing the world's perception of China.
01
Wartime Chinese Cultural Center
The sound of the river is mighty.
In the winter of 1940, several idols were carried out of the Dongyue Temple of Lizhuang and never brought back.
In the rumbling artillery fire of the War of Resistance, Tongji University migrated for the sixth time and finally landed in Lizhuang. The villagers asked them to walk away the statues of the gods, put them on the blackboard of tables and chairs, and the Dongyue Temple was used as the building of the Engineering College of Tongji University. In return, the Institute of Engineering erected wires and Li Zhuang people used electric lights, more than a decade earlier than Nanxi County.
Tongji University moved its campus, and initially set its sights on Nanxi County, but it was rejected. The gentry in the county town feared that the population surge would lead to higher prices and even endanger the customs of the people. At the time of uncertainty, a sixteen-character telegram was sent from the remote Li Zhuang: "Tongji moved to Sichuan, Li Zhuang welcomed; everything needed, local supply." The drafter of the telegram was Luo Nanxi, the gentry leader of Li Zhuang. His choice with Zhang Guanzhou, Zhang Wanqin, Yang Junhui, Li Qingquan, Jiang Xuhui and other squires and brothers made the unknown town of Lizhuang one of the cultural centers of wartime China, and also allowed the devastated Chinese culture to retain a glimmer of life.
Together with Tongji University, lizhuang was the Institute of History and Language of academia sinensis, the institute of social sciences, the central museum, the institute of liberal arts of Jinling University, and the China Construction Society. Liang Sicheng, Liu Dunzhen, Lin Huiyin and others also came to Lizhuang with the crowd. From Kunming to Lizhuang, the mountain road is winding and rugged. Each family was allowed only eighty kilograms of luggage, and from the elderly to the newborn babies, thirty-one people were crammed into the truck, bumping all the way. Immediately, they scattered like dandelions into the land of Lizhuang, Tongji University occupied various ancient buildings in the center of the town, the Shiyu Institute went to Chestnut Pass, and the China Construction Society moved to Shangba. Within a few months, the population of Lizhuang had surged from 3,600 to 15,000.
In the past, most Chinese did not know the name of Li Zhuang, but later, letters sent from all over the world only need to write the four words "China Li Zhuang" to arrive smoothly.
Little Li Zhuang became the Noah's Ark of this generation of scholars, carrying them towards an unknown fate.
02
The most extravagant taste
There is always a dog to bark first, like a long-planned conductor. At the beginning of the barking, the neighboring dogs immediately responded, far and near, high and low, twisting and turning. Through the farmland is the house where Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, Liu Dunzhen and others lived, where they are, where the China Construction Society is.
There is a big laurel round tree in the yard. As soon as Liang Sicheng settled down, he tied a bamboo pole to the guiyuan tree and repeatedly climbed the bamboo pole with the young people every day. When it comes to mapping ancient buildings in the field, climbing is a basic skill, and a day cannot be wasted.
In the small courtyard, the residences of the Liang family and the Liu family occupy both sides, in the middle is a long office, a few old tables and chairs are arranged quite neatly, and with each step, the wooden floor will also creak, as if the dull echo of time.
The China Construction Society has grown a little bigger, recruiting several young staff members, such as Lu Sheng, Wang Shixiang and Luo Zhewen, who will become the Taishan Beidou of China's architectural and cultural relics circles many years later.
In 1940, when Luo Zhewen was admitted to the China Construction Society as a trainee, he was only sixteen years old. Liu Dunzhen said to this curious young man that the China Construction Society is a pure academic group, and everyone is a reader and a scholar, not an official, not a yamen. Initially, Luo Zhewen helped Liu Dunzhen to copy and sort out the "Survey Of Ancient Buildings in Southwest China", and later with Liang Sicheng to learn to draw and sort out historical documents, Liang Sicheng taught him to use drawing plates, T-rulers, triangle plates and drawing instruments.
Luo Zhewen
It was rainy in southern Sichuan, the room was always damp and dark, rats and snakes visited frequently, and bed bugs crawled over the bed in droves. Lin Hui, who was ill, received special preferential treatment and had a canvas bed, and everyone else could only sleep on a bare board and bamboo mat. Sometimes, Lin Hui's high fever reached forty degrees Celsius for several weeks in a row, Li Zhuang lacked medical treatment and medicine, and Liang Sicheng himself learned to give her injections.
Supplies are scarce and prices are still soaring. Every month, when you receive a salary, you have to buy rice and oil immediately, and if you delay it, they may become a pile of waste paper. Liu Dunzhen's family of five, Chinese New Year's Eve night's Chinese New Year's Eve meal only five small pieces of hemp cake, the only difference from usual is that on this special night, a few small candles temporarily replaced the tung oil lamp and inserted on a piece of radish.
Liang Sicheng began to learn steamed steamed steamed buns, cooking, cooking, pickling vegetables, while Lin Huiyin learned needlework, and every day she forced her sick body to sew up the children's clothes that were too small to wear, and she laughed at herself that "this is much more difficult than writing a whole chapter about the architectural development of the Song, Liao, and Qing Dynasties or trying to depict the capital of the Song Dynasty."
Liang Sicheng
If his livelihood was still difficult to maintain, Liang Sicheng would have to go to Yibin, take off his clothes, and come back with some food. His favorite Parker pen and watch would be discarded, and he would joke that he had boiled the watch and stewed the dress.
There are many children living in Lizhuang, and the fathers will occasionally draw a few strokes on the small book to play with the children. Liang Sicheng painted a small painting, which is a delicate small bowl containing tomato egg soup. He wrote next to it: Wait until the victory of the war, drink such a bowl.
This is the taste that Liang Sicheng misses the most, and in that era, it was already a luxury.
In Lin Huiyin's eyes, his son Liang Congjie was once "the blossom of a tree and a tree, and the swallow whispered among the beams", but within a few years, he grew into "a tanned country boy with grass shoes on his feet." Speaking authentic Sichuan dialect when dealing with vulgar local classmates", I don't know if Lin Huiyin remembered Haridon in "Wuthering Heights", and his fate was so wrong.
Lin Huiyin
Old newspapers are always old news, but fortunately, if you want to read, you can go to the historical language to borrow. This is one of the reasons why the China Construction Society moved from Kunming to Lizhuang. There is also a phonograph in the humble home, and a few records of Beethoven and Mozart, comforting the embarrassing time. Borrowing a few Shakespeare records from Shiyu can excite Lin like a child, imitating Laurence Olivier's tone and murmuring Hamlet's classic recitation: "To be, or not to be: that is the question." Survival or death is not a question at all. In liang sicheng and Lin Huiyin's hearts, they actually had the answer.
03
Where is Lizhuang?
In exile, fortunately, the deceased did not lose contact.
Mr. and Mrs. Fei Zhengqing and Fei Weimei often received letters from Li Zhuang, and the envelopes were covered with stamps, and the letters inside were thick and signed with different dates. Because postage is expensive, sending letters is a luxury. Most of the letters are extremely thin and brittle, often of different sizes and shapes, and some may be wrapped in vegetables or meat, leaving subtle imprints. Every corner of the paper is filled with words. In Lizhuang, paper is also hard-won.
Mr. and Mrs. Fairbank and Mr. and Mrs. Liang Sicheng
How to explain the remote town of Lizhuang to friends elsewhere, Liang Sicheng pondered.
Lizhuang is located in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, with Yibin on the upper reaches, Luzhou on the lower, and flows to Chongqing. The Qing dynasty Weng Yilin wrote in "Overnight Stay in Lizhuang": "The entry is still parked at night, and the most popular population is Lijiazhuang. The land is located along the road to find a lonely post, and the city of Jianghe Rong remembers a pond. Don't be a light autumn, and the cattle and horses on the embankment are vast. Shuangyu asked each other through his hands, deeply ashamed to help his father and old man. "When the travelers went straight down the river and berthed Lizhuang at night, they would always look at the rolling cooking smoke on the bank of the river in a hundred senses. If you land on the shore, you will meet countless gods and goddesses, dongyue the great, the dragon king, the xuanwu ancestor, guan gong, the Buddha, Guanyin, and Jesus, waiting in their respective doors for people who come to make a wish. In fact, Liang Sicheng they are not the first batch of exiles in Lizhuang, the Ming and Qing dynasties, "the lake fills Sichuan", Lizhuang has ushered in immigrants from all over the world, mixed places in all directions, forming an ancient town pattern of "nine palaces and eighteen temples". At the back mountain gate of the Wangye Temple, there is a couplet on the stone square, "Jiang Kelai enters from the trail, and the plume returns to the small door knocking", which describes the typical Lizhuang terroir, the river rushing, the mountain path is deep, the wind and waves appear, and everything is silent.
In 1942, Fairbank returned to China as a civil officer in the U.S. Department of State's Department of Cultural Relations with China, a special assistant to the U.S. ambassador to China. Although he was a Chinese communicator, and the Feis had traveled with Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin through the backwoods of Shanxi, Liang Sicheng was unable to accurately describe Li Zhuang to them, and in the end, he could only vaguely write that Li Zhuang was "next to a less attractive tributary in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River."
Hearing that Fei Zhengqing was preparing to meet at Lizhuang, Liang Sicheng excitedly marked the location of Lizhuang in more detail. "From Chongqing to Lizhuang on a broken ship, it takes three days to go to the water and two days to go back to the water. There is no way to shorten the travel time or improve the means of transport. However, I still want to give you a map showing the location of our construction society, just in case you land at Lizhuang and no one picks you up at the dock. Boats do not run on schedule. Every arrival here is an emergency. But you can still use telegram to inform us of the name and date of the ship you are on. The telegram was sent by letter from Yibin or Nanxi, both of which were 60 miles (about 20 miles) away, and it may have arrived before or after you arrived. ”
The reason why he knows so well about the waterway between Chongqing and Lizhuang is because he often travels back and forth like this. In the early years of the China Construction Society, it relied on the "Geng fund" to maintain, "World War II", the "Geng fund" was unsustainable, Liang Sicheng could only try to seek support everywhere, to accompany the capital Chongqing, in order to apply for funds from the Executive Yuan and the Ministry of Education, in the end, the Institute of History and Language of the Academia Sinica and the Central Museum were responsible for issuing the salaries of the main members of the Construction Society, and the research funds collected were often only a drop in the bucket.
In November of that year, When Fairbank came to Lizhuang, he was seriously ill and had been bedridden, lighting vegetable oil lamps and candles at 5:30 p.m. Li Zhuang's hardships far exceeded Fairbank's imagination, and he lamented: "If Americans were in such a situation, they might have abandoned books long ago, found another way, and improved their lives." But this once highly trained Chinese intellectual, while accepting the primitive and simple peasant life, continued to devote himself to their academic research. The social responsibilities of scholars have penetrated deeply into the social structure and expectations of an individual's future. This is the fate of Chinese cultural people, and in modern times, it has become more and more tragic by the frequent national difficulties.
A few years later, Fei Weimei also had the opportunity to overlook Li Zhuang from the air. She and Liang Sicheng took off from Chongqing in a U.S. C-47 transport plane, and forty minutes later, at the bend in the Yangtze River, she saw a wall of the city. Liang Sicheng told her that this was the last place to arrive on the first day of the boat. It was in this small town in the mountains that Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin spent their forty years with dim vegetable oil lamps—the most precious time of their lives for academic research and artistic creation.
04
Secretly battling fate
Liang Sicheng's weight dropped to forty-seven kilograms, and his back was more hunched than before. Looking back on the time in Peiping, there is often a sense of passing away, he wrote in the letter: "Sometimes reading foreign magazines and looking at the colorful advertisements of modern facilities is like facing a miracle. ”
Fortunately, in his exile days, he saw another kind of miracle - those ancient buildings scattered in the mountains, exquisite stone statues, escaped the invasion of thousands of years, great beauty is speechless, and the world is independent. Even in the darkest of times, there are always wisps of light that can illuminate a corner and comfort people's hearts.
Liu Dunzhen was busy sorting out the "Survey Of Ancient Buildings in Southwest China". From July 1940 to December 1941, on behalf of the China Construction Society, he cooperated with the Preparatory Office of the Central Museum to visit 44 counties in Yunnan, Sichuan and Xikang, and investigated more than 180 ancient buildings and ancillary art relics. But he knew that what he saw was only a dime, only "one-tenth of Yunnan, one-fifth of Sichuan, and one-nineteenth of Xikang." He and his colleagues are confronted with an extremely complex architectural form, a world completely different from the North. Although the architecture of the southwest region can be generally divided into "Han style" and "Tibetan style", "due to the differences in geography, climate, materials, customs and other backgrounds, there are various styles of similarities and differences." Each style of work is replaced by a certain number of changes with the times. Therefore, if we want to complete a detailed and systematic investigation in a short period of time, it is difficult for the facts to permit it."
Liu Dunzhen
He also began to write with great interest the "Yunnan Ancient Architecture Survey", combing the historical evolution of ancient architecture in Yunnan, and planned to write two papers on the ancient architecture he investigated in Kunming and other regions outside Kunming, but unfortunately, this manuscript was only less than half completed.
Despite the meagre research funding, the China Construction Society inspected the monuments around Lizhuang. Mo Zongjiang and Lu Sheng surveyed lizhuang's spiral hall and Yibin Jiuzhou Babai Pagoda, Mo Zongjiang, Luo Zhewen, and Wang Shixiang surveyed Li Zhuang's Song tomb, and Liu Zhiping surveyed Li Zhuang's residences and mosques in Chengdu. In addition, as a representative of the China Construction Society, Chen Mingda participated in the excavation of the cliff tomb of the Central Museum in Pengshan, and Mo Zongjiang participated in the excavation of the tomb of Wang Jian in Chengdu. Victory in the War of Resistance still seems far away, and work can dispel the anxiety and disappointment of every day.
Liang Sicheng began to write the "History of Chinese Architecture", Mo Zongjiang was responsible for drawing illustrations, Lu Sheng helped collect the literature of the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, and Lin Huiyin, who was ill, in addition to collecting and writing the literature of the Liao and Song Dynasties, also proofread and supplemented all the manuscripts of the "History of Chinese Architecture".
Sclerosis of the spinal tissue has always plagued Liang Sicheng, who had to wear a vest made of steel to work. To relieve pressure on his spine, he pressed a vase against his jaw as a fulcrum to support the weight of his head. He laughed and declared that this would make the line straighter.
They worked until late at night every day, under the dim oil lamp, secretly battling fate. Writing makes them briefly forget the misery of reality and return to those legendary golden ages again and again. Many years later, one will find that the era pioneered by Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin and Liu Dunzhen was also the golden age of China.
05
Before dawn
In the early summer of 1943, the British historian of science Joseph Needham came to Lizhuang and was "treated with fried duck" at Liang's house. He gave a lecture at Lizhuang on why science is not growing faster in China than in Europe. However, the reality in front of him made him have mixed feelings.
Needham
At tong's first week of teaching at Tongji University, Needham was equally curious about the famous Chinese scientist and insisted on seeing his laboratory. Unexpectedly, he only saw an old microscope and a few goldfish. The German-made microscope was bought from a thrift store and cost the couple two years' salary. There are no additional experimental facilities in the first week of tong, like farmers who rely on the sky to eat, go to the sun to do experiments when the weather is clear, and use the reflection of the snow when it snows. Needham couldn't help but sigh that Tong First Week dissected the goldfish for research, but Tong First Week himself was not a goldfish trapped in the desert.
The China Construction Society is also trapped in the desert. A few months after Needham left, Liu Dunzhen also resigned to his colleagues in the society. In the autumn of 1943, he decided to return to the Department of Architecture of National Central University, which had been absent for eleven years. On the eve of leaving, he had a long conversation with Liang Sicheng. The two met because of the China Construction Society and worked together for eleven years. At the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the board of directors of Sino-British Gengjian said that even if the members of the China Construction Society were scattered everywhere due to the war, as long as Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen were together, the board of directors was willing to recognize the existence of the society. They survived the most difficult years, but they could not escape in the end.
Liu Dunzhen's departure seems to be quite hidden, but one of the important reasons is that the China Construction Society has lost its financial resources. Despite Fairbank's efforts to secure five thousand dollars in sponsorship from the Harvard Yenching Society, it was to no avail. Members of the society could not receive salaries and their lives were precarious. Liu Dunzhen has done accounting for the Construction Society, and he is well aware of the difficulties involved.
After leaving Lizhuang, Liu Dunzhen went to Shapingba, Chongqing, and the following year became the head of the department of architecture at Central University. He finally changed from a dusty inspector to a Confucian scholar who "wore a long shirt and held a teacup, slowly walked into the classroom, and spoke like a number of family treasures." However, his livelihood did not improve much, and in order to maintain his life, he was forced to sell the "Ciyuan" that he had treasured for many years, and even so, he could not save his little daughter, who was killed by meningitis.
Chen Mingda also left Lizhuang at the same time and went to the Southwest Highway Bureau. The War of Resistance brought him a fatal spiritual blow. His mother and sister who remained in Beiping died one after another, his fiancée died in the underground anti-Japanese activities, and his underage younger siblings suddenly disappeared again. The only thing that could comfort him was the wine in the cup and Du Fu's poem - "The fire lasts for three months, and the family letter reaches ten thousand gold." He anesthetized himself with endless work, and drank and cried after work. Fate is uncertain, disasters ensue, but "Building the French Style" is still his only spiritual pillar. He forced himself to stay in a small room every day, hand-copying the entire "Construction of the French Style" and all the hand-drawn architectural drawings. After leaving the China Construction Society, he never gave up the exploration of the corresponding county wooden pagoda and the "Construction French Style" Big Wooden Works. For the rest of his life, he has been studying and annotating the Construction of the French Style, and firmly believes that through this "Heavenly Book" of the Northern Song Dynasty, "a Chinese architectural system that is very different from the Western architectural system" can be restored one by one.
Chen Mingda
There were only four people left in the China Construction Society, and Lin Huiyin wrote to Fei Weimei to lament: "Now that Mr. Liu is gone, everyone is likely to scatter." ”
The China Construction Society did not scatter birds and animals. In 1944, Liang Sicheng even revived the "Construction Society Journal", which had been suspended for more than seven years. In the dimly lit house, they arranged the papers, copied and drew them on medicinal paper, and then printed them on clay paper with lithographs, folded and bound themselves. In his republishment remarks, Liang Sicheng described the efforts made by his colleagues: "During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, we saw increasingly difficulties in the material field, and only under the condition of being overstretched, we conducted a little field investigation in the southwest rear", and this "little field investigation" actually included "more than ten counties between Kunming and Dali in Yunnan, about thirty counties along the Jialing River Basin and the Minjiang River Basin in Sichuan, and about thirty counties along the Sichuan-Shaanxi Highway, as well as the two counties of Ya'an Lushan in Xikang". Steles, arches, pagodas, buildings, tombs, cliff tombs, coupon tombs, sculptures, cliff statues, murals, and so on. There are many articles in the two issues of the journal that are the results of their investigation in Sichuan, including Mo Zongjiang's "Tomb of the White Pagoda song in yibin old prefecture", Liu Zhiping's "Chengdu Mosque", Lu Sheng's "Spiral Hall", and Wang Shixiang's "Tomb of Lizhuang Song in Nanxi, Sichuan", and Liang Sicheng's discovery at the Foguang Temple in Wutaishan, Shanxi, before the war, and Fei Weimei's investigation of the Wuliang Ancestral Hall in Shandong, which were also explained in these two issues.
"Construction Society Journal"
In his republishment speech, Liang Sicheng tirelessly expressed his gratitude to the major institutions for their support to the China Construction Society during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the subsidies from the China Education and Culture Foundation and the Board of Directors of the Sino-British Geng, the special subsidies and supplementary budgets from the Ministry of Education and the Executive Yuan, and the cooperation or commission from the Institute of History and Language, the National Museum of National Sciences, the National Compilation Museum, the Central University, and the Jiangxi Construction Department, all of which allowed the China Construction Society to operate barely. He is deeply grateful for this.
However, after the resumption of the publication of the "Construction Society", only two issues were published, and it was forced to be permanently suspended. In the last issue of the journal, Liang Sicheng wrote: "The architecture of each school, like every language and writing, must have its own special 'grammar' and 'vocabulary'... This kind of 'grammar', in a school of architecture, i.e., in a language, is a traditional evolution and has its history. He devoted his life to deciphering these "grammars", and exploring "Building the French Style" and writing the history of Chinese architecture was his attempt. He traveled for many years, searching, investigating, mapping, and thus fortunately met ancient buildings of different eras. He made full preparations, but he did not expect that when he started writing, he was already in a difficult situation.
In 1945, he suggested that Mei Yiqi, president of Tsinghua University, establish the Department of Architecture to cultivate talents for post-war reconstruction. He was full of ambition and tried to re-engineer China's architectural education. He was dissatisfied with the French Eco le des Beaux-Arts curriculum system inherited by the architecture departments of many Chinese universities, believing that "too much emphasis on factional forms and not close to reality", and he himself was interested in the Bauhaus, hoping to plan the courses of the architecture department and cultivate "creative practical talents". With the remaining members of the China Construction Society, Liang Sicheng set off for Tsinghua.
The China Construction Society has existed for fifteen years and has quietly ended since then. Eight of these fifteen years were spent in war, displacement and extreme embarrassment, and even so, they tried to achieve unprecedented success. They supported each other and survived the war, but decided to make a new choice before the dawn came.
Liang Sicheng and Mo Zongjiang built the studio of the society in Lizhuang
After Liang Sicheng left the United States, Modernist architects such as Walter Gropius and Mies Vander Rohe began to guide the architectural world, and the Bauhaus trend sprung up, for which Liang Sicheng had some regrets, of course, only in the face of friends, he would occasionally sigh and feel that he had accidentally missed the feast of modern architecture. But when he briefly returned to the United States in 1947 to lecture at Yale and Princeton universities and to participate in the design of the United Nations Building, a young American architect lamented that although "few people in the American architectural community know about him (Liang Sicheng) or his career," "he gave our conference a sense of history more than anyone else, far beyond the sense of direct history that Le Corbusier insisted."
Between yin and yang, many ancient Chinese buildings have been reproduced in the footsteps of Liang Sicheng, Liu Dunzhen, Lin Huiyin and others, and "Building the French Style" is no longer a "heavenly book" that no one can understand, and the history of Chinese architecture has been written relatively systematically. They stepped out of the study and worked together to expand into a new field, becoming pioneers rather than followers. Therefore, the original miss also has a meaning like destiny.
Excerpted from Zhang Quan, "Masters in the Wilderness: A Century of Chinese Archaeology", Guangxi Normal University Press, 2022.3