"The City of Lee White"
I lived between Huangli Road and Cuiliu Street for 20 years, and my feelings about Wuchang are more specific than Hankou and Hanyang. However, because I have not lived in Hankou and Hanyang, I do not dare to write about the differences between the three towns, and I can only talk about it very superficially.
On the surface of the water, Wuchang seems to be larger than Hankou and Hanyang. East Lake and Sand Lake are in the center of the city, and further south are South Lake, Yezhi Lake, and Tangxun Lake, all sparkling and open. Judging from the density of buildings and residences, as well as people's visual perception, Wuchang seems to be a little looser. Wuchang is more powerful in promoting and expanding the name of "City of Hundred Lakes"; of course, it is also possible that Wuchang's endowment of water resources is better.
"Because of Wu and Chang", wuchang city has been related to many famous events for thousands of years, or real knives and real guns, and the great history has happened vigorously in this land. This characteristic of Wuchang may have a strong historical relationship with the characteristics of the ancient Chu land and The Chu culture, and it is mutually infused with each other; and Wuchang, as a part, sometimes exerts and transcends, resulting in a trend.
Today's Wuchang, more "cultural taste". In the regional rather than administrative sense, the Wuchang area gathers most of the universities in Wuhan, which is the source of culture and education, and young people gather together. With cultural people, innovation and progress have become the mission of Wuchang, which is more characteristic of the times.
I like the three Wuchang place names of "Huangli Road", "Cuiliu Street" and "Bailu Street". They bring a sense of history that lives endlessly and travels through time and space. In a sense, Wuchang is Li Bai's city, but at the same time, people embed poetry into Wuchang's daily life to express their respect for the "Twin Peaks". For both of them, Wuchang has a double liking.
I like this "like". (Liu Gonghu)
Wuchang is an ancient city, a city of bricks and tiles, but also a city of change, a city of new scenery, liu Wenxiang:
Using landscape changes to reveal Wuchang's different "city elephants"
Liu Wenxiang is a doctor of history and a scholar of urban studies. His research interests include wuhan urban history, modern and contemporary Chinese architecture, and Chinese university history. He is the author of "Luojia Zhuji: The Birth of a New Campus of a Modern National University", "City Elephant: Changes in the Historical Landscape of Wuchang", "Wuchang Old School" and so on.
After a detailed investigation of the construction process of Wuhan University and the writing of "Luojia Zhuji", the scholar Liu Wenxiang turned his research attention to Wuchang City, he did not tell all aspects of urban history in general, but took the urban landscape as the entry point, taking the landscape change in the process of urban history as the main line, and narrating around the evolution of the "city elephant", thus opening up a new perspective of Wuhan urban history research and writing "City Elephant: Historical Landscape Change of Wuchang". Last week, Liu Wenxiang accepted an exclusive interview with The Yangtze River Daily.
On the original site of the Yellow Crane Tower
Why built a Western-style alarm bell tower
"When Tongyou told me that this was the official Yellow Crane Tower, I couldn't help but be greatly surprised and regret this line of work! Could this be the famous Yellow Crane Tower – that's right in front of me? It's almost like a normal house, and inside, it's just a vicious and noisy teahouse. ”
This is a travelogue of Wuchang in the Ta Kung Pao in 1936. It must be noted that at that time, there was no Yellow Crane Tower, which had been destroyed by fire in 1884; what left a bad impression on the author of the Travelogue of the Ta Kung Pao was the "Alarm Bell Tower" built on the original site of the Yellow Crane Tower.
On the cover of Liu Wenxiang's "City Elephant", he deliberately chose an image of the "Alarm Bell Tower": on the banks of the Yangtze River, in the place where Cui Hao and Li Bai chanted "The Smoke Wave River Makes People Sad" and "The Plum Blossoms Fall in May in Jiangcheng", between a row of Chinese-style houses, a red Western-style building was erected, and there was a strange incongruity under close inspection.
The image was from a postcard printed by the Japanese, and Liu Wenxiang found the "Ta Kung Pao" travelogue to include in the book. He wrote: In 1904, 20 years after the Yellow Crane Tower fire, the then Hubei Inspector DuanFang presided over the construction of the Alarm Bell Tower at the original site of the Yellow Crane Tower, which is a fire fighting building that looks at the fire and informs the fire alarm, which is Western-style, the main building is two stories high, and there is a tower with a self-chiming bell on its west side. This striking Western-style building towering over the river was also an important new scenic landmark in wuchang ancient city at that time. Such a pure Western-style building, replacing the Yellow Crane Tower in the traditional Chinese style, is undoubtedly a little strange in terms of visual effects, and it is understandable that people have a bad impression of it.
However, behind this "weirdness", there is precisely a self-consistent logic: the ancient Chinese architectural heritage is not easy to preserve, in addition to frequent wars, another important reason is that the fire is difficult to disappear. How do Chinese cities in the modern transformation respond to fire protection problems? In addition to changing the urban pattern and building materials, it is more urgent to establish a modern urban fire protection system.
In this way, the construction of the alarm bell tower under the modern urban fire protection system at the original site of the Yellow Crane Tower destroyed by the fire can be seen as a manifestation of the modernization of Wuhan city, and it is a sign that The people of Wuhan at that time were eager to move towards modernization. As for the visual incongruity, it is the epitome of the intersection and collision of Eastern and Western cultures in the process of traditional Chinese urban transformation.
This is Liu Wenxiang's interpretation of the image, behind the reading of the picture is the collection and collation of historical materials, and behind the historical materials is the construction of the historical view. Professor Tu Wenwen commented: "As the titles of the four chapters of the book point out the 'ancient city', 'brick and tile city', 'city of change', 'city of new scenery', this is an ancient city with a long history of traditional Chinese mainland, and it is also a city that stands at the forefront of change in modern China. ”
Wuchang in the Song Dynasty
It is the city of great rivers and lakes
City Elephant: Changes in the Historical Landscape of Wuchang by Liu Wenxiang The Commercial Press
"Great rivers and lakes and great Wuhan" is a phrase often said now, and "City Elephant" tells us that as early as the Song Dynasty, when Hankou was not yet formed, Wuchang (then known as Ezhou) was a city of great rivers and lakes.
Liu Wenxiang looked for clues from the inscription notes and poems of the Tang Dynasty, the Southern Song Dynasty's "Youdi Jisheng", "Youdi Guangji", "Entering Shu", "Wu Chuanlu", the Ming "Huguang Tu Jingzhi", the Qing "Jiangxia County Chronicle", the "Huanghushan Zhi" and other documents, and speculated that the external landscape of the Song Dynasty Ezhou (Wuchang) City was restored, "The vast East Lake, with the same vast South Lake to the south, plus the great river west of the city, surrounds the city of Ezhou from all sides, making the Song Dynasty Ezhou like an island in the water, It is a veritable city of great rivers and lakes." To this end, he also asked his friend Mr. Li Guoliang to draw a speculative map of the layout of Ezhou city during the Southern Song Dynasty.
"City Elephant" is an academic book, and it has a good public reading. Among them, the part about the "bridge across the river" has a lot of knowledge to read.
Since the late Qing Dynasty, Chinese dream of building a cross-river bridge in Wuhan has been brewing for half a century. As early as 1906, there were media reports: "Governor Zhang Xiangshuai proposed to Si Dao that an iron bridge be built in the middle of the river, with Wuchang to Hankou; then an iron bridge to be built at Xianghe, and Hanyang to Hankou... In the future, the completion of the second bridge will not only avoid the risk of wind and waves, but also the End of Hankou can be connected to the Beijing-Han Railway, the Hanyang End can be connected to the Sichuan-Han Railway, and the Wuchang Bridge can be connected to the Guangdong-Han Railway Cloud." This is the earliest initiative to build the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge seen in the current literature. A few months later, "Japanese engineers estimated that the project would require at least more than 1.7 million gold." With the current financial support, the province of Hubei has held various new policies, and after the funds are needed, it has been decided to postpone the construction of the bridge, and the two roads of Sichuan and Guangdong will be completed and reconsidered."
From Zhang Zhidong to Cai Yuanpei and Sun Yat-sen, they all proposed that a bridge should be built in Wuhan; the Japanese, British, Americans, and Germans all surveyed and designed on the Yangtze River and came up with their own design plans; of course, none of this was realized. "City Elephant" contains blueprints or drawings of some of these schemes, which is also a kind of "image", an "urban landscape" that is not realized and only stays on paper. Reading this, you will sigh that the modernization of the city is really not easy.
【Interview】
There are still some places that need to be clarified in the history of Wuchang City
In the early years of the Republic of China, the American geologist Clapp took a picture of the Snake Mountain section of the Wuchang City Wall, and in the photos, the female wall of the city wall, the battlements, the corner platform of the mountain head of the Snake Mountain in the distance, and the outer wall of the mountain were only bricked on the outside, and the inside was exposed rammed earth slope and other architectural details.
Read +: Why choose such an entrance as "Historical Landscape Change" to study urban history?
Liu Wenxiang: Wuchang is an important cultural town among the three towns in Wuhan, and also an ancient city with a long history and profound accumulation along the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, and its urban history and culture are undoubtedly worthy of in-depth excavation and study.
For ordinary people, the landscape is also the most intuitive angle and medium for people to read and understand a city, so I try to sort out the historical materials and try to explore the evolution of the city's past history.
Read +: Why choose Wuchang instead of Hanyang and Hankou? What is the current state of academic research on the history and geography of Wuchang? Can you talk about the significance and value of studying the history of Wuchang City?
Liu Wenxiang: First of all, it is based on my understanding and interest in Wuchang. Since I came to Wuhan to attend university at the age of 18, I have been living and living in Wuchang. My relatives in Wuhan also live in Wuchang, and my first impression of Wuhan since I was a child began with East Lake. My doctoral dissertation focused on the history of the campus construction of Wuhan University during the Republic of China period, and in the process of carrying out related research, it also involved a lot of content on the history and geographical environment of modern Wuchang, which aroused my growing interest in the study of Wuchang urban history.
After I was transferred to Jianghan University in 2019, my main research direction was more focused on the field related to the history of Wuhan city, and in the process, some new materials were discovered and many new inspirations were generated, which eventually formed the current appearance of the book.
Academic research on the urban history of Wuchang has achieved a series of fruitful results. In particular, the relevant history of the modern period, whether it is from the macroscopic and overall urban development history, the evolution of urban spatial form, the transformation of urban modernization, etc., or the research focusing on specific historical events, such as the Xinhai Revolution, Zhang Zhidong's Supervision of Hubei, and the development of modern higher education, has achieved fruitful results. But at the same time, we must also see that the study of Wuchang's urban history is still unbalanced and insufficient. For example, the study of the ancient wuchang urban history is relatively weak, and many key issues have not yet been clarified and no consensus has been reached. Therefore, for the history of Wuchang city before the Sui and Tang dynasties, I wrote it more conservatively in this book. An important reason for this situation is the lack of documents handed down from generation to generation, the serious shortage of urban archaeological data, and the fact that few relevant historical sites have been preserved to this day, which makes it very difficult to carry out related research. Even in the modern period of urban history, there is still a lot of room for further expansion. For example, Zhang Zhidong ran many schools during his supervision, and if you list the names of these schools one by one, it is easy to do so; but the later evolution of these schools, as well as the specific teaching situation, is not easy to explain clearly.
Because of this, the significance and value of deepening the study of Wuchang City history are self-evident. In the history of China after the Tang Dynasty, Wuchang City is a regional center city with an important position and influence, and it is considered to be a cultural town within the scope of the three towns of Wuhan. Clarifying the many key issues in the history of Wuchang City is of great necessity and significance to enrich our understanding of the history and culture of Wuhan City.
The "first photograph" of Wuchang is now in the United Kingdom
Read +: More than 200 images are used in the book", many of which are from overseas, which is a major feature of the book, can you talk about the process of collecting these images?
Liu Wenxiang: I have always been very concerned about the collection and application of video historical materials in urban research. From ancient times to modern times, various types of Wuchang city image historical materials are also very rich. Therefore, in the writing of this book, the extensive use of video historical materials is a feature.
For example, I used a special section to discuss the photographic activities of Wuchang in the early modern period, and for example, the analysis of the 10 gates of Wuchang City Wall one by one, all of which combined ancient paintings, modern maps and photographs and other video historical materials.
On the second day of the first month of October in the forty-third year of Qianlong (1778 AD), Chen Huizu, the governor of Hubei, asked to repair the walls of Wuchang Province and add a stone bank along the river moat. The note is accompanied by a drawing sticker that marks the collapse of the city walls and the decay of the towers. In the picture, it can be seen that Wuchang City is built from the north to the east and south, and is built by the mountains; and turns southwest to north, close to the Yangtze River, and also depicts the Yellow Crane Tower and its Qingchuan Pavilion opposite the river; the city wall in the picture is magnificent, and the river is sparkling. A copy of this recital, together with the accompanying drawings, is preserved at the National Palace Museum in Taipei, China. In 2010, in their "Thousands of Strokes - Ancient Public Opinion Tutu Special Exhibition in the Courtyard Collection", they exhibited this map of the City Wall of Wuchang attached to the Qianlong Period, and a friend of mine paid attention to this map and told me this clue. The writing of this book coincided with the open online use of the "Ancient Public Opinion Map Database" of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, China, including this map. After contacting the museum and obtaining permission, I used parts of this diagram in the book.
For another example, the photo taken by the photographer of the Erjin Mission to the Governor of Huguang, Guan Wen, and others on the banks of the Wuchang River was taken by the photographer of the Erjin Mission for the British naval vessel on the bank of the Wuchang River. When the Sino-British Treaty of Tianjin was signed, Hankou was opened as a treaty port, and the British delegation, under the leadership of Lord Elgin, traveled up the river on the warship "Furious" to Hankou for investigation, and was able to enter Wuchang City and meet with the then Governor of Huguang, Guan Wen. On the seventh day of november in the eighth year of Xianfeng, that is, on December 11, 1858, Guan Wen led his officials to board a British warship for a courtesy return visit. Elgin's personal secretary, Laurence Oliphant, documented a detail of the diplomatic event: "After the luncheon we took pictures of him on the deck. The shooting effect can be seen in the woodcut, and the photo fully reflects the majesty of the adults. After taking the photographs, he almost compulsively asked Jocelyn to make the most solemn promise: to send him a set of photographs back when he returned to Shanghai. Joslin was a photographer in the mission.
The original photograph is in the collection of the Royal Bath Institute of Literature and Science, and in recent years the digital image was published by the University of Bristol's "Historical Images of China" project team. However, after consulting with the original collection, because the cost of commercial use was more expensive, I did not use this image in the book, but replaced it with a reprint of the print based on this photograph. I believe that in the process of domestic scholars using modern image research, special attention should be paid to respect for intellectual property rights.
Reading +: You also used "virtual images", asked someone to draw a speculative map of the layout of the Song Dynasty city, and used VR technology to make a restoration map of the ancient building, what is the reason for this?
Liu Wenxiang: Some of the planograms and digital ancient building restoration drawings used in this book are specially drawn by friends based on the relevant research conclusions in the book, and some of the absorption and citations are the research results of relevant people in the academic community. For example, the restoration of Wushengmen is a practical project led by Huang Tao of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and the relevant images are used in the book with the consent of Teacher Huang, which is also a way for scholars in different fields to exchange and learn from each other.
In the study of urban history, video historical materials are particularly of outstanding value, can provide rich, multi-dimensional and fine historical information, and many levels are difficult to replace in written historical materials. Video historical materials include both modern and modern photographs, as well as maps, drawings, and traditional maps and paintings. Images are not only used as historical materials to help us study, but also an important medium for the narration and presentation of research results. The use of this medium is particularly important and meaningful in the study of urban history.
Wuchang has undergone a series of changes between tradition and modern times
Reading +: Can you talk about the characteristics of Wuchang in the "Three Towns of Wuhan" from the perspective of urban landscape?
Liu Wenxiang: The urban development process of Wuchang is quite different from that of Hankou. Since the Sui and Tang dynasties, Wuchang has always developed as a regional political center, which is a typical model of ancient traditional Chinese mainland urban development, and before modern times, it completely possessed the basic elements that such a city should have.
However, after the modern era, due to the influence of a series of factors such as the opening of Hankou port and the New Deal in Hubei of Zhangzhidong, a series of wandering and changes occurred between tradition and modern times. These historical longitudes and latitudes are clearly reflected in the dimension of the urban landscape. In the face of this great change, the ancient city of Wuchang is by no means watching the fire and being indifferent from the other side, but is deeply involved in the urbanization change of modern Wuhan. Tradition and modernity collide and blend deeply in the city of Wuchang, forming complex urban characteristics and unique urban features, which are also the urban characteristics I try to present in this book.
In the book, I chose a photograph of the Mandarin College taken by the American Albert in 1898, which showed foreigners in suits and leather shoes, as well as Chinese with robes and horseshoes and braids. I also chose two photographs of the Hubei Consultative Bureau, the "Red Chamber". Stanley, a Briton, took a frontal photograph of the Council building with the Eighteen Stars flying on it, from which many of the architectural details of the parliament building can be clearly seen. This is the most magnificent group of new buildings in Wuchang City at the end of the Qing Dynasty, designed by the Japanese architect Fukui Fangyi, the entire building complex layout is harmonious, the proportions are rigorous, the appearance is gorgeous and elegant, the architectural craftsmanship is exquisite, in the late Qing Dynasty Wuchang City appears very unique and conspicuous, is one of the landmark architectural symbols of Wuchang Ancient City towards modernization. Shortly thereafter, the building was severely damaged during the Yangxia War, and subsequent reconstructions did not restore its original appearance, so the architectural information contained in this photograph is of great historical value. The second photograph was taken by the British missionary Stanfield, from which we can clearly see that the Consultative Office building was badly damaged in the war of the Xinhai Revolution, not only the central tower was completely destroyed, the entire roof of the building was burned down, and the east wing of the building also collapsed in half. This is undoubtedly one of the best historical testimonies, witnessing Wuchang's contribution to Chinese history. (Yangtze River Daily reporter Li Xu)
【Editor: Wang Yujin】
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