Caption
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, "the various passes in western Hunan were scattered with more than 2,000 black watchtowers built of bluestone, one of which was a stone enclosure, and one of the stone enclosures was the location of the Chenyuan Yongjing Military Preparation Road Office, called Zhencheng." There are five major surnames in the city, and five major families are reproduced.
Through the rise and fall of the Chen family of Chen Qingshu, the leader of the Yan Army, the novel shows the cruel struggle of the political, military and business circles in western Hunan at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the mutual tilting within the final nobles, the collapse of the ancient black camp, and the interpretation of a barbaric legend full of struggle and struggle, love and hatred.
"Black Camp Plate" is the opening volume of Yue Ligong's "Xiangxi Trilogy", and the second and third parts are "Red City Wall" and "White Altar".
On the historical ruins of my hometown, I picked up the broken bricks of your home and the broken tiles of his home, and cast an unnamed tombstone according to the totem in my mind. If someone or someone recognizes a faint mark on the foundation or body of the body, please do not be surprised. This unnamed monument does not belong to any individual, but is dedicated to the 100,000 wandering souls of the wilderness who have been killed, loved, and wronged in the past hundred years in that barbaric land.
I relied on a history full of one hundred and eighty question marks that has not yet been fully answered.
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It is said that hundreds of years ago there was an army, a pillbox, a camp, and a small stone city. Most of the people who lived in the stone enclosure were soldiers guarding the border areas of the town, and a small number of them were criminals who were exiled by the government and who were charged with the army.
The local mountains and rivers are beautiful, and the sun and moon landscapes work together to create the local indigenous peoples, making them both the gentleness of the majestic water of the mountains. Immigrants marry, merge, and reproduce with native races. Here are warriors, but also beautiful women.
Feng Shui in the hometown always breeds restless souls, and children's minds always germinate the illusion of going to other places to dedicate themselves. But the black camp that has been crouching there since I don't know what year, month and day, always seems to have a mysterious power, which magnetizes those attempts that deviate from the established trajectory and smashes weak thoughts into powder. The struggles of many generations have become a strange circle of end-to-end, and in the end, no one has really stepped out of that land that can be sung and cursed.
If you go back to ancient times, the three brothers of the Heavenly King, which have been engraved in folklore and songs, are more typical. Now in a place called Crow Creek, there is still a magnificent temple about them, which contains three huge clay statues. Clay sculptors use red sand, chalk, and black mud tricolor soils from different sources within a thousand miles of the local area to give them different colors. Because the three brothers had all eaten the poisonous imperial wine rewarded by the emperor, the amount of alcohol determined the severity of the poisoning and the urgency of death, so their faces were red, white and black respectively.
The third brother of the Heavenly King was the most enchanting village girl in the local area, and when he grew up, he took a belly for the rhinoceros spirit, and when he grew up, each of them was five big and three thick, and the amount of food and martial arts were synchronized with the astonishing, and the imperial court relied on their martial arts and brute force to kill the foreign tribes, "thirty-six people killed nine thousand, killed to the gate of the Riding Liang Cave", and won a great victory. The Emperor was overjoyed and announced that he would enter the capital and be rewarded. Not wanting to be jealous of the Minister of Military Affairs of the imperial Chinese, he played the table of Emperor Yun: "These three people are highly intelligent and brave. In the future, there may be a division of sons of heaven, and if they do not make their way out first, the country is afraid of future troubles. ”
The emperor then took the three kings in the back garden on a false banquet, and drank heavily on a high platform at night, and planted countless knives and stabs under the stage. Only to wait for each of them to be drunk and stumble and fall to kill themselves, but the three kings brothers are extraordinary. Yin has rhinoceros essence to protect the left and right, cheers to wanyi will not change color, the emperor is helpless. It is a separate secret plan, and the gift is generous. The Three Kings Brothers were overjoyed and returned to Zili, but they did not know that the gift was filled with dove wine, and when they entered the country, they were thirsty and drank. The king is anxious to raise a glass. The second king thought that the eldest brother was useless, and swallowed a bowl of it all into his stomach. He died not a moment later; the three kings were even more disobedient when they saw the situation, and they drank a large amount of ordinary wine, and simply drank a large amount of wine, and the wine tank fell heavily on the rock slab at the same time as his heavy body.
Although the three brothers died, mo bai died unjustly, the soul appeared, the noisy place, the emperor could not sit in peace, but the three people were appointed as hou, referred to as the three marquises, allowed to build a temple in Yaxi, forever subject to incense, yin and yang two pipes.
Photo: Fu Xiuzheng
There are many waterfalls and streams in the countryside, but there are no big rivers. Mountains and rivers are dangerous, traffic is blocked, and there is very little contact with the hinterland.
Three hundred years ago, in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, a great hero appeared among the local indigenous people, leading the rebellion against the imperial court, and the momentum was extremely great. The Chronicle of the Local Affairs Department and its beginning says: "On the twenty-seventh day of the first month, the sky will be bright, the southeast star is as big as a bucket, the light is flickering, and the third person who falls back to the top falls, and then falls into the forest village, and if it does not exceed the time, the fire of rebellion against the barbarians will be launched."
Citing a saying of the Hakka people as his goal, the chief wrote "Do not die until the Yellow River" on his banner, which is black and embroidered with a dragon and phoenix totem. He led tens of thousands of local rebels to attack and occupy the thirteen halls and counties under the jurisdiction of the three provinces and six provinces, and his momentum was really aggressive.
They made a tortuous attack in the mountain circle, and finally realized their long-cherished wish one day and killed the "Yellow River". The descendants of a nation that has been sick and sick for generations and died on the tip of a mountain fire. For the first time in his life, he saw such a vast and vast river, and he was calmed by its emptying turbid waves and the sound of cracking stones.
They slaughtered pigs and sheep on the beach by the river, sacrificed their ancestors, and after they had enough wine and food, they pulled up camp and returned to the mountain in triumph. The beach under the sun was a pile of ashes.
180,000 green battalion infantry from seven provinces were mobilized to rush day and night, and the famous "Five Streams Hunting" in history began to kick off the bloody prelude. This struggle of conquest and anti-conquest, assimilation and assimilation continued for a full twelve years.
The leading figure in the unveiling was only a green-skinned descendant in his twenties, and he had already passed the age of confusion when he was captured.
A long brown rope hangs grasshoppers and escorts a prisoner to the Beijing Division for trial. When passing through this great river again, in the dry season, he waded barefoot across the river, and its water was no more than waist-deep. At this point, the leader made it clear that this was not the Yellow River at all, but the upper reaches of a large local river called Yuanshui, which was not a hundred miles away from his village in a straight line.
He finally understood what the Yellow River looked like, and it was only after thirty-five days of being locked up in a wooden cage and thrown on a carriage.
The hero was a member of the local indigenous peoples. Why hit the Yellow River? Because the ancient song of the genesis of their own people says that it was their earliest home.
Many years ago, this people, who are said to have been the first to discover rice, began a great migration due to the brutal war in the Yellow River Valley, and came to the end of the mountains and rivers in southern China to live in danger.
In order to prevent the riots of this highly rebellious nation, the government built a black watchtower using bluestone produced in the local area.
The tower is located on the top of the hill, two meters high, surrounded by bluestone and glutinous rice lime; Divided into two layers, the lower layer is rammed with loess, the upper layer, the four walls leave eight gun holes, the standing roof is tiled, and there are guards watching and patrolling day and night. The surrounding areas of horse pens, gang houses, shacks, etc. adjacent to the outposts are still defined by bluestone enclosures, called camps. This kind of black stuff piled up more and more, and by the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were more than 2,000 seats. An earthen wall was built between the outposts, winding mountains and waters, like a huge iron hoop, encircling thousands of miles, becoming a rare "inland Great Wall" in Chinese history.
These dots are scattered throughout the diaoka camps at the key points of the pass, and with an astonishing number of troops, they are the largest and longest-preserved green battalion army in xiangzhou, and they are a reserve army of the state. The highest commander in charge of this thousand-mile camp was called Chenyuan Yongjing (辰沅永靖兵备道) at the end of the Qing Dynasty. The location of the Taoist office is also a stone fence camp called Gancheng.
Relying on its geographical superiority at that time, just as the plaques on the left and right sides of the Daotai Yamen gate advertised, it was "pinghan chuwei, xinjiang and qianbian", relying on countless bloody wars at home and abroad to establish its own prosperity and obscenity. It commanded the support of tens of thousands of green battalion soldiers on the 150,000 mu of "tun tian" that had not been collected from the indigenous peoples, and on their control and jurisdiction over the vast land of the twenty-two halls and counties on the border of the four provinces.
Gancheng has always been a hereditary military service system of "passing on from father to son," and the soldiers and the people have not shown the boundaries; coupled with the countless times the "border wall" in history has been built and destroyed countless times, a strange and grotesque phenomenon has emerged in the combination of the exchanges between the goods of the soldiers and the people and the marriage: If the card keepers and the defenders turn up the ancient genealogy, most of them actually have the same lineage.
In addition to some foreign miscellaneous surnames, the local people handed down from their ancestors are the five major surnames, that is, the five major families. These five large families are like tree branches, and they are split into more branches. These branches began to compete for survival, and after a few generations, some became popular, and some disappeared and almost disappeared.
When history penetrated the Yongdao of the nineteenth century and vaguely saw the threshold of the twentieth century, there was a "great military and political explosion" in Gancheng, and during the Qing Dynasty and the tongzhi dynasty, several prominent figures at the level of commanders of the provincial military districts were successively produced, which made several obscure families in the history of Gancheng suddenly become extremely popular, and they and several outstanding figures of their children and grandchildren grasped the history of the local area for nearly half a century.
This long history can be counted as a preliminary conclusion at the "Black Rock Mouth Incident", which I will refer to below.
There is a line of Chen surnames in these families that is worth mentioning. It is said that the ancestors of this lineage were awarded a toast in a certain dynasty and generation for their military achievements. Chen Tusi dominated one side before his death, and his power was extremely powerful, and after his death, he buried many false graves with thick burials, which is said to be because the burial was extremely expensive, so it was so. Many years later, eight gravediggers dug up all the graves and found nothing, so a new story with a little speculation was added to the place. It vividly reveals the ancestor's disgraceful privacy.
The story goes that Chen Tusi exercised the "right to the first night" in the township, and even spared his own nieces, and was later arrested by the imperial court for "incest crimes" and came to a real five-horse corpse.
Although the exact cause of his death is still a mystery, it is certain that this illustrious family has since fallen. What had to be passed into the hands of his seventy-ninth generation grandson, Chen Qingshu, was only a notched horse-cutting scythe.
Chen Qingshu was a prominent figure who later broke out during the Tongzhi period. He had three wives, two sons and one daughter. The eldest Yun Xiang died young. The second elder Yunquan and my family are a bit related to each other, and I call him my cousin. After nearly fifty years of hardship and struggle, this cousin and a child born in a remote shed outside the back door of his house dominated the place with the status of one and two hands respectively.
When my cousin was a child, he was also full of fantasies of going to a foreign country to dedicate himself, but strangely, when he grew up, he gave up many great opportunities to go out of the mountains. The play continued into the middle of this century. At that time, he was nearly old, tall and thin, his appearance was very spirited, his eyes had blue, yellow, and golden circles, and he loved to wear a tweed coat, and he was known as "the old master", and he was quite polite.
At that time, Yu Yingqi, the second in command of his confidant, received a telegram from the provincial chairman and decided to take up the post of provincial government commissioner. Therefore, at the edge of a bluestone pier-shaped ferry, under four machine guns and twenty-four fast and slow guns, a medium-sized truck carrying "Future of Xiang Province" was destroyed, and fifteen civilian and military officials were killed at the same time.
Regarding yu Yingqi's situation before and after his death, the cause of his death has been a mystery for a long time after that.
Later, when cleaning up the relics of my cousin-in-law, I found that one of his unpublished manuscripts called "The Dream of Xiye" contained a more detailed account, in fact, he single-handedly planned the bloodshed; Later, he personally presided over the grand funeral.
I heard from the old class that after the funeral, people found that his hair was all white. Weak and old, he lost his human form. Since then, he has been shutting down, deliberately writing and recounting his homeland, his fathers, his friends and enemies, and using reflective brushstrokes to trace the beginning and end of the great historical tragedy that occurred in the western region of a certain province in southern China.
I had the privilege of perusing this unpublished manuscript and was amazed to find that the half-century of classical legends, full of struggles and failures and love and hatred, actually translated the principles of modern art.
Experience has taught us that if we gaze at a green square for a while, and then close our eyes, we will see a red square as a visual afterimage. If we look at a white square on a black background and look away, a black square will appear as a visual afterimage.
Johannes Eaton, author of the famous book "The Art of Color", pointed out that a mixture of black and white produces a neutral gray, and red and green are also a pair of complementary colors, and when they are mixed, they can also produce neutral gray when they are mixed with white. Both the human eye and the brain need this neutral gray, without which it becomes unquirkable, and when this complementary relationship is established, it will be satisfied or tend to be balanced. Such a color scheme is always harmonious.
The book is a tragedy, the tone is medium gray, and it gradually takes family tragedies, local tragedies, and life tragedies as a ladder and is a trilogy. However, the personnel affairs in the meantime are always full of all kinds of opposing concepts in the world: civilization is barbaric, good and cruel, industrious and lazy, strong and obscene, and human animalistic. The color plot is also a strong contrast and contrast between big red and green, high-key, cold and warm.
A scholar who came out of that place and took refuge in the metropolis, while reflecting on the homeland that raised him, said something like this: "You push everything to two extremes, and this is the person on that side, the matter of that side, and the feng shui of that side." Yes, just like that, understand my fathers and countrymen and homeland! Push to the extreme, and in the end everything will be reasonable and harmonious.
In the face of such a heavy work, as a later person who was raised by that feng shui, what can I do? All that can be done is probably to reduce the barrier caused by the difficulty of those ancient words, mix my blood and my tears, and make a translation and interpretation within my ability.
Photo: Fu Xiuzheng
(In addition to the signed works, the picture is from the Internet)