Wen | Lin Wenying
Surrounded by the sea and covered with mountains, Hong Kong is truly unique to enthusiasts who like to hike and ascend.
The author often visits the mountain village of the visitor's home, and has another feeling about the mountain. Hakka originally in the mountains, there is more understanding of the mountains and rivers, plants and trees, which plants have medicinal effects on the human body, but also from generation to generation, and gradually formed a Hakka food culture of relying on the mountains to eat mountains and using local materials.
Looking back at the long river of history, the Hakka migrated from the Central Plains into Gansu, Fujian, Guangdong, Guizhou and Sichuan, and the ancestors all inhabited high mountains and dense forests or hilly areas. Not only the shrimp and crab snail clams in the rivers and streams, the birds and animals in the deep mountains and dense forests, the snakes and eels and frogs in the ponds of tiangengs, all become Chinese dishes, and the roots of many wild plants are also made into soup. It is a combination of medicine and food, forming a realm of unity between heaven and man.
Coming to the land of southern barbarians is inevitable. Open up the land and expand the plant, the wind and the sun will inevitably suffer from heat stroke, and the frost and snow will inevitably be cold and evil. The so-called "natural selection, survival of the fittest", in the face of a harsh living environment, can only make full use of natural resources, in the Hakka Mountain Hundred Grass Garden treasure hunting, through testing, mastering its medicinal properties, benefiting the ethnic group. "If you know when you are a grass, you know that you are a treasure", the Hakka Materia Medica knowledge, both inherited from the Central Plains, as well as new discoveries in the local area, even Li Shizhen's "Compendium of Materia Medica" is not recorded.
For example, behind the front house of the Hakka mountain village house, there is a four-season evergreen shrub, with strong vitality, let the fire burn and bury, harvest and ravage, still grow savagely, commonly known as "cloth frightened" derived from the Hakka dialect "not alarmed" harmonic sound, both to drive away mosquitoes, but also to cure headaches and rheumatism, calm the nerves, villagers pick and dry, used as pillows.
The herbs used by the Hakka people, such as half lotus, half flag, and five-fingered peach, can be associated with their forms; schisandra and wood ginger can imagine their taste. There are also some names that cannot be examined, such as Jack-of-all, Niu Dali, Gang Jing, Misty Kudzu, Chicken Bone Grass, Money Grass, Vine, and Broken Stone, which have been passed down for thousands of years and have been customary.
The Hakka mountains are home to longevity, which is related to the fact that villagers like to eat pure natural wild vegetables. In the heat of the south, the most common soups that Hakka people drink, such as five-fingered peach stewed chicken and raw native porcupine stewed pork.
In addition to the herbs on the table, the author remembers that when I was a child in my hometown in eastern Guangdong, there was also a kind of fruit that grew all over the mountains, called "Dang Pear" (also known as mountain barley). In the golden autumn of October, it is the season of ripening. The barnyard is first green and yellow, yellow and red, red and red and purple. Farmers and village women are tired of cutting firewood and cutting grass in the mountains, picking them with their hands, sweet and juicy, and quenching their thirst. After eating, do not wipe the mouth, tongue, teeth and lips are "red and purple".
The Hakka not only ask for food from nature, but also use natural ingredients to raise livestock. For example, villagers grow sweet potatoes, people eat sweet potatoes, and pigs eat sweet potato vines. Winter comes, sweet potato leaves dry up, and pigs run out of food. The Hakka used wild peonies instead. This plant not only allows boars to develop well, do not fight, and grow fat quickly. Wild peony has a Hakka name called "Pig MuLlein". The so-called "pig" is a boar that has not yet been bred.
About three-quarters of Hong Kong's more than 1,100 square kilometres remain in the countryside. In addition to 23 country parks, Hong Kong also has 4 marine parks and 1 coastal reserve. Surrounded by mountains, the shoal is lush with about 2,100 species of native plants. A good friend of the author, Ho Kwan Soon, is a representative of the original residents of Otou Village, Sai Kung. Once, when he was a mountain village, he said, when he was a child, most of the elders knew the efficacy of herbs, and now fewer and fewer people know. Helpless flowers fall, lost is an inevitable trend.
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