Go to Qianwan to see the ancient houses
Xu Qing
I have long heard of the ancient houses in Qianwan, and the earliest houses were built in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, with a history of 600 years. I planned to visit Qianwan twice, but I didn't make it. This morning, with a number of friends, our three cars set off from Xiangyang City and Zaoyang City respectively. At nine o'clock in the morning, I came to Qianwan Village, which I had admired for a long time.
Qianwan Village, 50 kilometers northeast of Zaoyang City, Hubei Province, has to go east to the mountains when you reach Xinshi Town. If you are going by car, it is also very convenient to walk according to the navigation. Since the residents of this village are mainly surnamed Qiu, the locals still used to call this village Qiu Jia Qian Wan or Qiu Jia Dawan.
In this village, there are many ancient houses that are more than 200 years old, and our group only focused on visiting a few representative ancient houses. Standing on the hill in the east of the village, overlooking Qiujia Dawan, you can see that the village is not too big but not small, I heard that there were more than 100 households living at the most, and now there are more than 90 families. This is the intersection of four counties in Hubei and Henan provinces, and from here to the east is Sanhedian Town in Suizhou, Hubei. To the northeast is Tongbai County in Henan, and to the northwest is Tanghe County in Henan. This village, in the northeast corner of Zaoyang City, Hubei Province, is the most marginal village in Zaoyang.
The ancient houses in the village that have been preserved to this day can be seen to be the ancient houses of the original architectural grade, concentrated in the last two rows. They are all three-in, three-out courtyards, forming a patio in the middle, whether it is the front yard, middle yard and back yard, the lighting is very good. The front yard of the front door is occupied by the maids, and the main house in the backyard is occupied by the owner. Since it is a three-in, three-out doorway, looking in from the doorway, the doorway appears very deep, which reminds me of "Houmen is as deep as the sea".
The entire courtyard of these houses, the main house and the east and west ear rooms, including the embroidery building where the young lady lived, are still well preserved. The houses with embroidered buildings are on the second floor of the backyard, with wooden stairs from the west wing to the east and west rooms, and a wooden bridge connecting the east and west rooms by the front wall of the main hall. In order to keep the main hall bright and bright, there is no second floor, making the hall high and bright. The sunlight shining in from the bright tile directly hits the floor of the main hall.
The open-air courtyard of the second courtyard, with an area of about 12 square meters, should be the place where the owner eats casually in summer and basks in the sun in winter. The antechamber house was small, only four or five people could sit and talk, and like the small living room now, it was located at the door of the house. It can be seen that the small living room is specially used to receive "foreign guests", which is convenient for guests to enter and exit. When dear relatives and distinguished guests come, they are not received in the small living room, but in the main hall of the main house. There is a main entrance in the front hall, and the main entrance is generally not open, and the main entrance is only opened when there are major events, happy events and distinguished guests at home. The front hall is east and west, and there are two wings. Usually, the doors of the east and west wings are always open, the master enters and goes through the east gate, and the maid enters and goes through the west gate.
Among the representative ancient houses we chose to see, we focused on three of them, which are in the second row from north to south. The three courtyards are adjacent to each other from east to west, and they are all large courtyards with three entrances and three exits, and the area size, design style, specification level, etc. are exactly the same. According to the current owner, the two courtyards in the west are 600 years old, and the eastern courtyard is more than 600 years old, more than 20 years before the two courtyards in the west, which were built in the early years of the Ming Dynasty. The first house was built by the father himself, and the two houses that were exactly the same side by side to the west were built by the father for the two sons more than 20 years later.
In this ancient village, the Qiu family has flourished for twenty or thirty generations. Around the Qiu family Dawan, there are many people with the surname Qiu. Not far from the two townships of Lutou and Liu Sheng, not far from Qiu's Dawan, most of the Qiu surnames migrated from here, and their ancestral homes are all from Qiu's Qianwan. "In Zaoyang Dongqiu, the family does not drink water from people with foreign surnames." This phrase, which began to circulate very early, is still circulating in the vast area of Zaoyang East, including Xinshi, Lutou and Liu Shengsan townships. The meaning of this sentence is that in Zaoyang Dongqiu surname is not only numerous, but also wealthy, everywhere you go, there are people with their own surname to serve tea and rice.
Including Qiujia Qianwan, in the area of Dongshan in Xinshi, the Qiu family and the Zheng family are two big surnames here, and the residence of the Zheng family is mainly Zhengjiawan. And these two big surnames have been living in harmony for many years, with many intermarriages and intricate relatives. It is precisely because of the harmonious coexistence of the two surnames, respecting the old and loving the young, respecting teachers and teaching, emphasizing agriculture and hard work, and developing cotton mulberry. So that the people here are simple, the economy is prosperous, the society is stable and vibrant.
According to rumors, the ancestors of the Qiu family, who chose to start building houses in the Qiu family in Dawan, were not officials or wealthy families, but started their families through business. After turning from poverty to prosperity, we should not forget our original intention, take a far-sighted view, persevere in our efforts, and drive our neighbors to get rich together, which will not only make the economy here, but also make the people here prosperous. The Qiu family has always been a famous family here. After the founding of New China, Zaoyang produced two women to serve as vice mayors locally, one of whom was a vice mayor surnamed Qiu, who was a descendant of the Qiu family Qianwan.
Qiu Family Taiwan, built on a relatively gentle hillside that is not too high, faces south from the north. The two rows of houses in the back are basically the same height, the same depth, and the same appearance, in rows. The distance between the front and back rows is about five meters, and most of the houses in front of the village are shorter houses, and although the two rows of houses in the back have a second floor, this second floor is a dark building, and it is not high, and it cannot be seen from the outside, so they do not block each other's light.
As our group circled from west to east in the village, I saw that the main hall was composed of a two-story small attic, and when I looked closely, some of the tiles on the roof and the bricks facing the wall were clearly carved with small characters, these words are auspicious characters such as "Fu" and "Shou", and some are era marks. These words and patterns should have been engraved at the time of firing. The walls are mostly brick and wood, but there are also a small number of granite walls. The houses in the last two rows are basically the kind of houses that do not collapse. The gatehouse is generally raised with four steps, some of the façade feet are white jade stone, and the rest are mostly made of large green bricks.
Walk unhurriedly in the village, step on the layers of stone steps, quietly admire, seek seclusion and visit the ancient, look around, and see that everywhere is antique. The gusts of wind blowing, greeting the freshness after the rain, quite pleasant. As I walked, I thought that this village must have been very beautiful in ancient times. Those high-end houses with brick and wood structure, solid construction quality, reasonable layout design, suitable room size, warm in winter and cool in summer. From the outside to the inside, they are exquisite and elegant, and they are standard Ming Dynasty Hui-style buildings, even if they live in such a house now, they will feel comfortable. The relevant departments of Hubei Province have identified the history of the ancient houses of this village, and in March 2008, the village has been named a key cultural relic protection unit in Hubei Province.
This ancient village has a distinctive feature, that is, special attention is paid to the drainage of the village. The surface water in the village is drained from top to bottom through the ground drainage. The drainage ditches are about 40 cm below the ground and about 15 cm wide, and both straight and horizontal ditches are made of stones to keep the flow of water unimpeded. It can be seen that this village has been willing to invest in drainage from ancient times to the present, and has a unified layout from the beginning, and this layout plan has been implemented until now. In addition to ground drainage ditch drainage, there are also many underground ditch drainage in the village. The water discharged from the ditch and the water discharged from the ground ditch are discharged directly into the large weir in front of the village.
On the day we went, the water in the weir had been drained and mechanical facilities were being used to dredge it. The large weir in the middle of the village is rectangular, more than three people deep, the bottom of the weir is flat, like the current reservoir, there is also a spillway, and the water can automatically discharge when it reaches a certain height. There is also a bottom drain at the bottom of the weir, and the opening of the bottom drain can drain the water of the weir pond in a short time. It can be seen that this large weir was also built by man. In ancient times, there were no mechanical facilities, and it was completely done by hand, but I think of the ancestors of this village, who were determined to dig this weir pond at that time.
This ancient mountain village is not a village with more than 200 households, as some people say on the Internet, and at the most it is more than 150 households. The remarkable value of this village is not the number of residents, but the fact that the village has a long history of more than 600 years. Very early, before I went to this village, I was thinking about it. The earliest ancient dwellings in this village are more than 600 years old. After more than 600 years of spring, summer, autumn and winter, rain, snow, wind and frost, how did this village survive strongly? After the field investigation, I personally believe that if there is no man-made demolition, there will be no natural disasters such as war and strong earthquakes, and the adobe houses in the village will not dare to say, and those houses with brick and wood structure covered with green bricks will continue to stand for another two or three hundred years or even longer. Chinese pine and fir have a saying of immortality for thousands of years. It is also worth mentioning that the architectural design of this kind of house, commonly known as "the house collapses and does not collapse". The four walls and roof can be replaced at any time, and the wooden poles used to support the roof can also be replaced at any time.
The village has been able to travel through time for more than 600 years and be well preserved in a remote corner due to many factors. Among them, a major factor has a lot to do with the village's emphasis on drainage and fire prevention from the beginning. As the saying goes, "water and fire are ruthless", water and fire are the natural enemies of human survival, and it is water and fire that often bring disaster to human settlements. And the drainage method of this village has adopted the "double insurance" measure of open ditch and dark ditch. The drainage project in the village is still in effective use after more than 600 years, which shows that the quality of the project has reached the standard it should have. It has truly been implemented, "a century-old plan, quality first".
In the past, the village should have had a strong wall. The walled wall is also one of the reasons why the village has been able to maintain its integrity. Today, the wall in the village is no longer visible, I have searched carefully in front of and behind the village, and even the traces of the wall roots have not been found, but there is a tall gate standing majestically in the southeast of the village. Judging from this tall walled gate, we have reason to say that the walled wall built in this village must not be short and strong.
There is a road southeast of the village, a straight line downhill to the south, until it leads to the Shahe River, two or three hundred meters away from the village. Standing on the bank of the river, the river runs from east to west, the other bank of the river is a mountain, the river surface is full of sand, and the width is more than 100 meters. As far as the eye can see, the river is about 100 meters wide, and there are many stones and small stones on the bank. There is not much water in the river, and it is a trickle to the people, but the groundwater is very abundant. There are two wells on the riverbank, more than three meters apart, and the one on the north side is an ancient well. Since the beginning of the inhabitation of this village, there has been this ancient well, and this well has never dried up.
The river in front of Qiujia Dawan Village usually does not have much water, and it is almost silent. But in summer, when flash floods erupt, the water is mighty, the waves rush forward, and there is a roar from the river, which travels far away like thunder. The whirlpools were one after the other, and the rolled waves were more than one person high. This river, which runs through the entire territory of Zaoyang for more than 100 kilometers, was called the Xishui River in ancient times and is now called the source of the Dasha River.
On the way to Qiujia Qianwan, due to the large number of cars and traffic jams, the line of sight was not smooth, and I did not see it. When I returned, I saw it very clearly, one big downhill after another, one bend after another, and drove for more than 20 minutes before entering the flat ground. Description: Qianwan Village is located in the Tongbai Mountain District, located in the southwest remnant of the Tongbai Mountain.
Comrade Fu Tao, mayor of Xinshi Town, took time out of his busy schedule to accompany us and introduced to us the past and present of the Qiu family, and he is very familiar with the process of the Qiu family's prosperity and growth. Mayor Fu has shown great enthusiasm for the future development of Qiujia Dawan, especially the development of eco-tourism. It can be seen that the grand blueprint for the future development of eco-tourism in Qiujia Dawan has long been planned and formulated by the new town committee and town government.
This time I came to Qianwan for a tour, there was no writing task and plan before leaving, and I was invited by a friend temporarily. When I went to the upper reaches of the Xingchuan Reservoir to view the scenery, my mind was still stuck in Qianwan Village. At this moment, a poem about swimming in Qianwan instantly popped out of my mind. Go home in the evening, after several modifications, present it here, to help friends, and also to throw bricks and jade for friends who will go to Qianwan to collect style and write poems in the future.
An ancient dwelling hidden deep in the mountains
Xu Qing
The sunrise is red and the fire,
Tourists like weaving in Qianwan.
Located on the border of Hubei and Yu provinces,
An ancient dwelling hidden deep in the mountains.
After 600 years of the Ming and Qing dynasties,
The pearl is set in the Central Plains.
There are many stories of ancient residences,
The sky is full of sky when the city returns at dusk.
28 May 2020
(All but one photo was taken by the author with a domestic Huawei mobile phone)
28 May 2020