Every time you come here, there are surprises; Every time you come here, you are blown away!
This is Wang Village, now called Furong Town.
In the afternoon, we walked into a homestay with strong ethnic customs and unique scenery. A very temperamental and personable lady greeted her warmly and arranged our stay. She is the owner of the homestay, a retired teacher at the state ethnic middle school. The friend who accompanied us said that there are hundreds of such homestays in the ancient town, with more than 8,000 beds. And the first few times I came here, Hedong was all barren mountains and mountains, and there was not a single house. Even the Tuwang Bridge that I just walked on has not yet been built. Today, along Yingpanxi, a newly built but very simple street has been built. The shops on both sides are antique and very national. The street surface is also bluestone slabs, like an ancient street that has survived hundreds of years of wind and rain.
After dropping off my luggage, I walked to the balcony outside the bedroom and looked up. There is an impulse in my heart: Ah, this place is so beautiful! No matter which direction you look, it's a painting, a stunning painting! On the opposite side, rows of stilted buildings stand close to the cliff, and at the foot of the cliff, a hanging stream pours down. On the surface of the water, a row of cement piers stands in the center of the river. Some tourists are jumping across the stream... I couldn't help but use my phone, in different directions, to take several photos in a row ...
I can't remember the first time I came to this ancient town.
Around the end of the seventies, I broke into this small town surrounded by mountains and rivers with a few literary partners. On one side, there is the Youshui River, which has a wide surface of the river; On one side, there is a small river with a small surface and a rushing river. The river cascades from high cliffs in many places, forming multiple layers of waterfalls. This small river is called Yingpanxi. Two rows of antique wood-paneled shops along the mountain line the mountain. Two rows of shops sandwich a bluestone street that cascades up. Every stone step is very steep, and climbing on this street is like climbing a ladder! Fortunately, at that time, I was young and strong, and it was very new to see such a unique street. One climb up, don't feel tired.
It is said that this town has a history of thousands of years. A regime surnamed Peng Tusi has lasted here for more than eight hundred years. That time, on the hillside opposite the town, in a small pavilion, I also saw a huge copper pillar left over from the Tusi Dynasty...
When I came here again, I came across the water transport constitution that was collecting wind in Xiangxi. At that time, he was invited by Hunan TV Station to create a TV series and went to Xiangxi to supplement his life and look for materials. So, we traveled around the town in pairs. Unexpectedly, after the release of the 20-episode serial "The Bandits of Wulong Mountain" created by him, it will be a hit for 20 years! Some viewers who have watched this TV series ask around: Where is Wulong Mountain? The leader of Longshan County, one of the filming locations of the TV series, keenly smelled the opportunity and followed the trend, renaming the Pidu River Grand Canyon in the county to Wulongshan Grand Canyon, and renaming the Huoyan Village in the canyon to Wulongshan Village, which greatly promoted the local tourism development and revitalized the economy.
That time, we took a wooden boat and launched from the county seat of Yongshun to this ancient town from the Mengxi River. Don't look at the fact that now Mengfeng River has become an Internet celebrity check-in place. At that time, not many people in the world knew about it. It is also a mountain village girl who is not dressed up. Wild and bold. On both sides of the river, cliffs rise and monkeys are infested. Although rough, it is extremely alive. I remember that when I returned from playing, Shui Jun also wrote an essay "Mengxi River, Man's River", which was published in the provincial newspaper.
Another few more years passed. Gu Hua's novel "Furong Town" was adapted by Shanghai Film Studio. During the shooting, director Xie Jin came here to take scenes. This town sandwiched between two rivers, especially the primitive atmosphere emanating from the bluestone street of the pig's intestines that rise above the town, conquered the old director. Soon, he took the whole crew of the film crew and settled in this town... When the TV shooting began, Shao Hua, an old writer who was then the secretary of the Secretariat of the China Writers Association, came to Hunan on business. He heard that "Furong Town" was filming in an ancient town in Xiangxi and decided to visit a friend of the film crew. So, Gu Hua and I accompanied Shaohua and came to this ancient town again.
In 1997, a major social change in our country: the poverty alleviation campaign, began to unfold in the vast countryside. Xiangxi is the main battlefield of poverty alleviation in Hunan Province. Our writers' association, under the arrangement of the principal leading comrades of the provincial party committee, organized writers to go to the front line of poverty alleviation to cover interviews. I traveled to Xiangxi with Shui Yunxian and Cai Zaihai, and naturally stepped into this town again. It was on this occasion that we discovered that the town was quietly changing. All the scenes left by the filming of the movie "Furong Town" were retained by the clever Wang Village people, who cleverly used it to attract tourists and promote tourism development. Such as Liu Xiaoqing's rice tofu shop and so on. That time, I stood in front of the rice tofu shop with Liu Xiaoqing's rice tofu shop sign and Liu Xiaoqing and Jiang Wen stills, and I saw many curious tourists coming to visit, and I felt a lot of emotion...
This time, after we put down our bags at this homestay called Baihe Renjia, we accompanied our local friends and led us along this newly built "ancient street" in Hedong. After a while, he turned onto a stone ramp and walked towards the Yingpan Creek, which had layers of waterfalls. At this time, I was still immersed in the memories of the past. Suddenly, there was a loud booming sound in my ears. As soon as we looked up, we came to the bottom of a waterfall tens of meters high. The few times I came, I could only see the waterfall cascading down the cliff from a distance in the old street. Today, the developers of Wang Village have cleverly built the trail under the waterfall. Let visitors cling to the high cliffs and drill behind the waterfall. The waterfall becomes a curtain of water that cascades in front of visitors. There are also stone caves on high cliffs, and there are sculptures of monkeys in the caves. It was as if we had really walked into the water curtain hole in Journey to the West.
After passing through this waterfall, I came to the old bluestone street that I climbed several times ago. When we first visited here, we stayed at a small inn run by a supply and marketing agency, which is now gone. Although the shops on the old street have an old appearance, the goods on the shelves are very trendy. Along the way, I listened to Lao Chen, director of the Propaganda Department of the Yongshun County Party Committee who accompanied us, introduced: With the broadcast of the movie "Furong Town", the filming place Wang Village gradually lifted the veil of mystery in front of the world, this remote deep mountain town, for a while, became famous, and the number of tourists who came here soared every year. In 2008, the county officially renamed Wang Village as Furong Town. Although in the past three years, due to the impact of the epidemic, the number of people traveling has decreased significantly. It is under such circumstances that Furong Town's tourism revenue still reached 140 million yuan last year. Today, there are an average of 12,000 to 3,000 visitors a day. This year, the town's tourism revenue is estimated to exceed 300 million. More than 8,000 bed homes scattered throughout the town are filled every day.
In Hunan, there was no place called Furong Town and Wulong Mountain. Furong Town, Wulong Mountain, is just a literary work created by writers Gu Hua and Shui Yunxian. It was borrowed by the resourceful Xiangxi people in a timely manner to promote its own tourism development. Just a few days before I came here, I visited Mangshan in Yizhang County, Chenzhou City. At that time, Gu Hua wrote "Furong Town" in a small wooden house in the Mangshan Forest Farm Guest House. After the work was published in "Contemporary", Gu Hua also invited me to visit Mangshan to see the wooden house where he lived when he wrote "Furong Town". That's the "hometown" of Seremban Town. When I went to Mangshan this time, I asked a dozen questions, and the wooden house had long disappeared into the smoke and dust of history, and only the small saplings planted by Gu Hua and the young people who had been released to the forest farm had grown into towering trees. What I didn't expect was that Furong Town in Guhua's work was resurrected in Xiangxi, hundreds of miles away! It seems that if used well, literary and artistic works can also help economic development.
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