Open the Wuhan downtown traffic map, and after a week of walking on the ground in Hankou, you can see a series of place names with the name "dun" from Yijiadun in the west to Huangjiadun in the east. According to some statistics, there are 65 piers in Hankou. Why are there so many "piers" in Hankou?
Old alley near Long Beach Street
Photo by Pan Chao
The word "dun" means "mound". Hankou is now north of Changdi Street, which was originally a lake and marshland, collectively known as Houhu. Some of the higher places exposed the surface of the water, forming piers, and nearby fishermen, farmers, disaster victims and refugees who fled from other places gradually migrated to live on the piers, and over time, the population multiplied, and natural villages with duns as settlements appeared. Those who came late did not have ready-made piers to live in, so they surrounded the piers and set up their own portals. As a result, there are many inhabited mounds in the back lake.
Back Lake area
Photography / Zhang Xiang
Ye Qiaoyuan's "Hankou Bamboo Branch Words" volume 3 "Houhu" has a poem written about the pier: "The yellow flower is not covered on the ground, and the Chigang ditch is wide with water." The people of the pier divided the land, and they only worried about the big water and did not worry about drying. The author added: "The real name is 'Huanghuadi', but now it is called 'Houhu'." There are more than ten mounds four or five miles away, where those who cultivate lake land live. "At the end of the Qing Dynasty, after Zhang Zhidong presided over the construction of the Houhu causeway, a large area of lake land was drained, and the pier was no longer an island in the lake, but a highland on land, and more people lived in the upper pier, the scope of the village expanded, and a certain mound gradually became a collective name for the area centered on the pier.
The names of these piers can be roughly divided into three categories, from which we can see the condition of the original inhabitants of each mound.
Bagudun Community, Tangjiadun Street
Left: Liu Zheng
Right: Ma Bo
At most one category is surname dun names, such as Yijiadun, Chen Jiadun, Hanjiadun, Cuijiadun, Jiangjiadun, Luojiadun, Chajiadun, Zengjiadun, Xiaojiadun, Wangjiadun, Tangjiadun, Hejiadun, etc., indicating that the earliest inhabitants of these dunzi either lived together or were monopolized, and this situation was like Zhangjiawan, Wangjiacun, Lijiazhuang, and Chenjiaxiang, reflecting some characteristics of the traditional Chinese family system.
Wangjiadun Park
Photo by Pan Chao
The second category of other place names such as Echeng Dun, Tianmen Dun, etc., indicates that most of the earliest inhabitants on these piers may have been disaster victims who fled from Echeng or Tianmen, and these mounds, like Huangpi Street, reflect some characteristics of Chinese social population migration.
The third category is stone bridge piers, horse pond piers, etc., which reflect certain characteristics of local geography, such as a nearby stone bridge, or a horse pond and other buildings. Others, such as new piers, Miao piers, etc., have their own characteristics and are difficult to classify one by one.
Source: "Wuhan Palm Death (Abridged Edition)"
Author: Yan Changhong
Editor: Miao Miao
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