Text/Wang Caiyuan
Inscription
Some people say that people always like to recall the past when they are old, and some people say that this is the resurrection of life precipitated in memory, in my opinion, it is a kind of homesickness, it has been more than 40 years since I left my hometown, but the old things in the mountain village are like yesterday, often returning to dreams. It coincides with the Saihan District Federation of Literature and Culture to edit the "Da Mei Saihan" series. This series of old stories is presented to interested readers. Write about the love, the scene, the thing, the person, and the old story in the small mountain village of your hometown, put the past that is about to be forgotten into writing, and take a trip through the time tunnel for those years as a pastime...
sex
Food, clothing, housing and transportation are necessary conditions for human survival, human beings from apes to people, out of the primeval forest, from living in caves, and then building sheds, building caves, building houses to pavilions, halls, this is the process of human civilization progress. This proposition is left to anthropologists and historians, and I will only make a brief record of the situation of building a house in the mountain village where I live.
Xiaoshan Village is located at the foot of the southern slope of Daqing Mountain, the geographical environment of hilly and semi-mountainous area, is the easternmost point of the Tumochuan Plain, and only a few miles away from the Dahei River in the east. The administrative district is under the jurisdiction of Yulin Town, Saihan District, Hohhot City, and is a remote suburb of the city. The history of human habitation can be traced back to the primitive society of slash-and-burn farming, and it is not far from the Neolithic stone tool manufacturing site where the Great Kiln culture was discovered, and this is a terrace on the edge of the Pingchuan River, leeward and sunny, which is very suitable for human habitation. A few years ago, on the slope of Daxiliang northwest of the village, there was a flood that washed away the Jomon black pottery living utensils and ashes used by the ancients. Proof that there are remains of the life of the ancients. In Dongganzhang Village, not far from the village, the ruins of the Great Wall of Zhao are still preserved. The neighboring village of Taobqi has the ruins of the ancient city of Taolin in the Han Dynasty. Someone has to have a place to live. The most direct evidence is that Alatan Khan built the "Banshen" (house) according to the Fengzhou beach reclamation in the Ming Dynasty. The small mountain village has Naimobanshin to the west, and Koukekbanshen to the south. The name "Banshen" is named after the house. In the twelfth year of Zhengde in the Ming Dynasty, Alatan Khan, the grandson of Dayanhan, practiced reclamation and farming in the Qiyutan (Tumochuan), recruited 100,000 Han people to expand the land and grow grain, so that these Han people outside the export settled down, built houses along the Heihe River, south of the Yin Mountain, and built houses to gather into villages, and there were 72 nameless boards in Tumochuan (that is, 72 villages called Banshen).
In fact, the Han people from the mouth settled in the Tumo River, and the first choice was to dig a cave and build a cave in the hilly and semi-mountainous area. Therefore, there are many village names with kilns in the hilly area of the semi-mountainous area on the edge of the Tumo River. It is not difficult to see from the name of the village that the villages with Banshen generally have superior natural conditions and are relatively prosperous, and the villages with kilns in the border mountains are mostly dry farming, which is a poor village.
In my childhood memory, there were very few families living in caves in our small mountain village. The people who live in the caves are the poorest families in the village. Only an old husband and wife with the surname Bian live in two caves under the cliff outside the village. After the death of the old husband and wife, a family surnamed Song fled the desert and settled in Hebei as a shelter, until the seventies of the last century built a new house in the village and moved out, the small mountain village completely bid farewell to the history of living in caves. When I was a child, there was a row of abandoned caves on the cliffside under the apricot forest in the west of the village, where we used to play peek-a-boo, and according to my father's generation, it was the cave where my grandfather and the villagers surnamed Shang lived. Near the cave on the cliffside, the winter is warm and the summer is cool, as long as the strength to take out the soil on the cliff side, hollow out into an arch-shaped cave, the cave into the depth of about a zhang, seven or eight feet wide, there are single holes and double holes, and the strength is also dug into three holes to connect, one into two open. Cover simple doors and windows to protect you from the wind and rain. In the Tumo River, that is, in the surrounding area, the people who live in caves must be poor, and the villages with many caves are also poor villages. The places called kilns on the Tumo River are all village names named after the place names of their origins before they moved to settle, personal names, and the number of Japanese calves or occupations, such as Yangqu kiln, Sanying kiln, Hanjiayao, Dachen kiln, San, Shixi kiln and other village names.
The village of Pingchuan has no cliff to rely on, and the poor people cannot afford to build houses, so they use adobe dry brick to build the vault-type coupon roof, and there are very few stones on the Tumo River, and the stone kiln is not low, so there are only adobe kilns. The families of the people who live in this kind of kiln in Pingchuan Village, the poor in the village, are better than "sneaking eaves" (wandering around without a place to live). However, the adobe of the topography kiln is a work of strength, and this adobe is made of yellow clay or white dried with water, mixed with wheat orange and wheat sugar and pureeed, and repeatedly turned and stirred several times before entering the mold and debilitating. The adobe size of the masonry kiln is large, one foot two inches long, eight or nine inches wide, and more than two inches thick, and can be used after drying. But the master of the kiln is a good bricklayer or a good kiln head. If you can't build it, if you collapse the roof, you will lose your life. Don't look at this adobe kiln, in the village called kiln, you can live in this kiln house and the kiln is a notch higher than the kiln dug up. The construction of an adobe cave is very large, and it is difficult for small families to complete it, relying on the help of relatives and friends, and neighbors in the village. In poor years, human affection is also very important.
Before and after liberation, the Zhuanghu families along the Tumo River in the Dahei River Valley chose terraces with higher terrain to build "Banshen" to build houses and live in villages. Although our village is hilly and semi-mountainous, it is also the Heihe River valley on the edge of the Tumo River, but it has gradually abandoned caves and cave houses, and people choose to build adobe houses to live in. Adobe walls, wheat straw and mud plastered roofs. At that time, the studio of the house was small, generally 2.7 meters wide, 3-4 meters in. The eaves are 2.4 meters high. Most adobe roofs are one water outlet (- slope roof), and the structure of the house is mainly beamed and column. Use wooden columns to support beams, poles, purlins, according to the depth of the house size, there are four-column type, five-column type, six-column type. But there are mostly four- and five-column styles. Due to the need to keep warm in winter, the houses are mainly sunny main houses. The back wall (adobe wall) of the main house is generally more than 60 centimeters at the top, and the width of the base is more than 1 meter according to three times the width of one arch.
The old houses in the village face south with three rooms, five rooms and seven rooms, and the main house is built first, followed by the east and west houses and the south house. A rectangular and rectangular courtyard is formed and adjacently adjacent. Due to the different homesteads, terrain, and financial resources, the courtyards are of different sizes, and the size is uneven. The poor family's strength is small, and the south house is impossible to talk about, and even the main house cannot be built at one time, so one or two rooms are built, and the rest build a back wall. Some could not build a house, so they first built a back wall on the homestead, a scene that was common in the Tumochuan countryside in the past. In the village, you will often see a thick adobe wall standing alone, which must be because the family cannot afford to build a house again. It belongs to the "crawling" family in the village. (i.e. life does not improve)
(To be continued)