Flowers on water bamboo

【Chinese Story】

Author: Long Renqing (Vice Chairman of Qinghai Writers Association, winner of the National Minority Literary Creation Horse Award)

Looking at the large area of ancient papermaking workshops, my thoughts returned to the papermaking workshops I saw in Guoluo, Qinghai a few years ago. After the birth of papermaking technology, whether it is climbing over the mountains to the Qinghai-Tibet region, or going south to the water towns in the south of the Yangtze River, it actually indicates the integration of civilizations and the growth of culture.

Intangible cultural heritage written on Tibetan paper

Before coming to Wenzhou and seeing the old paper-making workshop in a place called Zeya, I saw the production of Tibetan paper in De'ang, in the Guoluo grassland of Qinghai.

De'ang is a magical place, and this magic is the magic that is hidden. The people here live by herding, and if you're new to the city, you'll see a nomadic life. Under the ravages of wind, snow and dust that rarely stops throughout the year, the herdsmen who have become silent and even a little wooden silently guard their cattle and sheep. Emaciated cattle and sheep walked and stopped on the snow-dappled meadows, foraging and grazing on the coarse grass. Not far away are the herdsmen's tents, which are surrounded by scattered cattle and sheep, like a lonely yak lying on the ground. The tent is the home of the locals who warm their meals during the day and sleep and rest at night.

Illustration: Guo Hongsong

In the short summer, the grass is also green and the mountains are full of flowers, but in the longer winter and spring, it is this somewhat barren scene that occupies the place. Therefore, no one would know that in such a place, these shepherds, in addition to grazing cattle and sheep, also have a skill that the outside world does not expect—every night, they transform themselves from a silent shepherd into elegant scholars, and begin to copy Buddhist scriptures—under the roughness of the surface, each of them is as warm as jade.

De'ang Sazhi, a Tibetan writing technique and a national intangible cultural heritage, has been passed down on this grassland for more than 200 years. Its inheritors are these herders. The herdsmen returned to their tents after their daily solitary nomadic life, where the fire of cow dung burned in the earthen stoves, and a warmth filled the tents, illuminating the corners of the tents. Cow dung fire plays both a role in lighting and keeping warm.

Before going to bed, they sat on the ground, bathed their hands and burned incense, their faces were solemn, holding a piece of Tibetan paper in their left hand, and between their thumbs and forefingers they held a small Tibetan inkstone, which was made of ink made from the lamps formed by the burning of butter lamps. With a bamboo pen in their right hand, the herdsmen dipped it in ink and began to concentrate on copying Buddhist scriptures – and at the end of the day's nomadic life, they began to swim freely in the spiritual world. The fatigue and hardship of grazing cattle and sheep during the day were swept away, and there was a focused and sacred expression on their faces.

The kind of magic that they hid was unassumingly but very conspicuously revealed at this moment.

The Buddhist scriptures they copied were made of strong and thick paper, made from a local wildflower, Ruixiang wolf poison. The font on the paper is simple and smooth, which is Deang Sazhi. The text is written in black and red, and the red part is made of cinnabar to outline the key points in the scroll. In the middle of the black characters, red characters sometimes jump out, producing a casual decorative effect, and the simplicity is gorgeous.

The small size of the scriptures they wrote made them easy to carry and preserve, and they were especially popular with the monasteries and herders in their vicinity and further afield, and they also earned extra income to support their families. This writing technique has been passed down as a skill for them to earn a living, or simply as a way of life.

Although the name only mentions writing, it actually includes pen-making, paper-making, ink grinding and inkstone making, that is to say, De'ang Sazhi is a kind of intangible cultural heritage with pen, ink, paper and inkstone.

Here I will only talk about the production of Tibetan paper.

One of the most important materials used to make Tibetan paper is a wild plant commonly found on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau - wolf poison flower. The wolf poison flower is a perennial herbaceous plant that grows in grasslands at an altitude of about 2,600 to 5,000 meters. In Guoluo, Qinghai, the common wolf poison flower is basically Ruixiang wolf poison, red and tender buds, blooming snow-white flowers, with the strange fragrance of lilacs.

In Tibetan medicine, Ruixiang wolf venom is a kind of herb with expectorant, swelling and pain-relieving functions, the root of the wolf poison flower is highly poisonous, and the wise Tibetans have used its characteristics to produce a unique Tibetan paper, so that the Tibetan paper has the characteristics of not being afraid of insects and rat bites, not rotting, not changing color, and not easy to tear. Books written on Tibetan paper have become miracles that have survived the vicissitudes of time.

Papermaking adapted to local conditions

In De'ang, when the owner, Danbei Jiacan, the inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of De'ang Sazhi, took me to this small Tibetan paper workshop, I thought that a herdsman had just moved out of the tent and left the earthen stove in the tent undismantled. Danbei Jiacan looked at me with a stunned expression, and told me with a smile that the scale of Tibetan paper production is very small, because if the Ruixiang wolf venom is excessively extracted, it will cause damage to the grassland ecology. "We mostly dig up a small amount of wolf poison flowers from the degraded black soil beach. As he was talking, he picked up some wolf poison flower roots that were sticking to the soil next to the "earthen stove", and said: "Look at this, it rained and flooded here a few days ago, and some wolf poison flowers were uprooted and washed to the ground, so we picked up some ......."

After listening to Thanbei Jiacan's words, I couldn't help but sigh in my heart, how can we achieve the best of both worlds between ecological protection and the protection and inheritance of the unique intangible cultural heritage of Tibetan paper production?

On that day, the sun was shining, and on the plateau, a round of sun hung high above our heads. Dambe Jiachan's dark skin seemed to echo the sun, showing a high degree of integration with the environment, while I squinted my eyes and stretched out a hand to my forehead, trying in vain to block out the sun. At the site of making Tibetan paper, I listened carefully to the narration of Danbei Jiacan.

"The wolf poison flower is called 'Regaba' in Tibetan. Danbei Jiacan told me, "In the roots of the wolf poison flower, plus other raw materials - these raw materials are from the cold Qinghai-Tibet Plateau - it is necessary to go through the links of peeling, smashing, steaming, making, rinsing, pounding, beating, copying, steaming and drying to make Tibetan paper."

"In ancient times, making Tibetan paper was a very sacred thing. "Some Tibetan texts say that after the Tibetan paper is produced, a consecration ceremony is held. The tools used to grind Tibetan paper and make it smooth and smooth are made of materials such as white conch and yellow dzi, pearls and agate, as well as ox horns, porcelain bowls and other commonly used folk tools."

Dambe Jiacan also introduced me to the different origins and grades of Tibetan paper. He said: "We are a small place here, and we don't have a good name, but our Tibetan paper is specially produced for the purpose of writing De'ang Sazhi, so it is also a very special kind of paper. With that, he laughed.

After listening to the introduction of Danbei Jiacan, I thought to myself that the production process of Tibetan paper is actually similar to that of many papers I know, and the main difference is actually the material. After the papermaking technology is produced, it spreads everywhere, spreads to a place, and it will find some suitable papermaking material in the local area.

As the literati Su Yijian of the Song Dynasty said: "Shuzhong mostly uses hemp as paper...... Jiangsu and Zhejiang mostly use tender bamboo as paper. The northern soil is made of mulberry skin. The river is made of rattan as paper. The sea people use moss as paper. Zhejiang people take wheat stalks and rice stalks as crisp and thin, and wheat weeds and oil vines are especially good. ”

This ability of papermaking technology to "adapt to local conditions" is actually based on local materials. Everywhere you go, a local fiber-containing plant will be selected, and the paper made from this fiber-containing plant will also be named after this plant. For example, hemp paper, which first appeared in Shaanxi and Gansu regions, uses jute and other hemp plants as raw materials, and later uses mulberry, rattan, bamboo, etc. as raw materials.

It reminds me of those climbing plants.

Climbing plants are those that can climb upwards. In my hometown, on the Tibetan Plateau, there is a wild climbing plant called clematis. It has needle-shaped leaves with pronounced ridges on the stems and blooms from early summer. This flower has golden four-petaled flowers, lantern-shaped, picked by strong stems on the branches, sometimes in a row, sometimes staggered, golden, shining in the sun, and in the early autumn, the golden petals fall with the wind, growing spherical flower spikes, like a fluffy silver hair, so its name in Tibetan is "Aiwaguo", which means white-headed old lady.

Studies have shown that papermaking technology began to spread to Qinghai-Tibet in the early Tang Dynasty, and it found Ruixiang wolf venom in this plateau wilderness. With the help of Ruixiang wolf venom, the local ancestors made Tibetan paper with the regional characteristics of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is it just like the sweet clematis, with the vitality and vitality of continuous climbing?

Walk on Zeya Paper Mountain

When I thought of this, I was already in Wenzhou. Before leaving, my friend told me that on this trip to Wenzhou, we will go to a place called Zeya, she said: "There is my hometown, and it is also the production area of screen paper." "When my friend mentioned papermaking, I thought of my encounter with Tibetan paper in De'ang a few years ago, so I found the calligraphy work of De'ang in my messy study.

As when I received this precious gift from Thanbei Gyalcan, I took it upon me to appreciate it: on the thick Tibetan paper, a verse in praise of the goddess was written in typical Tibetan calligraphy, written by Lama Tsongkhapa, in which he prayed that the goddess would bestow the poet with the same poetic talent as the goddess, and that the bamboo pens and ink used were of course also written by the inheritors of the goddess.

I gently stroked this calligraphy work, and the touch of my fingers became keen, and I seemed to perceive that outside of this flat calligraphy work, those that cannot be seen by the naked eye, the rolling smoke clouds about history, geography, and the development and evolution of national culture are three-dimensional, vivid, and admirable.

In this way, I came to Wenzhou with the aftertaste of De'ang sprinkled wisdom.

It was a morning after arriving in Wenzhou. My friend took us from the Xianmen River in Ouhai and went down the river. The barge occupies the center of the river, and my friends and I stood on the deck of the barge, talking loudly to the roar of the engines while admiring the beautiful scenery along the coast.

The barge moving forward made the scenery on both sides of the strait retreat sharply, and the scenery became blurred and hazy in the fluctuating speed, as if it had lost its individuality and difference, and began to converge. The rolling mountains, without exception, are enveloped in impermeable green, rolling on both sides of the river, suddenly high and convex, suddenly concave, coherent and orderly, like two rows of symmetrical zippers, biting together, and the barge we are riding on is like a zipper lock. As we moved forward, the mountains on both sides of the bank opened up at the front of the barge and retreated behind us.

However, if you look closely, there will always be fleeting differences in this convergent landscape: a southern plant with large leaves, entrenched on the side of a reef, like a sleepy old man squatting there, with the casualness and uninhibition of a sage, an old but exquisite building, occupying the highest point in the mountains, overlooking the world, with the movement of barges, it moves slowly, noble and reserved, highlighting the connotation of the high degree of integration of nature and humanity in the south. In a place where there was a cottage, a peasant woman who was pounding clothes suddenly appeared from the corner of the greenery, dressed in blue calico. The deep blue color was like a wisp of smoke suddenly floating in the green bushes, becoming a fireworks scenery in the green eyes.

In fact, there are many fireworks in the scenery - in the sparse places where the dense green is slightly slack, houses and small buildings are hidden in the middle, and cars and pedestrians shuttle between the houses and small buildings from time to time. Telephone poles, telephone poles criss-cross wires, complementing each other as doors, signboards, billboards, as the image of the times and life, they are also indispensable to show themselves on this shore full of ancient Jiangnan landscapes.

For me, a person from the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, when I came from the plateau of the "ancient road west wind" to the south of the "small bridge and flowing water", I actually walked into the scene of poetry and distance - my hometown of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, but at this moment I have become the distance of poetry and distance.

I have no memory of how far we traveled by boat that day, or how long we walked. The nostalgia for the beautiful scenery on both sides of the strait makes us forget the time and the space at that moment. Later, I heard from a friend that on that day, we walked all the way through Nantang, Litian, and Wutian, and then went south to Li'ao, and then stopped unsatisfied.

Although I have forgotten the time and space, there is one thing that I have always remembered and remembered - that day, in order not to miss the scenery on both sides of the strait, we did not stay in the cabin, we all walked to the deck or stood or sit, or held up our mobile phones and cameras to constantly point at a certain scenery, but we soon found that we could not stand on the deck.

One after the other bridges spanned the two banks, and as the barges sailed, they approached us little by little, first in the distance, which looked a little small, but then they grew in size, until they became behemoths, and rushed towards the barges, and before we could show any surprise, they flew over our heads, moved to the stern, and then from large to small, and then disappeared into the distance.

According to a friend, there are more than 30 large and small bridges on the Tang River, many of which have a long history, legends and stories, and some bridges even have a history of hundreds of years. For me, the son of a shepherd from the western wilderness, the whispers of my friends were an eye-opener for me. The ancient south is rich in humanities and products. The high degree of integration between man and nature here makes any scenery here flash the dual colors of humanity and nature, unlike my hometown in the west, where occasionally some places will be called "no man's land".

When I arrived at Zeya Paper Mountain, I learned that the place name "Paper Mountain" is worthy of its name. Relevant information describes Zeya Paper Mountain as follows: a place of gathering water, a beautiful township, the terrain is high in the west and low in the east, with strange peaks and peaks, and it is a typical mountainous area. Papermaking is the main industry here than farming, in the gentle areas where every inch of land is at a premium, planting water bamboo on the slopes of the streams, and building water mills next to the mountain streams to make paper. Another feature of the area is the abundance of water resources, with many small streams flowing along the mountain. The combination of mountains and water makes this the most suitable place for water bamboo to grow.

Papermaking between water and bamboo

The water bamboo here is named after the place name here, called Wenzhou water bamboo. Before coming here, I had consulted the information, the information introduced, Wenzhou water bamboo belongs to the cluster type of plants, the stalk is straight and long, the wall is thin and the cavity is large, the bamboo is delicate, the fiber is soft, is the main material of local papermaking.

The mountains in the south of the Yangtze River are not majestic, but they exude a kind of handsomeness, and the water in the south of the Yangtze River is not cold, but it has a kind of clarity. After going around a few mountains and stepping on a few stone bridges, our eyes suddenly opened up.

This is a rare flat land in this undulating mountain. As far as the eye can see, clumps of water bamboos are everywhere. In the breeze that is so light that there is almost nothing, you can occasionally hear the rustling of bamboo leaves being blown by the wind, so subtle, there is a kind of caution and reserve that does not dare to disturb visitors from afar.

My friend led us into a narrow earthen gate, and rows of bluestone-roofed huts appeared in front of us. A friend told us that this is the water mill house. We listened, stunned. After introduction, we learned that water mill is the only process in papermaking that uses external force, and the rotten bamboo material must be constantly beaten and mashed. This process is also the front end of the entire papermaking process.

It's getting late. The host arranged for us to dine at a farmhouse in Shuidikeng Village and stay in a homestay for the night. It was late at night. As I lay in my room at the B&B, the sound of dogs barking from time to time sounded somewhere, and the chirping of birds from afar and near, reminded me of my hometown on the shore of Qinghai Lake. When I was a child, every night we fell asleep to the barking of dogs and the chirping of birds, perhaps it was this kind of memory that made me feel carefree like my childhood, and I soon had a deep sleep.

I got up early the next day, washed up briefly, and then walked out of the B&B and followed the road we had walked yesterday to the place where the water mill was. I walked along the winding path between the herringbone huts and took out my phone to take quite a few pictures. Today, this quiet place used to be a place where people sweated and rained. Now the water mill left behind has become a cultural relic that needs to be protected.

After breakfast, we went to visit the traditional papermaking exhibition hall. We waited at the entrance of the exhibition hall for the grandmother with the key to open the door, and for about ten minutes, the grandmother hurriedly came, spoke a dialect we did not understand with her friends, and opened the door of the exhibition hall. In the exhibition hall, what impressed me the most was the introduction of different kinds of paper made from different raw materials from all over the country in the form of pictures and texts, and of course, Tibetan paper. Looking at the brief introduction of Tibetan paper, I thought of the wolf poison flower on the plateau, and also remembered the climbing plant of sweet clematis on the plateau.

If Tibetan paper is the clematis that the papermaking technology blooms on the wolf poison flowers on the plateau, and the papermaking technology has come to this warm and humid south, symbiosis with water bamboo, giving birth to screen paper, which is exported to all directions and nourishes the mountain people here, then, if it is also a climbing plant as an analogy, what kind of plant should it be?

I immediately thought of Lingxiao Flower.

Lingxiao flower grows and blooms in the south, is a typical climbing plant, the woody stem is brown, bent, entangled, blooming bright red and orange yellow interlaced flowers, the flower color is dazzling, you can see it from a distance, it seems to be a charming woman, dressed in gorgeous clothes, showing her beauty without defense, "If I love you - never like the climbing Lingxiao flower, show off your ...... by your high branches" This is the poet's idea, and for Lingxiaohua, what she wants is "show off".

That morning, I had a wonderful encounter with Mizuku. Friends beckoned everyone to breakfast and were ready to take us off to the start of the day. When I returned to the B&B from Shuiqiu, I saw two bald bulbuls on a water bamboo, and they showed their affection and affection, and they didn't care about the peeps of passers-by at all.

I stopped and took a closer look at them. They are still intimate, just like the restoration of a scene in the movie "Tianxian Pei" - in the movie "Tianxian Pei", when the song "Husband and Wife Return Home" sounds, the picture shows lotus flowers blooming in the pond, a pair of loving white ducks, and then a pair of bald bulbuls singing and playing on the branches. As the camera zooms in, the bald bulbul jumps between the branches, following the Cowherd, and the Weaver Girl dancing with the Cowherd looks up at them with delight, and the song that spreads throughout China begins.

This walk on Zeya Paper Mountain will never be forgotten by me.

Guangming Daily (2024-01-05 14th edition)

Source: Guangming Net-Guangming Daily