Inscription
In the Qing Dynasty, the Yue language is elegant,
Drunk Wu Yin is self-flattering;
I still ask where the green plum is,
The bamboo forest flows through the small bridge.
One
In 2023, I went to Hangzhou for a trip to Hangzhou around the Qingming Festival, fulfilling my wish to sweep the tombs of my parents during the Qingming Festival in the past few years. In Jiangnan in March of fireworks, smell the smell of your hometown and listen to the long-lost hometown sound.
On the last day of March, we came from Hangzhou to Cangqian Old Street to visit the former residence of Mr. Taiyan. Seeing the newly renovated old houses on the street by the Yuhangtang River, I can't help but think of the visit many years ago. At that time, there were still some quaint features in Cangqian Old Street, a number of old and old houses, and Mr. Taiyan's former residence should have just been simply renovated, the dark beams and pillars and floors showed the traces of the wear and tear of time, and the shiny oil color indicated its renewal, but the former residence was empty, and there were no items on display. Today, the gate of Mr. Taiyan's former residence is different from before, but it is still the same as the old house, which is probably not wrong.
Cangqian Zhang Taiyan's former residence (photo by Wen Bing)
When he wandered at the door of the former residence, he saw a middle-aged man passing by, so he asked him about the story of the restoration of the former residence and the changes of the old street. The words left behind were similar to those in front of the warehouse. He listened to my accent and confidently decided that I was a native of Xiaoheshan, that is, a village under the jurisdiction of the town. I said, I'm leaving the townspeople. However, the Xiaohe mountain accent is no different from the local dialect left behind, but the native language of the indigenous people there is Hokkien, which is what the locals call Wenzhou Changli dialect. He said that he had acquaintances in Xiaoheshan, and said that he was actually from Shangfenshan, and only later moved to Cangqian. Shangfen Mountain is outside Yuhang Town, and it is a station left by the Hanghui Highway to Yuhang Road in that year. My great-grandfather's grave is located here, and I visited it with my father and a group of cousins and cousins when I was a child. The tomb here was later flattened, and we became unfilial descendants.
The local sound of chatter reveals the mellow taste of aging, and the flowing water in the river and the mist on the surface of the water also give off the color of the year for a while. If I hadn't been going to accompany Wen Bing and Huanhuan to visit, I would have carried a bamboo chair and sat on this river street where my father used to walk in his youth, talking to this fellow about Haitian and inquiring about the old things in front of the warehouse. He may not know Mr. Taiyan's knowledge, but he will know a lot of stories about Cangqian and the legends of the surrounding villages.
Mr. Taiyan's former residence is elegantly furnished, quite suitable, and some old objects that are not easy to see are exhibited, such as Mrs. Tang's letters, and the real objects presented by Mr. Taiyan's descendants, which is particularly likeable. The most disappointing thing about visiting the former homes of celebrities is that you can only see a few photos and a bunch of imitations.
Although Kuramae is within the confines of his hometown, this time he completely figured out the origin of the town's name. Originally, the Southern Song Dynasty had an official grain store here, and the town was just before the official warehouse. Today, the granary of the Southern Song Dynasty is gone. However, tradition has its inertia, and perhaps geography has its advantages, and later dynasties have intermittently set up official warehouses here. The current granary in front of the warehouse, another national key cultural relics protection unit in the town, is composed of two old warehouses in the Qing Dynasty and two Soviet-style warehouses in the fifties and sixties. In the fifties, it became the country's first four-no granary, and it became famous all over the world. In addition to the empty granary, it also has a large hall that displays various models of granaries from ancient and modern times, both Chinese and foreign, and displays the knowledge of a system and its architecture that people rely on every day but know very little about. The narrator is a girl from Jingshan. I asked her if she could speak Jingshan, and she said yes, so she said a few words, which sounded similar to Cangqian's dialect. One year at a meeting in Jingshan, during the spring tea season, I went to a nearby village and talked to a tea farmer who was sifting tea leaves at home, and learned that most of the raw materials for matcha in Japan came from this village. The little girl said that her family was also a tea farmer.
Coming out of the granary, I want to invite Wen Bing and Huanhuan to eat the famous local white-cut mutton and bean skin. After asking several people on the street in Cangmae, I learned that the best white-cut mutton shop was not in the town, but in the nearby market. As for the bean skin, they all said they didn't know, and this delicacy may have been submerged here. Following the navigation, after driving for more than ten minutes, we came to a restaurant street, where farmhouses were next to each other, but at a glance, they were very depressed. We walked to the door of the restaurant recommended on the Internet, and the two of them, who looked like the owner and his wife, were having lunch at the door. I just said hello with a message and asked why the guests were so sparse. The man with the beard said it was the off-season. I then asked directly, do you have white-cut mutton and bean skin, the proprietress replied in Cangqian dialect, there is white-cut mutton, there is no bean skin, but there is salted meat and simmered taro. I asked, is the bacon the meat of their hometown? She said, no, it's their own salted legs. Hometown meat is actually the name of self-marinated salted meat in winter in Hangzhou and Yuhang. I said, "Then I'll take a look," and she took me to the kitchen, and opened the lid of a stainless steel pot on the stove, and a stream of steam came to my nose with a salty aroma, and the taro and bacon were boiling in the thick soup. This is a traditional home-cooked dish from the hometown. I said, "Have a bowl," and go back to the table in front of the hall.
The proprietress came over to talk to me in Cangqian dialect, and couldn't help but praise her own mutton, saying that her ancestors were lamb cooks, and that many local mutton shop owners were her father's apprentices or relatives. She added that her son was reluctant to take over their business, and that only her daughter was helping. I said, it's not bad to have a daughter to help. Cangqian dialect belongs to the dialect of Yuhang Town, which is my father's mother tongue. His father was born and raised in Yuhang, and until he was old, he still retained his Yuhang accent. For example, the Liuhua is probably influenced by the Hangzhou city dialect, the code of the dock is pronounced ma, and the pronunciation of Yuhang dialect is mo. Wen Bing is from Chongqing, she can't understand my conversation with the proprietress, and she is a little ignorant, while Huanhuan is sitting at the table and laughing, she is from Fuyang, and most of them can understand, probably curious about our short chatter in such a parent.
Cangqian has now become a famous dream town in Hangzhou, and at the same time, the mutton festival is also on fire. According to media reports, the annual Pounding Pot Festival is held here - the way of pounding must be wrong, it is actually Tao. According to the local custom, boiling mutton, mutton, sheep's head and offal are cooked in one pot, and then what you want to eat and what you want to fish, this is the meaning of Tao.
Wen Bing couldn't hold back and finally asked: Why do Hangzhou people also eat mutton? This is the taste of northerners. I said that there was a tradition of sheep raising in the area of Hangjia Lake, and the skin of the lamb was a special product here, followed by mutton, and the white cut mutton was a unique practice here. While talking, the proprietress brought us the dishes we ordered, a plate of white-cut mutton, a bowl of salted meat stewed taro, a few Qingtuan, Qingtuan is also called Qingming Tuanzi, now is the time to eat Qingtuan. Wen Bing and Huanhuan tasted what I thought was good hometown food, and I revisited the customs and customs of my hometown in the countryside.
Two
On the second day of the meeting in Fuyang, I woke up early in the morning, so I walked to the Fuchun River to see the scenery. The Fuchun River flows to the edge of Fuyang City and turns a big bend, and it opens up for a while. In the distance, the morning fog is misty, the spring trees are hazy, and the spring water on this side of the river is rippling, slowly going east. Such a smoke tree Chunlan, look relaxed and happy, unconsciously paced to the foot of the stork mountain Ziling fishing platform side of a port, saw two or three people sitting there fishing, a little far away on the shore of the river rock towering Ziling fishing statue, added three points of interest.
I asked one of the middle-aged anglers if he was a native of Fuyang, and he said yes. I asked him how much he could catch in a day, and he replied "not much", and he didn't say much. At this time, Colin also came from the riverbank, stopped to listen to our non-sentence conversation, and was very interested, and asked, "What is that self-sailing boat?" The angler seemed to reply in dialect, but Colin did not understand, but was eager to find out the meaning of the sentence, and I wondered whether his words were dialect or Mandarin, and I did not hear clearly. Colin then asked about the difference between Fuyang and Hangzhou. At this time, I realized that there is a difference between the pronunciation of Fuyang dialect and the words left behind, and it is similar to Xiaoshan dialect, which should belong to Ning Shao. I said that it is different from Hangzhou dialect and Yuhang dialect, but if you don't speak quickly, you can understand it, and you can talk.
On the stone steps of the river port sat a young man, watching people fish. I asked him why he didn't fish, and he said that he was a civil servant and didn't fish, but just came to see him every day before going to work. He only spoke in Mandarin, spoke a few words to a few anglers, and spoke soft Mandarin.
Fuyang Stork Mountain, Fuchun Riverside (photo by Wang Heng)
In the afternoon, after visiting Huang Gongwang's hermitage, I walked to a canopy and stood still, and heard someone talking in the local dialect. Three middle-aged men, about security guards, sat in chairs in the shade, smoking cigarettes, and one of them talked about his family life with great interest, not paying attention to the people waiting for the bus around him. The man was talking about him cooking for his family, to the effect that he cooked according to his family's request, and made this dish, and some people didn't want to eat it, and then made another dish, and some people didn't like it. He went to the street to buy vegetables and then made another one, and his family was probably not satisfied. So, when it was time for dinner, he warmed it up and served it to the table. This is a trivial matter, but it is particularly vivid when spoken in dialect, and the subdued tone with undulating emotions makes people return to the human world of Chenguang in the past for a while. Their conversation used many dialect-specific words, some of which were originally hidden in the depths of my mind, and it was not easy to remember them in normal times, and even if they were talking about the country, they would not automatically come out, and if they were not called, they would be silent forever. But as soon as others say it, it is immediately activated, creating a special mellow in the current context. However, this is the Mandarin world, and in a few days they will be put on hold again.
Two days ago, I visited the "Song Yun Jinhui" exhibition at the Museum of the China Academy of Art, and my Hangzhou dialect amused the security guard brother and aroused Colin's curiosity about Hangzhou dialect. I said that the main historical source of the current accent of Hangzhou dialect should be in Bianjing. In the past, when dividing the dialect area, the dialect of Hangzhou was almost designated as a northern dialect island, but later because most of its vocabulary was Wu dialect, it was still classified in the Wu dialect area and became a small piece of Hangzhou alone. However, even in the city of Hangzhou, the scope of activities of Hangzhou dialect has become an isolated island. Hangzhou dialect is also active in specific environments and areas, such as old communities that have not yet been demolished. A few days ago, when I visited the Taimiao Square, the ruins of the Southern Song Dynasty, I saw that there were many chess stalls around, and the Hangzhou dialect was spoken for a while, and it was the old Hangzhou dialect - with a little Shaoxing dialect charm, flew out of those chess friend groups. This place was originally the center of the city of Hangzhou.
Although I have been able to speak Hangzhou since I was a child, I never spoke it before I left Hangzhou to go to Beijing to study. At that time, there was a popular attitude in the town of Stay, and if the people who stayed were speaking Hangzhou dialect, they were said to be "Shoutou Shou Brain, Ticking when I memorized". "Back time" is a common word in Tiaoxi and Hangzhou Xiaopian, which means out of place. Hangzhou dialect, the people who left it are also called Hang Baier, but this word is actually the influence of Hangzhou dialect. Hangzhou dialect was originally popular in the old city of Hangzhou, as well as in the suburbs outside the city, a really small piece, and the small piece of Tiaoxi to which the words belonged, the passing area was very large. Stay is the traffic artery of Hangzhou west, there are many people in the town who speak Hangzhou dialect, many primary and secondary school teachers are also people in the city who speak Hangzhou dialect, and later there are many large factories built around, and the children of large factories generally speak Hangzhou dialect, so they are exposed to it, and they will inadvertently have Hangzhou dialect. In fact, the words left were originally influenced by the Hangzhou dialect, and the pronunciation was harder than that of other areas in Tiaoxi.
Three
Two days before Qingming, I made an appointment with my eldest sister and younger brother to leave behind to sweep the graves of my parents. The parents' tomb is located on the slope of the Wuchaoshan Cemetery, which can be described as a high open land, surrounded by a group of peaks. This was originally the territory of the Stone Horse Brigade of the Commune. The tomb was swept two days in advance to avoid the congestion on the day of Qingming. In front of the tomb, staring at the photo of his parents on the tombstone, the past of his parents came to mind one by one, and I couldn't help but murmur to them that they were speaking in their native language.
After returning from sweeping the tomb, I walked to Liuliu Street and saw a scene of depression with no pedestrians, and I couldn't help but feel a little sad, so I thought that Yousi's self-righteous excessive intervention caused the fall of many old streets in Jiangnan ancient towns.
Walking across the bridge, I walked on the ground of the old house where my family had lived for many years, and after the house was demolished, a row of trees and flowers were planted here, and they were all very tall. I walked up to the bridge again, and I had to play here almost every day when I was a teenager, and I had to walk every day when I went to elementary and middle school. However, this time I was shocked to find that this cultural relic, which has been listed as a national security, has been greatly altered. The east wall of the bridge was originally a semi-circular step, leading to two streets, Tea Market Street and Beixing Street. The steps leading to the side of North Star Street have now been removed, and its original appearance has been severely damaged. I suddenly remembered that this kind of thing was not the first time it had happened in Hangzhou, and the theft of the tomb of Qian Biao in Lin'an was another case.
I haven't climbed Pingji Mountain (Anle Mountain) for many years, but this time I decided to climb it. My nephews and nieces offered to climb the mountain with me. The foothills of the mountain have long lost their original landform and style, but only a small vegetable field and a tea field above the original primary school still have a faint remnant of the scene of the year. There is a trail strewn with moss dots above the tea field, which seems to be rarely walked, and the trail is covered with trees that shade the sky. When I was a teenager, there were only dirt roads that people stepped on here, except for the shrubs that were masson pines, which were not high, and you could see everywhere. The trail was built all the way to the top of the mountain. In those days, every time you went to the top of the mountain, you would look into the distance, this piece of land, now known as the Xixi Wetland, the surrounding mountains and villages, can be seen, if the weather is clear, you can see the vast Hangjiahu Plain, until the clouds. Pingji Mountain is the southwestern boundary of the Hangjiahu Plain, and further southwest, it connects with the mountains as far as Fujian and beyond. But now, the trees are so beautiful that they can't find a high point to look at. This scene made me feel that I was not climbing the mountain that I had to climb almost every day.
At the dinner table, only my sister, brother-in-law and nephew still spoke a more or less authentic language, but many words have been infiltrated by Hangzhou dialect and Mandarin. In comparison, my words are more pure, because my native language is isolated in the brain in the language environment of Beijing. Although there have always been many outsiders in the town, the natives of the town only speak the words of the town. There is also a derogatory sentence in the words left behind, "Shui Lai Goods", which means that they float from the river and have no roots in the local area. But now, the population from other provinces has far exceeded the local population, so Mandarin has become the lingua franca. It's just that in the places where the old people live, they are still stubbornly retaining their remaining power. At my family's family gatherings, I used a combination of Luhua, Hangzhou dialect and Mandarin, but fortunately everyone could understand it, although the younger generation may not be able to speak it. There is a seemingly strange phenomenon for the younger generation not to speak dialects: in slightly larger towns, let alone big cities, children are treated as if they were from Mandarin villages from birth, and even grandparents teach their children to speak in local Mandarin dialect when they are babbling, for fear that they will not understand dialects.
Four
The day before the Qingming Festival, I went to visit the Haining historic site with my junior classmate Jun Ying and my students Danni, Mu Jin and Ah Jian. Wang Guowei's former residence is still closed, and the Tide Viewing Resort Park is not allowed to enter, so I said, then let's go to Chang'an Town. I have never been to this ancient town near Hangzhou. Immediately found on the Internet that there is a portrait stone tomb in Chang'an Town in the town, which is said to be the burial place of the third daughter of Sun Quan of Eastern Wu during the Three Kingdoms, commonly known as the "Three Daughters Heap". It is a national key cultural relics protection unit, but it is located on the campus of Haining Middle School. When you arrive at the entrance of the school, the electric retractable door is closed. We called out to the doorman to explain what we were going to do, but the doorman said, "To visit this tomb, you have to make an appointment, and you can't enter." I said that we had come from Beijing and Shanghai and wanted to see this national treasure tomb, and asked him to explain it to the principal. When the doorman saw that we were sincere, he called the principal, and he spoke Haining dialect, although there was a door apart, and I understood the result: the principal agreed to let us go in and have a look. Hehe, Haining dialect and leaving words belong to the same Tiaoxi small piece.
Yangshan Academy in Chang'an Town
At this time, the doorman opened the door quite politely and let us in, and he said that the tomb was locked, and that it was impossible to enter, and that the murals and other objects in the tomb had been moved to the museum, but there was a picture of it on the wall at the end of the school, so you could see it. He also specially recommended that there is also a famous Yangshan Academy on campus, which happens to be open today, and you can also go and see it. Usually it's not very open, and he's only been in it once or twice. When we arrived at the house at the entrance of the portrait stone tomb, we walked around, and after seeing the sign of the national key cultural relics protection unit, we came to Yangshan Academy. It is said that it is a academy, but in fact there is only one building, two wall gates, and half a courtyard, which is particularly elegant in the flowers and trees of Fusu. When the academy first opened, Huang Zongxi came here to give lectures, and the existing building is said to be a remnant of the destruction of the battle of Hong Yang, but it has a unique taste. Our group visited and took pictures upstairs and downstairs, in the courtyard corridor, and lingered for a while.
After coming out of Haining Middle School, we went to look for the Chang'an Lock of the Grand Canal. The museum by the Shangtang River, the "Grand Canal (Chang'an Gate) Heritage Exhibition Hall", has been closed, and we walked along the river to the site of the Chang'an Gate. It was reconstructed on the site of the old dam of the canal at the end of the Yuan Dynasty according to the archaeology of 2012, and the site of the dam was overturned. The site of the ruins is built with a dam reel, a winch and other things, and a pavilion covered with a grass roof, which is quite elegant.
From Hongqiao along the Shangtang River to and from Chang'an Gate, see the waterfront dwellings on the opposite bank, the river port revetment, there is still the old style, a number of dwellings build a water pavilion, there are one or two water pavilions also build a river port, prompting the prosperity of this canal commercial town in the past.
At the end of the Yuan Dynasty, Zhang Shicheng presided over the excavation of the river channel from the rising bridge of the Chengjiang River in Hangzhou to Tangqi, and the canal to the north no longer passed through Chang'an from the Shangtang River through Linping, and the status of the Chang'an Gate was reduced. According to records, the scale of the Chang'an Old Dam built at the end of the Yuan Dynasty was far inferior to the Chang'an Gate in the Song Dynasty. In a hut near the river at the site, there is a piece of "New and Old Two Dams Showing the Prohibition of Extortion Tablet", Haining Zhizhou Wang Zhaomin stood on the 22nd day of the first month of the eighth year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty (1882), which forbade the dam to extort and make things difficult for passing ships. It can be seen that the Shangtang River was still an important waterway until the Qing Dynasty, and the Chang'an Gate still played a role. Some people say that the principle of the Yangtze River Dam lock is the same as that of the Chang'an lock, and I wonder if it was inspired by it.
The harvest of the trip to Chang'an Town was unexpected, and everyone was very happy. Jun Ying concluded that in this ancient town, we visited a world cultural heritage, a national key protection unit, and a provincial cultural relics protection unit, which are very complete and quite complete. Back in the city of Hangzhou, it is already the lights of thousands of homes. Zhenhua had already booked a private room in the "front and back of the hall" opened by his nephew, and greeted Junying and the three students in Mandarin, while Zhenhua and I always spoke in a local conversation. His nephew's self-brewed mellow rice wine and delicious special clear water fish make people feel that the statement that Hangzhou is a food desert is untrue. I remember that day Huanhuan was in the West Lake on the edge of the West Lake to do the east, the crab stuffed orange and other dishes were delicious, comparable to the lake and sky outside the window, Wen Bing, Colin and Dani all praised her as a gourmet, and she was naturally praised in Hangzhou Guoqing for many years. Inspired by the food and beautiful scenery, we agreed on the topic of the 7th Chinese Philosophy Forum on the topic of "Language Expression and Painting Expression".
Five
Since returning to Peking University to teach, every time I return to my hometown, I come in a hurry, and I feel guilty from time to time, and I often live in my hometown for a while, but I have not been able to implement it. This trip to Hangzhou has strengthened this idea, looking for a comfortable old town near the mountains and rivers, and playing in the mountains and rivers; sometimes going to the teahouse to talk with the local old people about the sea and the sky; you might as well sit down on a small bamboo chair in the streets and alleys and listen to the street people say that your parents are short; you might as well mingle under the pavilion and corridor of the park and listen to the world's major events and the truth of the world in the local sound; and you can even visit the young classmates to reminisce about the old days and only talk about the hometown.
However, this hometown roaming made me suddenly awaken, and the local sound has faded into an isolated island in its original hometown. When I left my hometown to go to Beijing to study, Jiangnan was still a colorful world of Wu dialects, from one village to another, from one city to another, people spoke different dialects, experienced the inconvenience of communication, and felt the unique charm of foreign dialects. Today, it has become an island and reef in the sea of Mandarin, and even in towns and villages, the common language of the people is Mandarin, and it is only when the people gathered together are mainly locals that the dialect emerges from the waters of Mandarin. My generation will be reluctant to witness their gradual disappearance, not only in my native language, but also in other dialects that I have spoken since childhood.
Originally, the dialects were also one by one, and the Wu dialect was divided into many small pieces, however, except for the Oujiang small piece, which is the Wenzhou dialect, most of the other small pieces can communicate with each other, although sometimes it is inevitably slightly difficult. The pronunciation and vocabulary of each township and village in the same small area will also be somewhat different, and the dialect varies from village to village and town to town. For example, around the city of Hangzhou, there are as many as four or five statements about me, you, him, and us, you, and them, so just these pronouns can roughly tell which village and which square the speaker is, not to mention, which region. The so-called mother tongue is the dialect of one village and one town. In the past, all kinds of people who spoke Hangzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Anhui, Northern Jiangsu and Mandarin spoke freely to each other in their own dialects, and they could talk enthusiastically without any sense of disobedience, while scolding people in their own dialects, the same insults and intimidations, in Heidegger's words, were easy to get started and more authentic. It was in this context that I learned Shanghainese before I had ever been to Shanghai. The burlesques popular in Shanghai and Hangzhou are reproducing this style. The characters in the play come from different regions, speak a variety of Wu dialects, and also speak northern dialects, and its smorgasbord of dialects is called funny, but it is a realistic scene of the world in the south of the Yangtze River.
The folk sound is integrated with the customs, architecture, system, and human sophistication of the township. Some feelings, emotions, attitudes, relationships, and even states can be expressed in dialects very appropriately, but it is difficult to find equivalent Mandarin words. Dialects make up a unique world. In classical China, Chinese characters as universal symbols constituted the framework of a sense of social commonality, but the daily life and history of the people were connected by vernacular sounds. Today, people are recalling the everyday social life of a particular region in a previous era, and it is inevitable to retell it in the modern form of language, which filters out many unique expressions of emotion, human affection and customs. This is where the diaphragm of historical narrative is created.
From the perspective of historical development, the decline and disappearance of dialects, like the decline and disappearance of those endangered languages, is an inevitable and irreversible trend. The reason for the formation of the dialect is that the people living in the settlement are isolated from their counterparts in other regions for a long time or have little communication. In fact, large-scale exchanges and migrations of people throughout history have also changed the distribution and development of languages and dialects. However, emotionally, literally, and artistically, without the native sound, nostalgia has lost its main basis. The local sound has melted in my blood since I started babbling, and when it fades away from my hometown, it slowly sticks to my mind. I think that the last sentence of my life may be spoken in a local voice that no one can understand, and it may be the murmur of returning to my hometown.
April 6, 2023
Revised on August 1, 2023