Written by Zhu Haiyan
[a]
The Xiqi River is a river in my hometown, and every time I want to write something for it, I can't roll up the waves of emotions in my pen, not because I don't love it, but I really don't know much about it.
In the vast northern Anhui Plain, the Xiqi River is a medium river between the Yinghe River and the Vortex River, and later because a new river was excavated - the Cihuai New River, for the people of northern Anhui who have not seen the big river, they are regarded as veritable big rivers, they are important tributaries of the Huai River.
/Anhui Lixin Xiqi River scenery (picture source: network)/
The Xiqi River originates in Henan, one says that the source is in Luyi County, Henan, and the other says that the source is in Taikang County, Henan. Although the Xiqi River is the mother river of the Lixin people, no one in the Lixin people has seriously explored its source, whether it is in Luyi or Taikang. It flows through Bozhou, Taihe, Wuyang, Lixin and Yingshang, and flows into the Huai River at the gorge pass of Fengtai, with a total length of 250 kilometers and a basin area of 4,750 square kilometers.
Xiqi River, known as Xia Feishui in ancient times. "Water Classic: Huai Shui Note" said: "Huai Shui is north, and summer fertilizer water is injected into it." "History of the Ming Dynasty and Geographical Chronicles" called West Fertilizer Water. The Geographical Chronicles of the Qing Dynasty called the Xiqi River.
/The place where the Xiqi River enters the Huai River, the first gorge of the Huai River, the scenery of the gorge (picture source network)/
The gorge pass where the Xiqi River enters the Huai River, the hills on both sides of this place are secluded, the Huai water loops back, the surging Huai water flows eastward, encounters the Bagong Mountain to block, turns back and flows backwards here, splits the gorge stone into two halves, grabs the road and goes down, forms the first gorge of the Huai River - the gorge mountain pass. The natural geographical environment here has been deified by the people, saying that this gorge is the mountain gorge dug when Yu controlled the water. Believe it or not, this story has been circulating among the people for thousands of years.
However, there is one point, this place is the Huaishang Yaojin in ancient times, and it is one of the important battlefields of the Battle of Weishui. This is an indisputable fact.
The gorge pass is also the Huaihe River tour resort, climb the Kip Stone, visit the old ruins of King Yu, watch the Huaishui blue waves, put yourself in the Huaishang fairyland, witness the "Gorge Stone Qinglan", the sail sand gulls, the willows on the shore are lightly blowing, which makes people feel refreshed and happy. Kip stone is divided into East Gorge Stone and West Gorge Stone, and East Gorge Stone is close to Sanfeng Mountain, standing majestically. The West Kip Stone used to be the next cliff of Yuwang Mountain, and now it has been opened into a small island, the mainstay, the island shadow is like a turtle, it is still magnificent. On the southeast cliff, the inscription "Building the City" of Shouyang Xia Song during the Song Xianchun period is still recognizable. On Kip Stone Island, set up a pavilion, it is the "Comfort Agricultural Pavilion" rebuilt in the Qing Dynasty, commonly known as "Yuwang Pavilion", an ancient soaphorn tree in the west of the pavilion, is the symbol of the scenic spot of Kip Stone.
/Kip Stone Mountain Island (Image source network)/
The Xiqi River flows from its source to the place where it enters the Huai, probably the most classic and most brilliant pen and ink are written in the gorge pass, and the rest of the way is ordinary and inexplicable, there are no well-known mountains and rivers, and there is no thrilling moving story. Therefore, the Xiqi River is a civilian river, and there are not many towns under the jurisdiction of counties and cities, not to mention county-level cities. In recent years, after the county seat of Lixin extended westward to the east bank of the Xifei River, the city approached it for the first time. It is very much like a beautiful and shy young girl, always hiding from people, hiding from the prosperity, hiding from the hustle and bustle, silently walking through the land of Huaibei, silently conveying sweet milk to both sides of the river.
The Xiqi River is not only a civilian river, but also a purely rural river.
The river of my hometown is the river of my mother, no matter how deep or shallow my understanding of it is, how much or less I know, but it always flows in my heart day and night, and always flows in my dreams.
[b]
My second brother still lives in a small town not far from the east bank of the Xiqi River. He belonged to the literati in that county, and every once in a while, there were always some articles describing the rules and customs of the countryside in the newspapers, and several monographs describing the customs and customs of his hometown came out. However, his pen and ink never penetrated into the blue waves of the Xiqi River, and I think this may be the reason why the Xiqi River article is not very easy to do. The article on Xiqihe is not easy to do because its cultural heritage is too thin. If there are Li Bai and Su Dongpo left on this river, if there are words and chapters of Qu Yuan and Du Fu left on this river, or there are stories on this river that happened on the Dadu River and Jinsha River. Then some writers and poets in Shanghai and even Hefei will flock to it, and in its waves, they will definitely pull out earth-shattering stories to harvest the light of each of its waves. However, that's what it lacks. Of course, some local people and writers also cited a lot of stories when writing about the Xiqi River, and after thinking about it carefully, those romantic and borderless stories are all apocryphal legends made up to whitewash the Xiqi River, and there is no evidence. This may be the reason why some writers are reluctant to pay too much attention to the Mexican River.
/Anhui Lixin Xiqihe Wetland Park Northern Anhui Water Town Scenery (Image Source Network)/
If you talk to the elderly about the stories that happened on both sides of the Xiqi River, it is not tasteless, and the taste is the same as chewing wax. Some events are not inferior to the details of Mo Yan's "Red Sorghum", and there are also stories on both sides of the Xiqi River that happened in the northeast depression of Gaomi County written by Mo Yan. In the past, there was the prosperity of bandits, the tragedy of fighting with the Japanese, the miracle of bandits and the New Fourth Army joining hands to resist Japan, and a communist with the pseudonym Hufu went deep into Zhangcunpu on the bank of the Xiqi River to lead the struggle against Japan, and wrote a glorious epic.
Also, Xiqihe still has an inseparable flesh-and-blood connection with me, the Zhu family. At that time, my ancestors migrated from Anhui to Jinling, and from Jinling to Yanshan. For a period of time, he moved from the capital to a place called Liangxiang on the outskirts of Beijing. On a snowy night, for some reason, the ancestor moved from Liangxiang to the bank of the Xiqi River in the land of Yinghuai. The fertile fields here nurtured them, and due to the multiplication of the population, the land where the ancestors settled slowly became a market town called "Shunheji". I checked the county records of Lixin, but I did not find the place name "Shunheji". Later, the person who repaired the ancestral genealogy of my family told me that "Shunhe Ji" is now Zhu Ji. It is built along the Xixi River, so it is called "Shunhe Collection". From here, you can imagine how many times my ancestors traveled and investigated before settling their family on the banks of the Xiqi River. It was the Xiqi River that took in my ancestors and fed generations of my fellow Zhu with its milk. Today, the tomb of the ancestor is located on the south bank of the Xiqi River, and he listened to the sound of the Xiqi River day and night, as he did when he was alive......
/The author and his uncle and brother took a photo in Wangjiaba, Funan/
The second brother persuaded me more than once to write about the Xiqi River, which has been in the smoke and willows for many years. So, the Xiqi River in my hometown once again stirred up my thoughts, made me sleepy, made me helpless, made me want to put down but couldn't put it down, wanted to pick it up but couldn't pick it up. I regret that when I picked up the pen, I did not go to the vast and profound history of the Xiqi River from the older generation, and now I can no longer reach its profound and boundless past with only superficial cognition. However, I could not let go of the charming and beautiful river of my hometown, which was like a river of wine, which drunk me, confused me, and excited me, and made me suffer from endless emotions that I could not stop......
I'm starting to want to write about the Xiqi River.
I don't want to write it too deep or too far, because the magnificent historical events and complex contradictions that are isomorphic to the Huaibei Plain and the structure of that era will appear in another text of my conception. In this article, I just want to play the "noisy stage", beat the "side drum", and report to the river of my hometown, and I am approaching it step by step......
In order to write this short article, I chose a leisure day, in the territory of Lixin County, I drove my own car, and walked along the Xiqi River from village to village, it was a rare and pleasant day! Let me grasp the slender and long wisps of Wensi! After the Xiqi River from the upstream entered the territory of Lixin County, there turned a big curve there, and there was a dense willow forest growing in the bay, and from the soft waves of the river, the willow forest was sparse and unequal to the embankment of the river. On the embankment is a flat, curving asphalt road, and on the right side of the road is an elm forest that runs along the embankment. The villages in the embrace of the river bay, one is called Zhangzhai and the other is called Wang Village, they are all surrounded by green trees, and my footsteps to collect wind start from there.
/Villages on the banks of the Xiqi River (Image source network)/
And the arrangement of the wind collection is very consistent with my imagination.
The villages along the Xiqi River are all two- or three-story buildings with white walls and red tiles, and the willow forest at the head of the village is leisurely strolling with foraging sheep, and occasionally the whip of the shepherd sounds, but I don't know which big tree the shepherd is hiding behind. I sat on a bench of a century-old Tsubaki tree at the head of the village with strange villagers and chatted freely, and the topic of conversation was not related to the issue of GDP, which was the concern of the county magistrate and secretary. The villagers on the banks of the Xiqi River are concerned about whether the sons and daughters working in Shanghai and Suzhou will be unemployed due to the relocation of factories, how many eggs can be laid a day on the butt of chickens, and whether the Sichuan girl found by the grandson who works in other places can become his granddaughter-in-law in the real world. The issue of GDP growth is not a topic they talk about, nor can it enter the context of their conversation. Don't say that these villagers who have no duties and powers, dare to talk about the provincial governor and the prime minister while watching TV, and dare to criticize the officials of the United Nations, don't know what GDP is, even the secretary of the village branch who rides a battery car to inspect work all year round does not seem to understand the word GDP. The villagers who are digging in the soil are concerned about how much their pockets have bulged this year, how much money they have earned, how much money they have left for their children and grandchildren to marry their daughters-in-law, and whether the government can reimburse them for more medical expenses for hospitalization.
The villagers counted the accounts with their fingers, saying that the number of people in their village who went to Shanghai and Suzhou to work, and guessed their income. They said that a man named Goudan in the village, who sold jade and jade in Shanghai, met a wealthy businessman in Shanghai, made a lot of money over the years, and bought a house in Shanghai and bought 7 sets. Another fellow villager told me that there was a man named Blackface in their village who was doing business in Hangzhou, what kind of business he was doing, and he did not disclose to the villagers that he drove a Mercedes-Benz and the clothes he was wearing, and he spent 100,000 yuan on firecrackers alone during the Spring Festival.
The black-faced father is an honest farmer who has never spoken wildly all his life, but after his son became rich, he suddenly couldn't help but say to the villagers: "If there are people living in the family, I will build a villa with a black face, and it can be built from our village to Zhangcunpu." ”
This startled the whole village. "Obediently, this village by the Xiqi River, to Zhangcunpu is a few kilometers, a rural villa is 500,000 yuan, how many villas can be built in a few kilometers? And this precedent actually appeared on the bank of the Xiqi River where rabbits were so poor in the past that they didn't.
/Scenery on the banks of the Xiqi River (picture source network)/
In the village where I picked up, there were two girls who went to Ningbo to work, because they were educated and handsome, and they married young men from Ningbo, and their parents were retired cadres. After retiring, they actually drove from Ningbo to a remote and quiet small village on the bank of the Xiqi River in northern Anhui, and lived in a down-to-earth manner. They opened their mouths and closed their mouths to say that the air, water, and people by the Xiqi River are good, and it is a good environment for people to live in the old age.
I walked along the Xiqi River for two days, one village and one village, twists and turns, picking up a string of stories of water spirits washed by the water of the Xiqi River.
I talked to my second brother about the experience and harvest of collecting wind along the Xiqi River in the past two days. He said that such things are not a rare news phenomenon in Lisin, and that they can be found in any village in the county. The county has a population of more than 1.7 million, although the population in the household registration book is still unchanged in Lixin, but in fact, there are no less than 100,000 people in the county who buy real estate in Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Hefei and other places.
(Image source: Internet)
The decades of reform and opening up have formed the largest wave of immigration in China since ancient times. This wave of migration broke through the dual structure of urban and rural areas that restricted people's free development, and transformed the identity of hundreds of millions of peasants from peasants to urban people. The villagers did not rely on the sky, the earth, or the immortal emperor, but relied on their own unyielding struggle to change their poor fate
Yes, I left the well to go to my hometown for half a century, living at home in the north, how many times I looked at the moon in the starry night, how many times I climbed high and raised my eyes to count geese, and in my endless thoughts, I always thought about the old face of my hometown. But in my endless thoughts, my hometown has undergone earth-shaking changes. The river is still the same river, the village is still the same village, and the content of life is no longer yesterday's scene.
Being in the city, busy all day long with things that are important but not very important, and working hard for those literary words that correspond to the situation, I actually pushed away and forgot my hometown river, the Xiqi River. What a pity!
[c]
I don't know how many towns and villages in Lixin County are located on the banks of the Xiqi River, but a few decades ago, a child in open crotch pants didn't care about these things that had nothing to do with him. However, there are two small towns a few kilometers on the west bank of the Xiqi River that I will never forget: Wangshi Town and Madian Town. The county seat, Wangshi, Madian these three places are an irregular triangle, the Xiqi River flows from northwest to southeast, the county seat is on the east bank of the Xiqi River, the two market towns are on the west bank of the Xiqi River, the two market towns have roads leading to the county seat, and Wangshi and Madian are on an oblique line from northwest to southeast, and the two places are about 15 kilometers apart.
And my village surnamed Zhu is in a straight line from east to west with the county seat, because the village is too small, and there have been no celebrities, more than 70 years after liberation, the county magistrate or the secretary of the county party committee, who have been regarded as scared to death by the common people, have never set foot in my village. Of course, there is another reason why they don't go, that is, it is separated by the Xiqi River. There is no bridge over the river, and the roads in the countryside are poor, so let the officials who take the small car go to inspect the villagers' three acres of soybeans and two acres of sorghum, and if they are so tired that their backs hurt, how can the villagers afford to be offended?
This geographical environment determines the difficulty for the villagers to go to the county once. Or take the South Road, pass through Madian Town, and turn to the northeast to the county seat. That highway is a famous provincial highway in Anhui, that is, Fubang Highway. About 3 kilometers away from the northeast of Madian Town, there is a highway bridge across the Xiqi River, so the place is called Xiaonigou, and the villagers call this majestic bridge "Xiaonigou Bridge". Looking northwest from the bridge, the riverbed is covered with weeping willows and aspens, and flocks of ducks and geese roam above the blue waters. Looking downstream, the southeasterly path of the river was not straight, and after turning a loess headland, it suddenly hid and disappeared from my sight. But I know that the Xiqi River has not stopped its footsteps, it is flowing into the distance, it is constantly flowing, from there it will run to the Huai River, to the Yangtze River, and to the East China Sea. Although I can't see the distant figure of the Xiqi River on the Xiaonigou Bridge, its will to go far has affected my life.
To the county seat, there is another feasible road to the north, that is, through Wangshi Town, turn southeast to the county seat. About 5 miles away from Wangshi Town, there is a highway bridge flying over the Xiqi River. Because this place is called Dabukou, the villagers call this bridge "Dabukou Bridge". In the past, there was a ferry here, about in the Ming Dynasty, a group of Jin merchants came here by boat, found that the west bank of the river has Wang City, Dongcheng Erji, the east bank of the river has Sun Ji, Yan Ji Erji, they think that this is the treasure of doing business, so they built a commercial port wharf here, called "Jin Port Mouth". Probably because of the large ferry, the locals call it "Dabukou". That group of Jin merchants, seeing that the four seasons here are distinct, the ground is as flat as a mirror, the wind and rain are smooth, and the people live a rich life, so they settled here. Now, many surnames say that they are the descendants of those Jin merchants.
/Lixin Madian Bridge under construction Renderings (picture source: Internet)/
Due to the age, Dabukou was shouted to change its tune, calling this place "Dabukou". In fact, "Dabukou" is its real name.
The highway from Wangshi to Lixin County is not a provincial highway, so the "Dabukou" bridge of the Xiqi River is not as magnificent as the small mud ditch bridge in the northeast of Madian Town. When the bridge was built, in order to save investment and reduce the length of the bridge, people built a highway bridge above the low riverbed, and the river flooded the bridge deck when the water of the Xiqi River rose sharply during the flood season. Therefore, people also call the Dabukou Bridge "Water Man Bridge".
There is no way to take the south road or the north road, and it is 40 miles from my village to the county seat. The villagers are very nervous when they go to the city to do errands, go to the county seat, and rush back and forth every day. At that time, most people who went to the city had to borrow bicycles from wealthy neighbors. In the 60s of the 20th century, in the extremely poor 60s of the 20th century, one or two families in three villages and four villages could afford to buy "flying pigeon", "permanent" and "phoenix" brand bicycles, which was extremely rare, and the peasants regarded entering the county seat as a rare luxury in life.
The Xiqi River is like a chain that traps the footsteps of the villagers!
Although the Xiqi River is the river of my hometown, I rarely had the opportunity to visit the Xiqi River when I was a teenager. The Zhuzhuang that gave birth to me is 8 kilometers away from the Xiqi River, which is not far away, and it is said that this distance is not far away. But I wasn't lucky. When I was less than 1 year old, my aunt, who had no children, told me to be her son. My aunt's home was in a market town called Yongxingji, and I spent my childhood in that town as an ignorant child and a little bit of knowledge. Yongxing Ji is 8 kilometers away from the village where I was born, and 8 kilometers plus 8 kilometers is 16 kilometers. The distance of 16 kilometers from the Xiqi River is a distance of heaven for me. (To be continued)
/Photos from left to right: Li Wubing, Ran Huaizhou, Zhu Haiyan, Yi Lei/
Introduction of Zhu Haiyan
Zhu Haiyan, a native of Lixin, Anhui Province, enlisted in the army in 1976 and served as a soldier, platoon commander, deputy instructor, and cultural officer of the division's Political Department in the Seventh Division of the Railway Corps.
In 1983, he was transferred to the "Railway Soldier" newspaper, and in February 1984, he was transferred to the "People's Railway" newspaper and served as a reporter, chief reporter and chief reporter. In 1998, he served as editor-in-chief, president and editor-in-chief of China Railway Construction News, and a senior reporter. In March 2010, he was transferred to the Engineering Management Center of the Ministry of Railways as the deputy director at the bureau level, specializing in the writing of railway construction reports.
The winners of the 6th Fan Changjiang Journalism Award are the "four batches" of talents in the national propaganda system, leading figures in China's press and publishing circles, and senior experts directly controlled and contacted by the central government. He has won the China Journalism Award eight times, won the first and second prizes of provincial and ministerial news awards more than 90 times, and won the "Five One Project" award of the Central Propaganda Department for his long-form reportage "There is War in the North". He has published 40 collections of various works, with a total word count of 20 million words. He enjoys the allowance of the State Council and is a member of the Chinese Writers Association.
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