Cover news reporter Zhang Jie
Regarding the tea houses in Chengdu, we can see more from the description of literature than from the narrative of history. For example, Li Jieren's "Before the Storm" and "Big Wave" have many scenes that take place in a tea shop in Chengdu. In his famous short story "In Its Fragrant Teahouse", Satin describes the life of a teahouse in a small town near Chengdu, and this novel is also a reproduction of his own experience. Sha Ting has a special love for tea houses, and even believes that there is no life without tea houses in Sichuan. In the view of historian Wang Di, "Literature sometimes does a better job than historiography in showing the details of history." ”
In October 2021, Wang Di's non-fictional new work "The Tea Shop on the Corner of the Street" was published by the People's Literature Publishing House. As always, Wang Di, who is known for his "micro history", has focused on ordinary people, jumped out of the research mode of emperors and generals and heroic elites, and written a history of people's life with a downward vision. Wang Di's research on Chengdu tea shops, from the 1990s to 2018 around 2018, after more than 20 years of exploration, published academic monographs such as "Tea House: Chengdu's Public Life and the Watching World (1900-1950)", which has achieved great success in academic circles.
Wang Di advocated that academic research should not be separated from public reading. Therefore, he not only pays special attention to the smooth and readable nature of the text in academic monographs, but also devotes a lot of energy to the popular expression of the text and communicates with the general readers. "The Tea Shop on That Street Corner" is another attempt by Wang Di to translate academic research into public reading after "The Vanishing Ancient City".
Full, dense, rich in detail, as well as vivid, fluid and restrained narration, coupled with objective, rational and multi-dimensional analysis, this work forms a simple, fresh and passionate style. Wang Di said that writing this book is "completely for the public to read, try to describe more vividly, more meticulously, and more storytelling." ”
With microscopic historiography and literary descriptions, it recreates the old Chengdu tea shop
Wang Di advocates that historical writing should be literary, and has practiced cross-border writing for many years, spanning many fields such as history, anthropology, sociology and literature, so we have also seen that in Wang Di's historical works, many literary works, such as Li Jieren's novels, have been used, making a model for "documenting history". This is also evident in "The Tea Shop on That Corner". In this book, Wang Di sets his sights on the Chengdu tea shop from 1900 to 1950. He comprehensively used official archives, modern novels and Chengdu bamboo branches and other materials, with the research orientation of microhistory and the literary writing technique of deep painting, vividly showing the daily life of Chengdu tea shops and the overall social appearance presented in the public space of tea shops.
Chengdu is not the only city that uses tea houses as a market, but in Wang Di's view, "no tea house in any place can play so many and so many functions in the lives of ordinary people like Chengdu." Through reading a large number of historical materials, field investigations and personal experience, he found that in Chengdu from 1900 to 1950, the relationship between Chengdu people and tea shops and tea houses was close: buying "fresh boiled water", listening to stories, adjudicating disputes, finding jobs, meeting friends, chatting, watching plays, listening to commentaries, playing chess, talking about business, etc. As with cafes, hotels and bars in early modern Europe and the United States, the social function of Chengdu tea shops goes far beyond the mere meaning of being a place for leisure.
In Wang Di's view, to some extent, in modern history, a tea table reflects the connection between people. The social and cultural roles played by Chengdu tea shops are more complex than similar spaces in the West. They are not only places where people relax, pastime and entertain, but also places of work and stages of local politics. Western travelers to Chengdu at the time also noticed the commercial function of teahouses, and in Chengdu in the 1920s, the American geographer Hubbard discovered that teahouses were not only places for public chatter, but also that "most of the business was also in and out of business."
He often saw "merchants anxious to meet their business partners in teahouses, where vendors used whistles, gongs, castanets, etc. to attract buyers." "The tea shop is half the home of Chengdu people. Many people have small, rudimentary, and dark houses, not a place to stay for a long time, and those who can't stand loneliness at night have to go to the tea shop to have fun. In times of social unrest, tea shops are also the best places for people to escape from real suffering, at least to seek a little comfort there, or to temporarily forget the pain of real life.
To Wang Di's surprise, the tradition of drinking tea has also been preserved in modern Chengdu. "When I was doing teahouse research at the turn of the century, I often asked some elders to conduct interviews, and they almost all had to go to the teahouse to meet. They often meet friends in teahouses without an appointment, and tea customers generally have teahouses they regularly go to. ”
Wang Flute
From Zitong Bridge to Bluestone Bridge
There are good memories of Wang Di's youth
Wang Di was born in Chengdu in 1956 and lived in the compound of No. 2 Buhou Street in Chengdu until 1965. "There are two stone lions on the left and two on the right at the door, two black-painted gates, high thresholds, and inside the walls outside the gates, there are also stone horse stakes embedded in them. In the past, it was a few sets of courtyards of the family clan, which had pavilions, long corridor arches, fake landscapes, fruit trees and flowers, and became the seat of the organs of the Sichuan Provincial Federation of Literature and Literature. ”
Unlike Wang Di's other academic works, Wang Di expressed his strong personal memories and juvenile experience of the tea house as a Chengdu native in "The Tea Shop on that Street Corner". He even painted 19 illustrations for the book, "learning to paint from a young age, but in the end he did not complete his dream of becoming an artist." By drawing these illustrations, it is also a reliving of the dreams of teenagers. This book expresses my feelings and understanding of the tea shop not only in words, but also in the form of paintings. In this way, this book is the latest result of my combination of history, literature and art. ”
In Wang Di's recollection, "Buhou Street is a typical Chengdu alley, and when you go out, you will be Zitong Bridge and Fuxing Street, and if you continue to move forward, it will be a lively area such as Jinjiang Theater, Commercial Field, and Zongfu Street." I actually moved out of there more than fifty years ago, but my childhood memories are still so fresh. ...... From a very young age, I was infected with the kind of city pyrotechnics we call today. The impression that a city leaves on a person is often something that repeats every day in daily life, and that experience is deeply imprinted in his mind and melted in his own blood. There is a tea shop on Zitong Bridge. It was always packed, smoky, full of people, bamboo chairs with handrails polished like brass, three-piece bowls of tea, a dozen pig iron teapots burning on the fire, plus a tiger stove with a large water urn... That's the tea shop on the corner that I've been popping into my mind all my life, going back and forth into my dreams. ”
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