The first impression of Shaxi is that the shadows of light and shadow, plants and houses cast on the yellow wall. Sunny, quiet and deserted, old houses, cobblestone alleys. Walking to a square, the shadows of the trees covered the masonry floor, and my heart was shocked. Looking up, I saw only a vigorous and lush old locust tree, and I remembered a sentence in "Snow Country": Looking up, the Milky Way seems to make a noise and pour down on the heart.
This is the heart of Shaxi Ancient Town, Sifang Street, where ancient opera stages, Xingjiao Temple and rows of Mabang shops stand. An old man sat on a wooden stake stool in front of the horse shop inn, eating the melon seeds in his hand, and the relish made me almost want to put down the camera and go over to him to eat. There were originally two century-old locust trees in the square, and there was a play "Double Locust" in the repertoire performed on the stage. When the square was restored more than a decade ago, one of the old trees died, the roots fell, and people planted another one in the same location to grow up.
Imagine how lively the horse gang was resting in the shade of the trees and the market was bustling. Today, Shaxi is the only surviving ancient market on the Tea Horse Ancient Road, behind the Shaxi revival project that has cost 14 million yuan in the past 20 years.
Shaxi is located between the two famous tourist cities of Lijiang and Dali, which belongs to Jianchuan County, but because it is not along the Dali Expressway (Dali-Lijiang), not many tourists know about it. It takes nearly two hours to drive from Dali or Lijiang to Shaxi, and the shuttle bus requires a transfer to Jianchuan. The Shaxi branch line of the Hejianlan Expressway is scheduled to open to traffic on September 30, 2021, and those who like Shaxi are worried that after the traffic becomes convenient, will Shaxi become another ancient town destroyed by tourism development?
Sunset in the ancient town (Luo Yi/Photo)
<h3>520-year-old tree</h3>
When I visited Shaxi in winter, I thought I would meet an ancient town that was slightly depressed. Unexpectedly, the warm sun during the day was basking, and the temperature could rise to 20 degrees, so I quickly took off my heavy down jacket. Locals told me that the annual temperature difference in Shaxi is small, the daily temperature difference is large, and it can avoid cold in winter and summer.
In Shaxi, the sense of season is a bit blurred. There are both lush evergreen trees and large trees whose leaves have fallen only their branches, standing tall and solemn, and ginkgo biloba, and the golden leaves swaying in the wind. The houses are only one or two stories high, and the trees are particularly tall.
The oldest tree in Shaxi is probably the yellow tree near Dongzhai Gate, 520 years old. But the star tree in winter should be a persimmon tree: stretching out in the courtyard deep in the alley, the low wall can't stop it, causing passers-by to stop and look up and take pictures. The leaves of the persimmon tree have fallen out, and the fruit is covered with yellow, orange and orange, which makes people hungry. Walking into the yard under the persimmon tree, it turned out to be a homestay, but it could not be found on the booking platform. The boss said while peeling persimmons that he would only accept offline customers. On the persimmon trees, there are already many strings of peeled persimmons for drying, as well as the wishes of the residents of "persimmon ruyi".
"Persimmon Ruyi" (Luo Yi/Photo)
When the afternoon sun becomes softer, go to the creek to see those golden willow branches and blue sky projected in the water, the charm of Jiangnan water town, which can also be encountered in this southwest plateau.
The trees of Shaxi are not alone, they represent the years, represent the historical traces of this place have been preserved, as well as the original layout of the ancient town, the gates, the streets, the old houses... Those ancient towns and villages that do not have old trees, or places where old trees are left behind but many new houses are built to destroy the pattern, there must be no atmosphere like Shaxi.
Plateau Water Town (Luo Yi/Photo)
<h3>The Tea Horse Ancient Road Market, which began with the salt trade</h3>
There are not many era slogans left by Shaxi. On the yellow wall of an old house, there are both ink-colored vertical rows of "Purple Qi Donglai", which is a common poetry painting decoration in Bai houses, and red horizontal large-character slogans "Resolutely eliminate schistosomiasis", the two overlap, competing for who can stay on the wall longer. Another prominent sign is on Sifang Street: "China wants to be rich and strong, the nation must be prosperous, and the population must be controlled." "The house is now a café.
Sifang Street is named after the topography, and the square square is surrounded by a circle of shops, and the east and west sides are the Kui Ge Belt Stage and the Xingjiao Temple. Sifang Street is a temple before there is a street, how to form a market on the Tea Horse Ancient Road, from the geographical environment of Shaxi. Shaxi is connected to north-south traffic, surrounded by many salt wells, including Nuodeng Well, Misha Well, Qiao Hou Well, etc., the terrain is relatively flat and open, and Shaxi, which has convenient transportation, has become a salt trading center. And because Shaxi is rich in rice, "Xu Xia's Travels" records that "the rice valley from Shaxi is very prosperous, and Jianchuan Prefecture comes to take enough", starting from the salt and rice that people must live in, to a variety of food and daily necessities, the scale of shaxi's market gradually expanded, the horse gang came and went, and the market site was located not far south of today's Sifang Street.
In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, the Xingjiao Temple was built near the market, and when people came to the market, they would go to the incense to worship the Buddha, and over time, the market moved to the open space in front of the Xingjiao Temple. In the Qing Dynasty, a Kui Pavilion with a stage was built opposite the Xingjiao Temple, which is said to be so that the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the temple can enjoy with the people. Shops and horse shops built around the bazaar were enclosed to form the pattern of today's Four Square Street. Every month there is a market, people with pine torches rush to the night market, drink on the ground, sing and dance, men and women meet, lively. At first, the locals called the market "Si Deng Street", which means "the market of the place where the temple is" in bai dialect, and later, Si Deng Street became the name of the village where the Xingjiao Temple and the bazaar were located, and the street where the market was located was called Sifang Street. Shaxi Town administratively includes a number of villages centered on Si Deng Street, but when people refer to Shaxi or the ancient town, they often refer specifically to Si Deng Street.
Yujin Bridge Morning Mist (Luo Yi/Photo)
In 2001, Shaxi was included in the List of 100 World Endangered Architectural Sites worth noting in 2002 by the World Memorial Architecture Foundation (WMF), "the Shaxi (Si Deng Street) area in China is the only surviving market on the Tea Horse Trail, with intact stages, inns, temples and gates, making this market that connects Tibet and South Asia quite complete." This simple description changed the fate of Shaxi and became the starting point of the later Shaxi revival project.
The Institute of Space and Landscape Studies of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic University is actively seeking funding at home and abroad, and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation has become one of the main funders for the Shaxi Rehabilitation Project. In the end, the total amount of funds raised, including the matching funds of governments at all levels such as Yunnan Province, Dali Prefecture and Jianchuan County, exceeded 2 million US dollars. In 2002, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology sent a project team to Shaxi, and Huang Yinwu, a Chinese student who was studying at the school at the time, came to Shaxi to become a bridge between Swiss experts and local teams. Unexpectedly, this revival project lasted for nearly 20 years, Huang Yinwu is already a middle-aged man in his 40s, who bought a yard in Shaxi and settled down, and his father will often come to live and paint in Shaxi.
Pastoral scenery (Luo Yi/Photo)
<h3>Repair Square Street</h3>
"Teacher Huang's book ('Reading Time in Shaxi') I helped him sell many copies, charity sales." Grandma Ari, who runs a souvenir shop on Square Street, said.
Grandma Ari can be said to be the "Internet celebrity" of Sifang Street, as soon as she heard that I wanted to take a picture, she immediately took off her cotton coat and hid it in the store, put on a hat, and sat upright in front of the store with a small bench. "Hi yo cold me", after I finished taking the photo, Grandma Ari quickly put on her coat. These days Grandma Ari sells persimmon cakes at the entrance of the store, sweet and sticky, for as long as two dollars a piece. The grandmother is a native of hualong village nearby, and the annual rent of this shop on Sifang Street is more than 20,000 yuan, and the government has given a preferential treatment, which is about half of the market price.
The restoration of Sifang Street is one of the first projects launched in the Shaxi Revitalization Project, and its top priority is the restoration of the Kuige Theatre Stage. The Kui Pavilion with stage includes two parts, the Kui Pavilion and the Stage, which enshrine the statue of the KuiXing (the god in charge of the Meritorious Examination), and integrates the functions of worship and entertainment. The restoration of Kui Ge solved the problems of column distortion and beam and column dismounting, so that the dying Kui Ge regained a youthful and healthy body, but on the surface it looked almost exactly the same as before the restoration.
The restored Kui Pavilion with theatre is not only a cultural relic, but also a pavilion and two wings transformed into a showroom showing local history, culture and customs, and the stage has occasional performances and filming activities. When restoring, the functionality of cultural heritage is fully taken into account, and restoration is carried out with the idea of sustainable development, only in this way can the life of cultural heritage be truly continued.
The temperature plummets to nearly zero at night, but I still like to go out and hang out, the streets are clean and deserted at night, and the stage is even more beautiful than during the day— the well-designed warm spotlights are just right to illuminate the algae wells and beams and pillars, and the two wood-carved phoenixes under the cornices are spreading their wings.
Sifang Street Big Locust Tree and Kui Pavilion with Stage (Luo Yi/Photo)
"Monster! Where to run? ”
In Huang Yinwu's book, the ones who spent the most ink on the restoration story were in addition to the KuiGe belt stage and the Xingjiao Temple, as well as the horse shop. There is a row of horse shops on the north side of Sifang Street, and on the outside it appears that the columns and façade are still sloping to the east, but the internal structure has been reinforced. They embody Huang Yinwu's understanding of "the most ideal architectural heritage restoration" - they think they have not been repaired, but in fact, the problems in the building have been solved.
It is said that these horse shops have been converted into inns, and before the epidemic, many blonde foreigners were staying, but unfortunately the door was closed when I went. What happened to the Ouyang compound of the "five-star horse shop" on Si Deng Street?
The gate of the Ouyang compound is very grand, with intricate carvings, but when you walk in, it is an alley, the wall on the right side of the alley is overgrown, and the left is the main entrance of the Ouyang family. Further ahead of the main entrance to the end there is a small gate, which is the entrance to the stables of the old days, so that horses can enter the stables without going through the main entrance. Interestingly, there are two monkeys painted on the stable door, which is probably the lower mortal bow horse Wen.
The Ouyang Compound is a typical Bai residential three-square-one-wall structure. The small garden on the north side of the north wing is also a wall of three squares and one wall, and the small garden is a horse shop where the horse pot heads (horse gang leaders) live, and there is a small door leading to the stables. At that time, there will be a drama class performance in the small garden, and the two sides of the box can see the performance of the stage by pushing the window, so that the horse pot heads can sit in their rooms to watch the play, do not need to worry about the safety of valuable goods in the room, it is indeed a "five-star horse shop"!
The compound has been relatively well restored, and the second-floor windows overlook the railing and the distant mountains are in sight. The rooms were empty, except for the small garden where the plants grew luxuriantly, and a few small birds pecked at the fruit in the treetops. I was the only tourist, but the background voice was the "Journey to the West" series, "Monster! Where to run? "Could it be that the monkey on the wall of the stable is the Qitian Great Saint Sun Wukong?" The sound comes from the gatehouse with the doors and windows closed, it is the uncle who is watching the drama, thinking back to that year, perhaps the stage here has also staged the Journey to the West.
The Ouyang courtyard is free to open, and it is very comfortable to sit in the courtyard and bask in the sun, but because it is not on the main street, very few tourists will come to visit, there is no explanation or decoration instructions, and the audience is not clear. The Ouyang Compound, which took a lot of effort to repair, has not yet been able to truly come back to life like the Kui Pavilion with the Stage and the Xingjiao Temple. When I was listening to a play on the wall of the small garden, a girl in a light Chinese dress ran in and asked me to take a picture of her in the garden, and then hurried away after taking pictures.
Whose yard is busy drying (Luo Yi/photo)
<h3>Postal Savings Bank is not "green" anymore</h3>
A friend once asked me why I liked Shaxi, and I couldn't say a specific reason for half a day except to say that "it's comfortable to hang out". Later, I suddenly woke up to the fact that the comfort is because there is no very abrupt thing to destroy the overall atmosphere of the ancient town, and everywhere it looks like "it should be", in fact, behind it is the repair and planning that cannot see the traces of force. The chicken soup that "you have to work hard to look effortless" also applies to the restoration of the ancient town -
The public toilets are beautiful and clean and harmoniously integrated into the surrounding environment, the meters on the walls are hidden in wooden boxes, the electric towers are made into a few chaotic "pine trees", there are elegant street lamps and stone lanterns by the creek outside the village, the roofs and eaves of the old houses are just right to illuminate the outline of the building without dazzling lights, and the lights under the canals of The Square Street illuminate the babbling water... All shops use unpainted wood signboards, including the Postal Savings Bank of China, which is always green elsewhere, and has become a log color when coming to Shaxi. When I lived in Kyoto, I often admired the perfection of its historic district protection regulations, and the 7-ELEVEN and Starbucks signs changed from green to brown according to the main color of the ancient capital, and I was glad to see the same phenomenon in Shaxi.
The handwritten couplets and small poems pasted on wooden doors that can be seen everywhere in Shaxi also often stop and admire. Every household is different, and often points out the local characteristics of Shaxi: "The mountain is not old, the water is endless, the fish and rice town is endless." Passing by a demolished and empty courtyard, only the gate remains, and the connection on the door frame is still intact: "Relatives and friends are ashamed and difficult to pay, and the loving mother is deeply grateful and unreported", and the horizontal criticism of "touching guests and sentimentality" is touching. While other ancient towns and villages are increasingly eroded by vulgar chicken soup slogans and extensive billboards, Shaxi silently adheres to the Confucian culture of the shili family.
I heard that Shaxi only had the opportunity to visit many years later, and it was not too late to meet and hate. It does not have a souvenir shop for yiwu purchases, no noisy bars, and no "net red punch point". There are many cafes, and I heard that there are more foreigners than Chinese in Shaxi during the epidemic, which has created a coffee atmosphere in Shaxi. Drinking coffee at the window of the Square Street is very pleasant, watching the clouds cirrus in the sky, watching people come and go under the shade of the big locust tree, watching the sky gradually turn blue, and the brightly lit Kui Ge belt stage is shining.
See the picturesque tree shadows on the gables of the old house (Locke/Photo)
However, don't think of Shaxi as a kind of isolated paradise, it just walks relatively slowly. Ye Zi, a Xinjiang girl, traveled to Shaxi and returned here to open a small Japanese restaurant with only one table and live upstairs. There are many young people in foreign countries like Ye Zi, who stay because they like the atmosphere of Shaxi, and they bask in the sun and read books on days when there is little business, and they are not too anxious to make money. There are more locals engaged in homestays and catering, and like other commercial ancient towns, locals sell their houses and move out, and outsiders flock to open shops, which has not yet appeared on a large scale in Shaxi. The lady owner of Longfeng Halal Restaurant told me that business in 2020 is better than before the epidemic, even in the winter off-season, no one earns less than a thousand yuan a day. The family was busy marinating beef in the kitchen, with lots of bacon hanging from the beams.
At present, Shaxi has not yet settled in big-name luxury hotels, mostly old houses converted into homestays, in the winter there are many vacant rooms, the price is as low as one or two hundred yuan. In order to protect the landscape of the ancient town, the houses on Si Deng Street are not allowed to install air conditioning, except for the high-end downhill rooms with floor heating, other homestays can only be heated with electric heaters. Farther away from Quad Street, large hotels are under construction, and the opening of the new highway may bring a lot of passenger traffic.
Small town fireworks (Luo Yi/Photo)
<h3>"The most beautiful rural bookstore in China"</h3>
Of course, there is more to do in Shaxi than just bask in the sun and drink coffee. In the early morning, go to the Side of the Heidian River to see the sunrise, the river is clear, the morning fog is like smoke, the distant mountains are like Dai, and the white-walled and green-tiled houses stand under the fields and mountains, a pastoral scenery. You can also have a morning run, run out of the ancient town, run towards the mountains and the morning sun, run through rice fields and reeds, and imagine that in the spring, the green rice fields and green mountains must be more beautiful. During the day, you can go to the Pioneer Bookstore in Beilong Village to read a book, climb the "Poetry Tower" to watch the sunset, and the Mid-Levels Cafe in Hualong Village is also a good place to watch the sunset; at night, after seeing the night view of Sifang Street, walk to the place where the lights are scarce, look up at the sky full of stars, and even see shooting stars. However, the better place to see the stars is the lighthouse village, where there is less light, there is a homestay on the top of the mountain, and if you climb to the roof, you can have both the human fireworks under the mountain and the Milky Way in the sky.
The pioneer Shaxi Bai Bookstore, which opened in the spring of 2020, may be the place with the most popular temperament in Shaxi, and has been praised by netizens as "the most beautiful rural bookstore in China". It was designed by Huang Yinwu and rebuilt from the village grain processing station. As soon as you enter the door, your eyes are attracted by the tall roof and wooden steps, and when you walk up the steps, you will find that the entire wall is filled with books related to Shaxi and Yunnan. Walk through the courtyards and cafes to the poetry tower converted from the flue-cured tobacco room, and climb up the fan-shaped staircase, where portraits of poets and verses hanging on the wall accompany you. The bookstore clerk said that during the peak season, there are waves of tourists who come to the bookstore to punch in, and there are not many people who buy books. Those tourists who come to see it may know the pioneer Shaxi Bookstore first, and then they know Shaxi. As I sat on the steps writing postcards, a group of middle-aged uncles asked me to give way to them, and then each of them drew a book from the bookshelf to pose for a pose.
Pioneer Shaxi Bai Bookstore converted from a grain processing station (Luo Yi/Photo)
If there is such an internet celebrity bookstore in the village, what will it bring to the locals? No one knows whether bookstores will produce a group of literary and poetry lovers. Two little boys ran in, flipped through children's books and calligraphy books, ran outside to the courtyard to play badminton, and the next day, they met them skateboarding, this courtyard is indeed an ideal playground. The door of the bookstore is squatting in front of the driver who solicits customers back to Si Deng Street all year round, in fact, it takes only twenty minutes to walk from Si Deng Street to the bookstore, and the scenery on the road is very good, there is no need to take a taxi.
Huang Yinwu may not have foreseen that bookstores would become Internet celebrities, and even bring Shaxi to some extent. His original intention in designing the bookstore was to create a "Big Sand Creek". Originally, the Shaxi revival project was almost over in 2009. But in 2010, when the news of the Imminent Opening of the Dali Expressway came, prices and house prices in Shaxi rose, and Huang Yinwu found that local people began to rent or sell their houses and move out on their own. In order to prevent Shaxi from becoming a second Lijiang, Huang Yinwu, as a local government adviser, reached an agreement with the county magistrate of Jianchuan County: using the planning idea of "Dashaxi", expanding from Shaxi Ancient Town to the entire Shaxi Damzi, going to the villages around Si Deng Village to build bookstores, repair city god temples, community cultural centers, and museums, and building roads along the Heiyi River flowing through various villages, so that on the one hand, it can divert tourists from Si Deng Street, on the other hand, it also allows the local people to have something to do and are willing to stay.
The planning of Dashaxi has indeed enriched the tourism experience of the ancient town. However, the surrounding villages often have only one place to visit, such as cafes and bookstores, and the village itself is still an unmodified rural landscape, although the original ecology does not have many highlights.
Local children reading books at Pioneer Bookstore (Locke/Photo)
The courtyard outside the bookstore is also a place for children's activities (Locke/Photo)
<h3>End</h3>
"Shaxi is better than other places because the location is a bit remote and there is not a lot of bad weather." On the road from Shaxi to Dali Airport, the driver's eldest brother told me. He said that now some Lijiang drivers come to Shaxi to grab business and ask for kickbacks with homestay restaurants, but their convoy only accepts local drivers and never takes kickbacks.
"How long have you been driving?"
"I didn't drive before. I have been doing wood carving for ten years, and I really learned from the teacher kowtowing, before the epidemic, foreigners came to buy it one by one. ”
I think of the handicraft shops on Sifang Street that sell wood carvings, rattan weaving, and black pottery. As for the market that makes Shaxi known to the world, it is now held every Friday, but not on Sifang Street, but on the road 20 minutes walk from the ancient town.
Huang Yinwu opened a window for the ancient town, the picture shows the pioneer Shaxi Bai Bookstore. (Luo Yi/Photo)
Huang Yinwu writes in the book that the goal of the Shaxi Revitalization Project is to create an example of sustainable rural development in Shaxi by constructing an ideal framework covering the economy, society and the environment. However, it is more difficult to "restore" and "rejuvenate", and it is much more complicated to give Shaxi a sustainable future than to restore the historical features of the ancient town. How to develop tourism and economy, increase the income of locals, and not destroy the ancient town style of Shaxi that is difficult to restore? The future road still depends on the Shaxi people to grope for themselves.
In any case, Shaxi provides us with a model for the restoration of ancient towns, breaking the strange circle of destructive development of ancient towns in China. Before I had the chance to go to Shaxi again, I would occasionally play a Bai minor tune recorded on my phone. Male and female vocal duets, the tune is high-pitched and cheerful, babbling and babbling can not understand at all, but how can not listen to tired, it is said that the singing is mostly love and love. It was the music of the Shaxi garbage truck, the little tricycle that was the only car allowed to drive in the ancient town.
Locke