A border town on the HanHuang Ancient Road

Prose | border town on the Han Huang Ancient Road

Text/Yu Great Wall

1

In my last year at New County High School, I rarely ate in the school cafeteria. We had a small group of five people, called the "Five Poisons Cult" by our classmates, five people who were obsessed with martial arts novels, pool, poker, movies, and play that were not good at learning. We often had lunch, or dinner, at a miniature restaurant outside the school. The restaurant is run by an elderly couple, the target is students, and the number of customers at each meal seems to be rarely more than ten people, so the five of us are also considered big patrons. The school canteen issues meal tickets and meal tickets. Meal tickets are bought with money, while meal tickets are exchanged for rice or food stamps. Because nearly a thousand rural students carry different rice from their homes and have poor rice quality, the rice made from the mixture of various types of rice is difficult to swallow. The school always uses leftover rice to make porridge the next morning, so the porridge always has a mushy smell, so we have to buy some breakfast on the mobile food truck at the school gate.

It's not exactly restaurant eating. Every two weeks, I would go home, take two ten-dollar tickets dripping with sweat from my father's hand, bring a large ocean porcelain jar filled with pickles, and ride back to campus on a Type 28 bicycle borrowed from a classmate and relative in Chengguan. In the first half of my freshman year of high school, I was still riding in a car, and sometimes I had to carry a bag of rice on my back. Since the second half of his first year of high school, his uncle has participated in the work and worked in the grain control office, and since then he has had sufficient food stamps. This huge porcelain jar was passed down to me by my uncle and can hold a kilogram of pickles and can be eaten for up to four days. I couldn't touch or smell the sweat on the bills my father handed me, and I usually didn't want to eat pickles after two or three days.

The school cafeteria was also extremely unhygienic, and in the first semester of the school, almost all of the students suffered from dysentery, and many people pulled on the road to the dormitory toilet in the middle of the night. Maybe since then, we've occasionally stopped eating in the school cafeteria. At that time, we were all very able to eat, and half a kilogram of rice in the school canteen was not eaten, and we generally had to eat seven or eight or two. Once, two classmates bet on eating, one ate two pounds and nine two, and the other ate four pounds and seven twos. But in the small dining outside the school, it seems that half a pound of rice is full, and the rice quality is good, soft, the dishes are clean, and the color and flavor are good.

Before we chose the old couple's miniature restaurant as a long-term stronghold, we hesitated at their door and the restaurant next door greeted us. The old woman scolded the next door: "Look at you like a Hankou solicitor!" I have always remembered this sentence, not because of her swearing skills, but because of Hankou, a place name that is extremely closely related to the new county.

2

When I left Xinxian to take a bus to Xinyang Railway Station after graduating from high school, I deliberately learned about the road journey from Xinxian to Xinyang City - 147 kilometers, while Xinxian is said to be only 120 kilometers to Hankou. When I was in high school, a newly opened commercial street in Xinxian County was hung with not cheap but fashionable clothes shipped from Hanzheng Street, and was full of fake leather shoes that threatened to be genuine leather. We have taken great pains to discern the similarities and differences between genuine leather shoes and fake leather shoes, although in the end we still buy leather shoes. At that time, my uncle also sold this fake leather shoe in the town, which was also purchased from Hanzheng Street. At that time, the only principle of the entire private business was that there was no refund after sale.

It wasn't until the second year after I joined the workforce that I had the opportunity to travel to Hankou, where I actually traveled to Wuhan University and the desolate Hubei University. After traveling to the Yellow Crane Tower, I took a one-dollar ferry to Hanzheng Street, where I bought back two fake cigarettes and was extorted $33 by a telephone booth with a timer faster than a bullet.

When I was young, I loved to ride a long-distance train, and I preferred to take a long-distance train to a train – and I could enjoy the scenery along the way with unbridled care. So on my return from Hankou, I broke down the one-stop train journey into several shuttle buses. At that time, I didn't care which national road and provincial road I was taking, and I was not interested in the road, only the destination and the scenery along the way—the unnamed trees, villages, rivers, mountains.

I am only interested in the roads of my hometown. All roads in the countryside have no names, whether they are roads or field paths, mountain roads, or even urban and rural roads, all roads are named from start to finish. However, the provincial highway and the national highway have names, and there is only one provincial road through the new county, called the Zhaitan Highway, and there is only one national highway passing through the new county, called the 106 national highway - but it does not pass through the county seat of the new county, but only passes through a township in the new county. It was very close to my hometown, but for a long time I didn't know about the existence of National Highway 106.

Before I went to high school, although I also took a car to visit relatives in the county seat, I didn't know that the last ten kilometers of asphalt road belonged to the Tanzhai Highway. Although I have definitely been to the new county seat no less than four or five times, I can only remember two times now, one on foot and one by car.

Walking was when I was very young, maybe five years old, and I wasn't in school yet. In order to save money, they took me to the extremely difficult mountain road that they had walked countless times, saving half the distance than the car. Remember that the trip was not because of the extremely steep and barren mountains, but because of a small sika deer drinking water in the mountain stream, and its jump as it escaped. This mountain road is the only one with a name on all the roads in the new county—I have always thought of it as "Eighteen Mile Pan," which means eighteen miles of winding mountain roads. Later, when I was in high school, I retraced this mountain road and only met three villages, each with only four or five families.

The ride was one of the trips I was most ashamed of. I followed my uncle, who was six years older than me, to the county town, but my uncle did not buy me a ticket, although I had grown to one meter seven in the second year of junior high school, but my uncle insisted that I was still in elementary school and was less than one meter two. The ridiculous argument ended up me standing for two hours to reach the county seat, all the while blushing— because there were two female classmates in my class. I only saw them when I got in and out of the car, and I deliberately made neither of us visible to each other during the trip.

3

Many years later, I learned that the whole course of the Zhaitan Highway and the section of National Highway 106 passed through were the former Guanghuang Ancient Road or Hanhuang Ancient Road. In particular, the first half of the Zhaitan Highway gave birth to the new county seat.

In high school, there were only three streets in the county seat of Xinxian County, namely Aviation Road, Xiangyang Road and Capital Road. The intersection of Sanjo Road is the Xinxian Bus Station and the Cinema. Aviation Road and Xiangyang Road both belong to the Zhaitan Highway, the former site of the capital of the Eyu-Anhui Su District of the Communist Party of China is on Capital Road, and the former site of the Eyu-Anhui Aviation Bureau is in the campus of Xinxian No. 1 Middle School, so the road in front of the First Middle School gate is named Aviation Road. The starting point of the air road is the bus station, and the undefined end can be considered as the New County High School, which is a north-south road. Xiangyang Road is an east-west direction, its end point can be considered to be the highest slope of Chengguan Town, across that slope Zhaitan Highway and turn south to Tanshugang and Hong'an County. Capital Road is the xinjizhaizheng street in the late Qing dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, leading south to Macheng.

Capital Road is basically parallel to the HuangHe River, which is now sandwiched between the county seats, and the east of the river was still desolate at that time. The section of Xiangyang Road extending to Huanghe Bridge is the political, economic and cultural center of the county, because the county government, government guest house, department store, cultural center, cultural center dance hall, and video hall are crowded on both sides of the county's widest avenue of less than 500 meters, the county government is facing the capital road, and the department store building is located in the opposite Golden Triangle.

The Huanghe Bridge was built in the late 1960s when the Xiangshan Lake Reservoir was repaired, and until the late 1980s, there was only one such bridge on the Huanghe River. At the end of the 1980s, the new county built a museum, the most magnificent classical building in the county, and a second bridge was built between the martyrs' cemetery and the museum. Xiangshan Lake Reservoir is the source of the Huanghe River, ten kilometers away from the county seat, and the road leading to the reservoir is called Xiangshan Road.

There is a large factory between Xiangshan Road in Qiaodong and the east bank of the river, which is the Xinxian Fertilizer Factory, so that the leaves near the factory are always gray and not slippery, making the trees look like patients who have been sick for many years. On the east bank of the river, south of the fertilizer factory, there was a machinery factory that looked to be out of business, and one of my classmates, said to be the son of the factory manager, always wore a pair of tattered jeans, and he had a solitary house for studying—where we used to play poker— and at night we could hear the barking of dogs on the river beach and the chirping of chickens in the early hours of the morning.

A new hemp spinning factory was built between the fertilizer factory that was about to close down and the machinery factory that seemed to have closed, and the most beautiful female workers in the county were recruited at a noble price of 4,000 yuan - as collective workers to enter the factory and solve the chengguan hukou. One of our five poison cults, his junior high school classmates and first love girlfriend, was also recruited. These female workers were the prey of the county officials and the rich second generation and the hooligans, so that my good friend who had lost love dropped out of school after only the first semester of high school, because he could not bear the blow of lost love—so that only four of us were left to eat together in the miniature restaurant outside the school gate. In the mid-1990s, when the Beijing-Kowloon Railway passed through Xinxian County, the Xinxian Railway Station was built at the location of the hemp spinning factory or machinery factory.

At the end of the factory, there is an airfield, which is said to be parked by three planes used to spray pesticides in the mountains and forests, and it is said that these aircraft, together with the military aircraft and cannons in the museum, were donated to his hometown by General Xu Shiyou, commander of the Nanjing or Guangzhou Military Regions, along with a locomotive that was later sold to the Zhengzhou Railway Bureau. When I was a child, I used to see such small planes flying over our villages, and I didn't know whether to spray pesticides or do environmental surveys.

4

On weekends when we don't go home, our crippled Five Poisons Sect often goes to sleep in the Martyrs' Cemetery to see a classmate and dozens of people practicing martial arts with a martial arts master, and the tuition fee is fifteen yuan per month. Here, we know that the population of the county has increased fivefold in forty years, so we can forgive and understand the pig pulling in the family planning process.

At the beginning of liberation, there were fewer than 50,000 people in the county—because more people died because of the revolution than there were left. At the beginning of liberation, the population of the county town was less than two thousand, and after forty years it had increased more than fivefold. When my second and sixth grandfathers and my father's mother moved to the county seat, I don't know, but my eighth great-grandmother also returned to the city from teaching in the countryside—she was born in this small town—when it was still a small town, or not even a town.

The eighth great-grandmother, whom I called the eighth wife, was born in this town in 1924, when the center of the town was not in this position, but in Changtan. In the early days of the Republic of China, the reform of administrative place names did not affect here, and it was still called Changtanli. There are four subordinate bao in Changtan, and the center is Changtan Bao, which is divided into li chang and bao chang.

The Guanghuang Ancient Road of the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty was excavated along the direction of today's 106 National Highway, along the Bailu River, a tributary of the Huai River, and crossed the Great Boundary Ridge or The Small Boundary Ridge of the Jianghuai Watershed respectively to Reach Macheng, and then to Huangzhou and Hankou. The Guanghuang Ancient Road of the Ming Dynasty followed the direction of the Huai River, a tributary of the Huai River, that is, the first half of today's Zhaitan Highway reached Changtanbao in Changtanli, and then went straight south across the Jianghuai watershed to Macheng, Huangzhou, and Hankou.

According to the Ming Dynasty Guangshan County Ling Li Yangzheng's "Records of the New Changtan Yi of Guangshan County" and the Records of Guangshan County, it can be seen that the Guanghuang Ancient Road began to pass during the Ming Zhengde period, but there was no post station; during the Ming Jiajing period, Shen Shaoqing of Guangshan Zhi County built the Changtan Mansion in Changtan for merchants to stay; in the twenty-eighth year of the Ming Wanli Calendar, Li Yangzheng of Guangshan Zhi County began to build Changtan Yi. Changtan Yiyi was concurrently appointed by Niushan Inspector.

Speaking of Niushan inspection, it is impossible not to mention two other Guanghuang Ancient Roads since the Southern Song Dynasty, one from Baishaguan in Qianshanhe Township to Huang'an County (present-day Hong'an County, a county in the Ming Dynasty), and one from Suhe Town, Kafang Township, Modouguan, and XiushanGuan to Huangzhou or Guangshui. These two roads have the Niushan Patrol Station. There is no place name for Niushan in present-day Xinxian County, and its location should be between the present-day Suhe Town of Nanxinye Highway and Wuchenhe Township. Therefore, through the five Guanghuang Ancient Roads in Xinxian County, the one passing through Changtanli Changtanbao is the middle one, and it is also the closest distance, the two guanghuang ancient roads of the Tang and Song dynasties in the east, and the two small roads in the west that have not been taken by too many people since the Southern Song Dynasty. The purpose of the inspection is to prevent smuggling, especially smuggling of salt. The name Kafang Township is derived from "Ka Huang".

After the completion of Changtan Station, because of the needs of tourists, a new store was formed one kilometer south of the station, which was later developed into a new market. During the Xianfeng period of the Qing Dynasty, Zeng Sernong built a stone village in Xinji, called "Xinjizhai"; at the end of the Qing Dynasty, Zeng Xianzhu and Liu Lingxun built more than 600 houses on a grand scale--known as "Zeng And Liu Liangjia"; in January 1931, Wang Shusheng, commander of the Red Fourth Front, led a team to conquer Xinjizhai with a coffin of explosives to blow up the wall of the village, which became the headquarters of the Eyu-Anhui Sub-bureau and the Red Fourth Front; after the Long March of the Red Fourth Front, the Kuomintang government built Jingfu County, and the county government stationed Xinjizhai; in 1947, Liu Deng's army liberated Xinxian County. Newly integrated as the county government station, later set up as Chengguan Town.

Therefore, before the establishment of the county, the political center of the border town was still Changtanli, but the new set was more prosperous than the Changtan set. The Zeng family also has many industries in Changtan, such as the former site of the Eyu-Anhui Aviation Bureau, which is the industry of the Zeng family.

5

When I was very young, my grandfather had an Air Force pilot's goggle in his drawer, which I used to wear to swim in the pond. Under a scrappy foundation behind my house, a neighbor dug out a saber that was rusty like a dog's bite because of the tree. These objects are closely related to the glorious years of Xinxian County.

After the Kuomintang government established Jingfu County (the predecessor of the new county), a large number of troops were stationed and the Tuntian system was implemented. At that time, there were still CCP guerrillas in Xinxian County, which persisted until Liu Deng's army went south to reach Xinxian County. The guerrilla force was led by Liu Mingbang and Qiu Jinmin, secretaries of the CPC Jingli Luoguang County CPC Committee. Because Liu Mingbang was a native of Kafang Township, and Kafang Township's proximity to Lishan County (present-day Dawu County) and Guangshan County and Luoshan County was exactly the place where the westernmost Guanghuang Ancient Road had to pass, the Kuomintang army hunted down guerrillas and created a terrifying white terror, so that the population of Kafang Township has not yet returned to the level before the establishment of the county. Mao Dun's younger brother Shen Zemin, then secretary of the Eyuwan Provincial Party Committee, was also buried in Kafang Township.

The Red Fourth Front was founded as a result of the Jute Uprising, and Huang'an and Macheng belonged to Huangzhou. The Red Fourth Front moved its headquarters to Xinji precisely because Xinji was an important transportation location in the middle of the Guanghuang Ancient Road and was mountainous. After liberation, four general counties emerged centered on new counties, namely Hong'an in Hubei, Dawu, Xinxian in Henan, and Jinzhai in Anhui, one of the ten major general counties. Macheng, ranked twelfth in the general county rankings. Xinxian, Dawu, and Jinzhai were all established by the Kuomintang government in 1932 at the same time— in order to better rule this Soviet area.

The capital of the Song Dynasty has been Kaifeng, and since the Song Dynasty, the capital of Henan Province has been in Kaifeng. From Beijing, Kaifeng to Hankou, a straight line is bound to pass through Gwangju and Huangzhou. Although the Beijing-Hankou Railway did not pass through Gwangju and Huangzhou because it did not pass through Kaifeng, before there was no railway, the most vertical route for road traffic was still passing through here. Because of the importance of the Ming and Qing Dynasties Huangyi Road, it gave birth to the border town of Changtan and also gave birth to the county seat of Xinji.

6

Xinjiren has a broad field of vision because it is so close to Hankou. As early as the 30th year of Guangxu to the last year of Guangxu, in the five years, 13 people in Xinji went to Japan to study at their own expense, including 8 members of the Zeng family and 3 members of the Liu family. Among the 8 members of the Zeng family, Zeng Zhaowen served as the first senator of the Kuomintang, a major general in the army, and the head of the Henan branch of the Kuomintang, but unfortunately died of illness in 1913. Among the three members of the Liu family, Liu Jiyan revolted in 1949 as the administrative inspector and security commander of Huangchuan, Henan Province, and later served as a member of the Henan Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and died of illness in 1961.

In history, whenever there was war, Gwangju people always hid in the Dabie Mountains, such as Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhongjiu slaughtered Gwangju in the late Ming Dynasty, and Gwangju people fled to only 1816 registered men. However, in the peaceful years after the war, the fugitives still returned to the plains, because the mountains could not feed so many people after all. However, after the Qing Dynasty, with the increase of grain production, the whole of China showed a high degree of population growth, which is why the number of residents in the new counties increased at this time, so that the number of people reached 100,000 during the Republic of China.

Population growth can bulldoze some hills, like the "agricultural village". Therefore, during the Xianfeng period of the Qing Dynasty, the new Jizhai formed a scale. More and more people also need wood, and the mountain forests are getting smaller and smaller. By the time I was in high school in the county, all the primeval forests had disappeared, leopards had disappeared, wolves had disappeared, and a strange species— the donkey-headed cat (known as the donkey-headed wolf in Hubei) — had also disappeared. When I was very young, I naively thought that the name of the county was because all its mountains were almost Kwangsan.

Both Grandpa's family and the Eighth Lady's house once had a wooden building separated by wooden planks, and the wooden planks were more than an inch thick and more than a foot wide. In my grandfather's generation, the six brothers owned three mountains. In my eighth generation, there were eight cousins, two of whom were captured by Hu Zongnan's troops to defend Xinyang City against the Japanese, and have not been heard from since. Hachita's father married a woman with the surname of Shinji, and WaiHachi married his mother's niece, my Rihachi. In the more than twenty years that Waibatai was beaten into a rightist and returned to the village for labor reform, every time he went to the county seat of Xinxian County, he always took the mountain road of eighteen miles, and when he went, he carried a load of firewood, and when he came back, he returned with another load of firewood.

My grandfather, who was only four years younger than the eighth wife, had studied private school for ten years and worked as a farmer all his life, but he had never taken a train or been to Hankou. The goggles of the air pilot hidden in the drawer of Grandpa's table do not know what kind of nostalgia he has, who he misses, or is it just a coincidence?

After the death of the great-grandmother of the fourth generation, the mother asked for the separation of the family. The first graduate of Xinxian High School, the second grandfather who worked in the county town, sold his ancestral house, which had been idle for many years, to my family, an old house that had survived for seventy years and then twenty years. The second grandfather, who had never joined the party and had never been the director of the bureau, could occasionally take a public jeep back to his hometown, and his light overshadowed my eighth wife, who had taught at Jiangxi University.

In the small space of the new county seat, my four relatives—the eighth wife, the second grandfather, the sixth grandfather, and the mother-in-law—my favorite place to go is the eighth wife's house. The half-mad WaiBatai, who had not been able to recover after rehabilitation, always told me some astronomy, and I was never keen on it. But the pile of foreign literature he left in his old house and two broken world masterpieces inspired my love of literature. The last pair of Spring Leagues he left behind, which I still believe to be his work, was written in the Lishu he was best at: Zhou Yiyun Qiankun Dingyi, Mao Shiyue Zhong Gu Lezhi.

Yes, it has been decided. In the year of my birth, all the reservoirs, large, medium, and small, have been repaired, as if they had already existed there, and all the mountains that should have been flattened have long since been leveled, as if the earth had never changed. A set of gongs and drums in the production team will play a special joy every year in the first month, and often crowds will use it to practice joy in the middle of summer. Even on the most tragic days, I could hear this joy in the funeral procession.

The Eighth Lady was finally not buried on the ancestral tomb hill, but buried in the public cemetery next to the county seat. More than ten years later, the ninety-two-year-old Li Batai was also buried there. They left no children, no inheritance, and the last libatai left only a thousand yuan for funeral expenses.

When he was very young, his father said that every Spring Festival, the eighth wife always gave the children in the village two yuan each, so that the parents of the children sent their children to school, but they were frugal enough to break a penny into two petals. In her twilight years, she may have spent less than ten yuan a month, food and vegetables were sent by her niece, and the only appliances she had were a TV and a fan.

This woman, who was transformed from a rich gentleman's family, was a deputy to the county people's congress for three consecutive terms, and like her husband, she had been engaged in education all her life, and all the students were her children. And Xinjizhai or Xinji County, just like her, has undergone transformation, becoming the way we hope in our hearts, and will continue to change.

Night, June 5, 2021