The homeland is good feng shui Why bury Yangzhou - I feel that Zeng Guofan complained about Wei Yuan

During the Qing Dynasty, Wei Yuan's hometown of Shaoyang County was adjacent to Zeng Guofan's hometown of Xiangxiang County. The two large xiangzhong counties were split up in the middle of the last century, and the hometowns of Wei and Zeng Ergong belonged to Longhui County and Shuangfeng County, and they were no longer neighboring counties. Zeng Guofan was 17 years younger than Wei Yuan, and according to the teeth of the year, Wei was Zeng's township predecessor. However, Wei Yuanzhongjinshi was 6 years later than Zeng Guofan, and in terms of Kodi, Wei Yuan was a junior.

Zeng Guofan admired Wei Yuan's insight and knowledge, and he had carefully read many of Wei's writings. However, in the diary of Zeng Guofan Xianfeng in the first ten days of December in the ninth year, he was very complaining about Wei Yuan, and there was no sarcasm between the lines. Its text reads:

Talk about family affairs with Mu Yun. Yuandi reburied the first concubine, this department bought the land of the Xia family, and when the cave was about to be opened, it was on the ground of the Hong family. The Hong family's heavy demand for capital has a reason. The greatest pity for the creation of the auspicious land is not to be tolerated with the slightest deception. Those who are blessed by the earth's veins must first be poor and lowly, and they have no experience, and after they become rich and famous, they will not be blessed with the intention of the land. Among my new friends, such as Changtang Ge's Ruan Fuhou, who plotted land, Jinlan Changshi who was both expensive and landless, shaoyang Wei Moshen, who became famous and plotted land, reburied the two generations in Yangzhou, but there was no blessing, and Gai inevitably used deceit to conspire with them. Creation is forbidden, and those who have a heart should not also be.

Muyun is Zeng Guofan's brother-in-law Ouyang Muyun, and Lang's uncle can talk about family affairs without scruples. This passage basically explains Zeng Guofan's attitude towards feng shui. He is not an unbeliever of feng shui, but he is opposed to deliberately seeking auspicious land. Changtang Geshi, Jin Lan Changshi, and Shaoyang Weiyuan did the disprovement of his theory.

The Changtang Ge clan was in Changtang Village, Heye Town, Shuangfeng County, Hunan Province, and was close to the Zeng family, and The mother of Cai Hesen and Cai Chang's brothers and sisters, Ge Jianhao, was from this family. The Changtang Ge clan became extremely wealthy during the Jiaqing period and built a large-scale ancestral hall, which still exists today. The Jinlan Chang clan refers to the Chang Dachun family of Jinlan Township, Hengyang County, adjacent to Zeng Guofan's hometown of Xiangxiang Heyetang. Chang Dachun was the predecessor of Zeng Guofan's Hanyuan, who was very close to him in Beijing, and later became an official to Hubei. In January 1853, the Taiping Army destroyed Wuchang, and Chang Dachun committed suicide with his family to martyr the country. After the Ge and Chang families were rich, they spent a lot of energy to find auspicious land for their ancestors, but they did not bring blessings. Wei Yuan was even more obsessed with feng shui, and he actually moved the tombs of his ancestors (presumably grandfather and father) to Yangzhou to find a piece of ji lang for burial.

Although Wei Yuan became famous earlier, he was trampled on the field and Jiaqing was selected for eighteen years. In the second year of Daoguang (1822), he was the second in the Chinese style of the Nongwu branch. But since then, he has tried to fail many times. He made a living in the southeast for a long time, and successively served as an aide to He Changling, the envoy of Jiangsu Province, and Tao Shu, the governor of Liangjiang. As early as the twenty-fifth year of Jiaqing (1820), his family moved to Yangzhou, and at the same time bought a residence in Longpanli in Nanjing, called "Xiaohua A". His son Wei Qi (字伯孺, 号刚己) said in the "Shaoyang Wei Fu Junshi Strategy": "(Daoguang) fifteen years, with Chen Taigongren (author's case: Wei Yuan's mother) Spring and Autumn High, thinking of so much joy, buying a garden in Yangzhou New Town, stone planting flowers, raising fish and feeding cranes, known as 'Garden of Silk'. ”

Wei Yuan's family moved to Yangzhou, a first-tier city at that time, to welcome the old mother and raise them, and to relocate the bones of two generations of ancestors here, which may be convenient for future descendants to visit the graves. But at that time, after thousands of miles, it was rare to relocate the ancestors from Hunan to Jiangsu at great expense, and it was difficult for ordinary people to understand. Probably Wei Yuan did have feng shui considerations, believing that finding Jidi in Yangzhou would be more able to shelter future generations, so this story was widely spread in Shilin.

Mr. Wei Moshen traveled thousands of miles to Yangzhou to find good feng shui for his ancestors. After his own death, he was buried in Fangjiayu, Nanping Mountain, another beautiful city in Hangzhou. Today, the grave pile no longer exists, and only the herbs remain. Interestingly, the feng shui of Wei Yuan's abandoned hometown of Shaoyang Jintan was not bad, and a few years later, his nephew Wei Guangtao entered the Xiang army camp as a rural gold digger, and because of his military merits, he was promoted step by step, and eventually became the governor of Liangjiang, with a grade much higher than Wei Yuan's Gaoyou Prefecture Zhizhou - this is probably something that Wei Yuan could not have imagined before his death. According to the theory of feng shui, the good feng shui in the area of Jintan in Shaoyang, the hometown, allowed another branch of the Wei family to occupy, which confirmed Zeng Guofan's statement, "It must first be a poor and lowly family, and it is difficult to gain happiness after becoming rich and famous, and if it has the intention to plan the land, it will be difficult to be blessed." ”

When Zeng Guofan was young, he was taught by his grandfather Hoshioka Gong and said that he did not believe in feng shui, witches and Buddhist tao. But in life, he still maintains the necessary reverence for such a mystical thing as feng shui. For example, in December of the twentieth year of Daoguang, shortly after he became an official in Beijing, his father would escort his wife, children and brother to Beijing, and he would first rent a larger house. Go to Liuli Street to see the house, the daily record:

Because of his worship of Jiang Jun on the side of the house, he talked about the wife Wang Gongren who knew that this house had lived in the old age of Di, and was martyred in this house. The housekeepers in the capital seek more auspiciousness, and the martyrdom of the people, the clan Lu must not be said to be lifeless, and this house must not be called ominous. However, the words "loyalty and festival" were admired by Fang Hui afterwards, which was not a blessing in the court at that time. This room is too expensive, there are too many houses, and I don't want to live in it.

The wives of the elders committed suicide in this room, although according to Confucian values, this is an act of loyalty, and the clan and neighbors cannot be treated as if they were killed, and the house is not an ordinary murderous house. But in Zeng Guofan's view, after all, it is not a good thing, and it will feel uncomfortable to live in. He refused on the grounds that the rent was too expensive, and later rented a house in Cotton Six Alleys.

People who do not believe in feng shui often also go to Tujili in their houses and burials, which is probably the psychology of ordinary people, and Zeng Guofan is also inevitable.

In November of the 26th year of Daoguang, Zeng Guofan's grandmother Wang Gongren died, and his grandfather, who did not believe in feng shui, was still alive, and chose a cemetery for his old wife to bury, several grandchildren thought that the feng shui here was not good, and tried to discourage it, but the grandfather insisted on his own opinion. A few years after Wang Gongren's burial, the Zeng family had good fortunes, and Zeng Guofan mentioned this matter in a letter to Zhudi in the twenty-ninth year of Daoguang:

Since the burial of the ancestor Yu Muchong in the winter, my family has added three male dings, I have been promoted to the cabinet, promoted to waiter, and the ninth brother has entered the school to make up for it. The auspiciousness of its land has been clearly verified. I usually do not believe in feng shui the most, but Yu Zhuziyun's words "mountains surrounded by water" and "hidden wind and gathering qi" are firmly believed. The land of mudu chong is not taken seriously by ordinary days, and after the burial is auspicious, it can be seen that the blessed people bury themselves in the blessed land, and it is absolutely not possible to participate in it by hand.

This passage shows that Zeng Guofan had formed a stable attitude towards feng shui in his early years, and he did not believe in feng shui at all, but advocated not to force it, because good feng shui could not be sought, and blessed people could get it. In the ninth year of Xianfeng, he and his ninth brother Zeng Guoquan led an army to fight against the Taiping Army in Gansu, Anhui and other places. Zeng Guoquan still put aside important military affairs and returned to Xiangxiang to preside over the funeral of his parents.

In the first month of the seventh year of Xianfeng, Zeng Linshu, the father of Zeng Guofan, died in his hometown, and Zeng Guofan returned from the battlefield to his hometown to defend the system. At that time, the Zeng brothers did not bury their father and Xianfeng's mother, Lady Jiang, who died in the second year, but were buried alone in one place. There are people in the countryside who understand feng shui who say that this land contains "fierceness", not a piece of auspicious land. In October of the eighth year of Xianfeng, the sixth brother Zeng Guohua died with Li Xubin in sanhe town, Anhui. Probably in the eyes of Zeng Guofan, Zeng Guoquan and other brothers, the father's burial place is indeed "fierce", so it is necessary to find a piece of auspicious land and bury his parents together.

Maybe it was the information asymmetry, so shrewd Zeng Laojiu made a mistake. It was the place where the parents were buried, and it was purchased from the Xia family, but Mr. Feng Shui saw the mountain direction, used the compass to select the acupuncture point, and when he excavated, he dug into the ground of the Hong family. According to the custom of Xiangzhong, once the selected tomb is excavated, it is not allowed to fill in the soil and abandon it and then choose a new site, which is very unlucky for the main family. Therefore, the Hong family sat on the ground at a high price, which made Zeng Guofan feel helpless and irritable. Around the time of discussion with his brother-in-law, he was not very reliable about the handling of Zeng Guohuang and Zeng Guoquan's two younger brothers, and he also thought that he had a clever intention to find a piece of auspicious land for his father to relocate, and used "deceit", so it was not smooth.

Later, through some mediation, the Zeng family paid a big price and buried the Hong family's land to bury their parents. Soon after, Zeng Guofan was appointed by Emperor Jian as the governor of Liangjiang, and finally had a piece of land that had been sought for many years, and the ninth brother Zeng Guoquan also took advantage of the situation, until the two brothers were crowned Hou Bo. If mr. Feng Shui explains, Zeng Guofan's parents have the blessing and yin virtue to enjoy the auspicious land, thus bringing blessings to their children and grandchildren.