Qianzhuang Village, a small mountain village in Fenyang City, Shanxi Province, belongs to Lijiazhuang Township, and after the village was merged, it has become a natural village. The village is located in the northwestern mountains of Fenyang, about 16 kilometers from the city. The village is backed by the Lüliang Mountains and faces the loess slope, which is a typical small village in a ravine.
Adjacent to Qianzhuang is a Village of Houzhuang, whose name may have derived from the location of the two villages. The village is very small, with a registered population of about 200 people, and only 30 or 40 people live permanently. The village is verdant with trees and fresh air. Looking at the Lüliang Mountains in the distance, the green mountains contain Dai; looking at the village up close, the traffic is strange, staggered; the chickens and dogs in the ears smell each other, and the various birds on the trees are gentle and crisp.
The villagers' courtyards are built according to the mountain, high or low, or gathered or scattered, staggered and distributed. Most of the houses in the village are decades ago or even older, with earth kilns and brick kilns. Many courtyards in the whole village have been empty and idle for a long time. Villagers leave the place where their ancestors lived, move to the city or the suburban village, come back when the farmers are busy, and leave after they are busy, like migratory birds. Only yellow hair remained in the village, no hair hanging, the road was cold and clear, and it was rare to see a person.
The village is mostly curved slopes, and there are very few straight roads. Some lots have slopes above 45 degrees. Fortunately, the streets have been hardened, basically realizing the village and village communication, household access, cement road to the main gate of every household, the main roadside also installed solar street lights, to provide villagers with great convenience at night access.
The village has long since abolished the school, the water pipes have not been repaired after they have been damaged, and the villagers have taken water from the only ancient well, but because the amount of water is not enough, they have to go to the neighboring village to pull water. A large plate of round red sand stone at the mouth of the well, which looks very old, is estimated to be hundreds of years old, and the middle is carved out of the round mouth as the wellhead, and the wellhead is exposed without any protective measures, which is very worrying.
There are no schools, no restaurants, no shops in the village, and the only health clinic with the Red Cross emblem has long been abandoned. The only flat place was a row of several fitness equipment, but it was spattered with cement that no one seemed to have used for a long time.
The village committee is located in the center of the village, a simple two-poster door, equipped with an iron railing gate, and several vertical plaques hang at the door: the village committee, the village branch, the village economic cooperative, the village affairs supervision committee, the golden plaque is shining, but the gate is locked. Through the railing, you can see the five caves inside, pasted with white tiles, the courtyard is clean and wide, planted with a few walnut trees, corn is planted in the open space, and it seems that someone often comes to clean up.
On the gate of a villager's courtyard hangs a 1995 horizontal plaque, on which the four characters of "Five Generations together" have been peeled off incompletely, but it shows the pride of the owner, the courtyard once lived for five generations, and it was once a popular home, but now the courtyard is overgrown with weeds and depressed. The older earthen cave courtyard higher up in the village is even more ruined, and the walls are leaning down.
We went in mid-July, and in several courtyards, villagers were packing up the apricots that had been recovered from their homes, removing the pulp from the outside, leaving the cores of the apricots inside, which had dried and ready to be sold. According to the market of the first two years, a pound of dried apricot cores can sell for about 4 yuan.
The uncle's house that chatted with us was located on a high roadside not far from the well, opposite the gate was a high earth cliff, a row of six unadorned clear water brick kilns, it looked like it had been repaired, the whole family sat around a table in the wide courtyard and peeled the apricot cores with their bare hands, the yard was full of peeled apricot meat, and there were six or seven white "Changbai Mountains" in the pig pen at the bottom of the cliff, lazily lying at the mouth of the circle, and when they saw people in the past, they all stood up and their mouths were long.
In another courtyard, a small denuclearing machine is being used to remove the apricot core, father and son cooperate, one person piles apricots on the machine, one person takes a bucket and then the apricot core, which is much faster than manual peeling, and the yard has dried a lot of apricot cores. The house is a brick cave dwelling around the 1980s. They live in Lijiazhuang Village on the outskirts of the city, and when the farmers are busy, they come back and leave when they are busy.
There are few people in the village, and each family has about 30 acres of land, which is more than one or two acres and a few points of land in the villages around the city. The old man in the village said that his family originally had more than ten or twenty acres of land, and over the years, the barren slopes and depressions of the land had been planed out, and only then did they have about thirty acres, and these land rights were also confirmed when the land rights were confirmed. However, because the mountainous areas are all drylands, and there are many walnut trees planted in the fields, the crops can only be intercropped and there is not much income. Fortunately, the villagers here are very industrious, and the corners and corners are not deserted. Most of them grow corn and millet, and in the past two years, they have also planted sorghum in succession, and sorghum was subsidized by the state for more than 200 yuan last year.
The only Dragon King Temple in the village, located outside the village, has now become a field, planted with potato seedlings, the temple site has almost disappeared, and the land can be seen with small bricks, small tiles, a pine tree, green and tall, witnessing that this place was once a temple.
Remote mountain villages, inaccessible transportation, barren land, no hospitals, no schools, no shops, not even running water... The city has developed, but the countryside has declined, and the revitalization of the countryside has a long way to go.