Meet the World Heritage | Wang Renkan's former residence - Chi cheng Dan heart candle ancient and modern

Source: "Mindu Culture" Selected Edition "Character Volume"

Author: Lin Liqin

Passing through the bamboo forest of people and cars, the narrow lantern alley hides an old mansion. There is a leafy Apple tree in the house, and the thick green canopy protrudes from the saddle wall of Xiaoyi Lane in the east, and the leaves sway in the cooling autumn wind. It has been blooming and falling here for more than 300 years. "Pingbo" is called "Pinbo" in ancient times, which originates from the Sanskrit word and originally means "figure". It is indeed a testimony to the changing figure of the owner of the house for more than 300 years. The most famous of these was a Qing Dynasty official who was not a prefect and had a life expectancy of less than 50 years, Wang Renkan.

The people of Fuzhou used to call this house the "ancestral residence of the Yuan" because Wang Renkan was the last Yuan of Fuzhou. In 1877, the 22-year-old Wang Renkan won the top spot in the scientific expedition and won the high school. For a while, the neighbors praised, and relatives and friends feasted. The old house was crowded with people and drums churning. At that time, no one foresaw that 23 years later, the leader would return to his hometown and the coffin would be transported back to Fuzhou from Jiangsu. It is not the return of the clothes, only the return of the soul.

Today's "Ancestral Residence" still retains the overall pattern of 300 years ago, but it has long since disappeared from the glory of that year, and the remaining black white walls tell the vicissitudes of the wind and rain. Pushing open the small archway, a three-room, three-entry deep mansion compound is inhabited by 10 descendants of the royal family, the newly built low houses are unevenly stacked, and the hanging clothes are fluttering on both sides of the hall. "The original three entrances and four walls are hung with various plaques such as the plaque of the soldier and the plaque of the eye. The plaque is a red base with gold trims around it. It now hangs in a museum in Beijing. A descendant of the royal family told us, pointing to the empty wooden wall that remained of its old appearance.

Pushing open the thick stone-framed wooden door to the east, a double-sloped roof building with a bucket-shaped wooden frame, three rooms wide and seven columns deep, was originally the "place of study", the Jinghua Hall, which was later changed to the Wang Family Ancestral Hall by Wang Renkan's grandfather. The Apple Tree on the small rockery on the east side of the courtyard patio is almost connected to the cement wall, and it must have seen Wang Renkan write "Zhi is not in the food and clothing" in the voice of the High School Leader' Dao Xi, and the sentence "Zhi Bo Yunxiao is not undressed, and the ZhiShenLang Temple He Kan accompanies the food and false name" is still in the past.

Wang Ren kanzi Kezhuang and Nin'an, gongding, grandfather Wang Qingyun to the Ministry of Works Shangshu, brother-in-law Chen Baochengui as the emperor. His articles were full of vigor and calligraphy, and in the early days they were deeply valued by Empress Dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor, and they were dedicated to walking in the study.

But soon he angered Empress Dowager Cixi. At that time, the military was weak, and cixi, in order to satisfy the desire for "recuperation" and recreation, asked the governors and gentry of various provinces to raise huge sums of money on the grounds that naval construction was in urgent need of funds, and secretly embezzled military funds to rebuild the Summer Palace. In the silence of the crowd, who saw through but did not break the truth, Wang Renkan wrote a letter of advice regardless of the stakes and pleaded with him to stop building the Summer Palace. He believes that this money "although it is not the right offering of the earth, it is still the anointing blood of the small people." Cixi was quite concerned about his directness.

In November 1890, Wang Renkan was made the prefect of Zhenjiang. Wang Ren was heartbroken and did not hurt himself. He firmly believed that "Saint Ming did not abandon his talents", and took his family to his death happily, and arrived in March of the following year. Less than 5 days after arriving in office, he encountered a tricky nursery murder. A large number of child bodies were found near the Danyang Catholic Church, which is also a nursery school, and angry people set fire to the church. The next day, Wang Renkan rushed from Zhenjiang to Danyang to deal with the matter. After the examination of the child's body, Wang Renkan personally "sighed for a long time" and believed that "the name is Catholic Church, and there should be no dead child bones." That is, the Childcare Bureau should not have no living babies", insisted on "the crime of bending loans to fool the people, in order to reassure the people, do not give pension fees, in order to support the other clan", and agreed with Cha Wenqing (Jin Yong's grandfather) in Danyang Zhi County to "strive for the people's lives, and if they are not good, they will be martyred by officials". Liu Kunyi, the governor of Liangjiang, scolded him for being "pedantic" and agreed to this treatment. Can't "ask for the people's life", "martyrdom" what a pity! The loyal Gengsuke who had no room for maneuvering back and forth was as usual. In 1892, Wang Renkan fell ill, but natural disasters continued and could not be relaxed. He described himself as haggard but still in a hurry, toiling and rushing. In the spring, Wang Renkan ignored dissuasion and personally supervised the locust hunting with illness. In the autumn, Wang Renkan rushed to Danyang and Dantu counties to deal with the severe drought, asked for the interception of 50,000 yuan of caomi to relieve 200,000 disaster victims, and raised more than 200,000 yuan to deal with disaster relief and aftermath. The receipts and expenditures of the donations were all published to the public, and the remaining funds were established as a place for teaching the scriptures. At the same time as providing disaster relief, he created a system of armor protection, strengthened the management of local public security, and vigorously revitalized agricultural water conservancy and disaster prevention, and successively excavated nearly 7,000 ponds and weirs and more than 100 gates and dams during his tenure.

The five characters of "the world's first spring" personally inscribed by Wang Renkan are still engraved on the stone wall on the banks of the Lingquan Spring in Zhenjiang. In the Tang Dynasty, Zhongling Spring was known as "the first spring in the world", and it was difficult to find the spring when Wang Renkan was in office. He led people to investigate, dredge and find springs, and recreate this thousand-year-old scenic spot by expanding the land, opening ponds, building embankments, planting lotuses, etc. He did not regard this place as a means of detention, but he did not use public and private to buy a field for himself. Most of the government offices left by Zhenjiang's predecessors collapsed, and Wang Renkan had to borrow money to repair the government office and repay it in annuals. He hung a self-written couplet in his study: "Reading in the county, borrowing two acres of official land; governing the valley, accounting for one point of the ruler." "I came here to "read" and "govern things"!

During his three-year tenure as the prefect of Zhenjiang, Wang Ren was honest and diligent in government affairs, sparing no effort to implement various measures to benefit the people. At the end of his term of office, Jiangsu approved Wang Renkan's political performance as the first in the province.

In July 1893, Wang Renkan was transferred to the prefect of Suzhou. The iron-beaten people flowed water officials, but this time the people of Zhenjiang helped the old and the young to "cover the way and cry", and spontaneously rushed to the streets to send Off Wang Renkan. As the carriage and horse slowly moved, people grabbed the rut and followed it with tears, as a sign of reluctance and retention. Previously, some gentry proposed to do good deeds for Wang Ren, but they were all politely refused, instead of spending money on the trip, it was better to give the necessary expenses to the poor people.

Wang Renkan, who had already been sick in Suzhou, went to the Bureau of Rumors (the ancient organ that tried cases) every day to clean up the backlog of cases, "in less than two months, more than 700 cases were settled." On October 20, 1893, he finally stopped and rested in the sleepless toil and never woke up again. Wang Renkan, who had been transferred to Suzhou for only 3 months, died of illness at the age of 45.

The bad news that came from Suzhou to Zhenjiang was transmitted from Suzhou, "the soldiers abandoned the industry, the merchants went on strike, and the wild quit the farming, all of them sighed and drooled, and set up a place and sacrificed." "People didn't expect that helping the car cry 3 months ago was a trick to say goodbye. Zhenjiang Prefecture erected a meritorious monument for Wang Renkan: "Three people who plan the river, three who order farmers, three who build schools, three who restore the Ying and receive the show and spit on the three, three years of political reporting, and go to the public office; the first to drink the spring, the first to guard the rivers and mountains, so we should be the first to defend the disaster and cure the peace, and the first to transform the first county, and the people are all as good as the people." The people of Suzhou revered him as "Wang Suzhou" and included the poems and music he composed during his lifetime in the "Testament of Wang Suzhou" and the "Supplement to the Testament of Wang Suzhou". The famous modern scholar Liu Yizheng wrote in the "Supplement to Wang Suzhou's Testament • Trek": "Those who want to write and are confused, cannot go down for a long time." ”

The governor Liu Kunyi and Inspector Kuijun sighed for a long time and reported wang Renkan to the imperial court that he "practiced practical government with a solid heart, regarded civil affairs as family affairs, and had an ancient style of following the rules of officials" to the imperial court. Guangxu Zhaoyun Xuanshi Museum established a biography for it. In the early years of Guangxu, it was stipulated that officials could only ask for eunuchs after their death, and Wang Renke broke the precedent. In the late autumn of the deep and solemn, the carriage and horse carried the coffin of this hero who had devoted his life in office all the way from Suzhou to Fuzhou. The long wind carries the hardships of thousands of people from afar, with the regret of unfinished work, through the ups and downs of the human world, a coffin, two sleeves of fresh wind. The pingbo tree in the hometown sighed and fluttered, and the leaves swayed and flipped in the wind. "Zhi Bo Yunxiao is not undressed, and Zhi Shen Lang Temple He Kan accompanies the false name." That dusty sentence, beyond the glitz of "false name", the sincere and profound sincere Dan heart of the people of the homeland is still hot!