It was not the name of a person, but the name of a village.
Where is it? Yuna is in the deep crease of the mountains in the northern foothills of the Lei Gong Mountains in the Miaoling Mountains. The village is now under the jurisdiction of Jiuyang Town, Jianhe County, with a total population of 245 households and 1300 people, all of whom are Miao. Yu Na's original name was "Wang Lang". According to legend, the ancestors of the local Miao people migrated here during the Qianlong (1736-1795) period, and because of their location in the eerie ravine, they named the village "Wang Lang" (Miao), which means flat land in the ravine. And how did the village later become called "Yu Na"?
Looking through the historical materials, I understood that "Wang Lang" was renamed "Xiao Na" and was related to Li Hongji, a figure of the same period in the Qing Dynasty in the village. This time I went to Yaona to search for a period of history in the depths of the years, or more precisely, to find the deeds of Li Hongji, a figure who rose up for the interests of the Miao people in the anti-Qing struggle. In that period of smoke-filled Miaojiang history, he was imaged as a meteor in the dark night, cutting through the dark night sky of Miaojiang, and although the light was short, it was permanently projected on the annals of Miaojiang's history.
The road to Yuna is a hardened rural cement road, outside the car window is a series of mountains, the car winds through the mountains, a mountain is approaching and far, another mountain is approaching and far, and the peak is silent. This is the road to the hero's hometown. The peak loop turns, a small stream flows from west to east, and it is quietly attached to a large mountain bend, and the wooden houses and brick houses are scattered along the mountain side or on the mountain, ordinary mountain houses. It was this ordinary Miao village that raised a generation of heroes who deterred the Qing soldiers- Li Hongji, the famous leader of the Miao peasant uprising in the same year.
Park the car at the entrance of the village and pay homage to the hero's hometown. Time and space will erase many traces, can I still find the footprints of heroes? In front of a family in the village, I talked to an old man surnamed Li, and I told him that I had come to visit Li Hongji's deeds. He looked a little solemn, as if he had fallen into some kind of contemplative state, and then he said in his mouth: Li Hongjimiao's name was Xiang Liangdi, born in the tenth year of Daoguang (1830) and died in the second year of Guangxu (1876). He was intelligent, studious, martial, brave and good at fighting, and after raising the flag against the Qing, he made a pair of armor and cast a fork (like a buffalo horn) on his helmet, so the Hmong people called him "nix ghongl gib". The Miao dialect "nix ghongl gib" means "bent bull horn" "nix" is a water bull, "ghongl" is a bend, "gib" is a horn, because the Chinese language can not find the word "ghongl gib", so the historical records are Li Gongji, Li Hongji, you bow order...
The old man's narration brought my thoughts into the smoke-filled years of Miaojiang: In 1729, that is, at the beginning of the seventh year of Yongzheng, the governor of Yungui, Ortai, presented to the imperial court the "Matters Concerning the Establishment of Officials in the Newly Opened Miaojiang Camp in Qian Province", and with a stroke of Yongzheng's imperial pen, the land reform of Miaojiang was officially implemented. Before Yongzheng, Miaojiang, from the perspective of territory, even though it had belonged to the imperial court, was actually not subject to Dili, and belonged to the "land of exogenous seedlings". With regard to miaojiang, which is "the land of exogenous seedlings," Ortai advocates that "making seedlings is the priority, and especially training troops and managing seedlings is an urgent task." That is to say, the focus of the land reform and return of Miaojiang to the stream is to use force to open up "Miaojiang", and the purpose is to open up "Miaojiang" to attract reclamation and increase the state's land and taxes. The use of force to open up "MiaoJiang", wherever the Qing soldiers went, plundered the land and land of the Miao people, resisted slightly, and brutally suppressed, resulting in a sharp confrontation between the imperial court and the people of Miaojiang. Li Hongji's youth and youth coincided with the years when the people of Miaojiang were oppressed and suffered great calamities. The cruel squeezing of government officials, local officials, and servants made the Miao people breathless, and the paddy fields they had reclaimed for generations were gradually plundered by the Han and Miao landlords, especially the Qing government set up forts in Antun in the Miao district, forcibly enclosed the land, and the fertile land of the Miao people was more seized. Just as Hu Linyi, who was the governor of Yungui at the time, described the life of the Miao people at that time in the "Book on the Matters of the East Road": "All day long for food, not a single millet is allowed to enter at four o'clock." The Miao people live in poverty to such an extent, and the desperate Miao peasants who are desperate to "die for thieves, die of hunger and so on, and if they break the law, they can die on credit, and if they endure hunger, they will die immediately." Officials forced the people to rebel, and in the tenth month of the lunar calendar in the fifth year of Xianfeng (1855), Li Hong responded to the Miao uprising led by Zhang Xiumei based on the Qingjiang Jiuxi and Jiujie (present-day Jiushun Village, Jiuji First and Second Villages in Jiuyang Township), and put forward the political proposition of "fighting the Tun army and seizing the land", which won the support of the Miao people, and the number increased to thousands. The rebels attacked Xunke Fort all the way, captured the city and captured qingjiang hall city and Liuji county town. Li Hongji, together with the Dong rebels Jiang Yingfang, Chen Dalu, and Zhang Xiumei, the Miao rebels, attacked the Qing forces together and captured Tianzhu County, Huangzhou, Yuanzhou, Huitong, and Jingzhou in Hunan, expanding their numbers to tens of thousands. The battle footprints spread throughout Guizhou, Hunan, and Guangxi, and the Qing government replaced two Guizhou inspectors, dismissed and demoted to deal with a Guizhou envoy.
In order to suppress the Miao people's uprising in miaojiang, which was in full swing, the imperial court had to mobilize 80,000 troops from the five provinces of Xiang, Qian, Chu, Gui, and Yunnan to suppress it. For a time, miaojiang swept through the clouds. In the eleventh year of Tongzhi (1872), the Miao rebels and the Qing army fought a decisive battle at kaili Crow Slope, and the rebels failed to retreat to Lei Gong Mountain. In the twelfth year of Tongzhi (1873), the rebel army camp Lei Gongshan was attacked by the Xiang, Qian, and Chu armies, Zhang Xiumei and Yang Daliu were betrayed and captured by the traitors, and Li Hongji broke out of the siege and sneaked back to his hometown of Yuna Village, hiding in a cave. On the sixth day of the first month of December, the Guiqi regiment dedicated a human head as Li Hongji's head to Chu Yuli of the Xiang Army for a reward. Chu Yuli found out that it was fake, so he sent Xu Desheng, the deputy general of the Qingjiang Association, to set up a camp to garrison Yu Nazhai to round up Li Hongji. The Miao masses throughout the village protected their leaders, and one by one they kept their mouths shut, and the Qing army had no way to do anything, and they could never catch Li Hongji. The Qing army withdrew in the second year of Guangxu (1876). Li Hongji went out of the cave to reunite with his neighbors, and soon fell ill and died. According to the old man, Li Hongji died of illness and did not hold a funeral, because he was afraid of exterminating the nine ethnic groups, and the villagers secretly buried the hero in a vegetable field that night, and after covering the soil, they replanted green vegetables, and did not leave a grave, and the hero quietly buried in his hometown.
The old man told me that the only thing li Hongji left in the world was his suit of armor, but Li Hongji's heroic feats have been deeply remembered in the hearts of the villagers. According to the old man, after Li Hongji's death, his armor could not be found in the place where he hid, and the armor he was wearing became a mystery. At the time, rumors were rumored to have been lost in battle. In order to find the whereabouts of the armor and avoid falling into the hands of the miscreants, after searching for all his hiding places and the farmer's house without success, he suspected that Li Hongji had buried the armor deeply, so he mobilized the people in the village to "dig three feet" into the agricultural land around the village, and all the green vegetables and melons in the soil of the large and small vegetable gardens did not dry up or rot, and none of them were spared. Locals describe this scene as "Wo La" (Hmong language, meaning rotten green vegetables and melon beans, describing even if you don't eat or wear, you have to turn upside down. Hou Yu is a heroic and good warrior who sacrifices his life and forgets death. As the search for armor penetrated the hearts of the people, "Wo La" became synonymous with "Wang Lang" village, and the Qingjiang Zhi called "Yao Wax". Due to the differences in the Miao dialect and the writing habits of later generations, it is often written as "夭na", which is still used today.
In 1958, villagers dug out Li Hongji's armor while digging the soil behind the village house, which was 25 centimeters high and 20 centimeters in diameter. The front of the helmet is inlaid with a pair of iron calf horns, about 5 cm long, with a spacing of 6.6 cm between the two corners, and a hollow small iron pillar welded in the middle of the two corners, slightly above the corner tip (its hollow small iron pillar is now destroyed, and the calf horn is still intact). The front of the iron armor is made of five pieces of iron slightly larger than the palm of the hand, such as fish scales, and the back width is made of eight iron plates with buckles, and the left and right armpits are connected by a whole iron plate and the front and rear iron plates, which are flat and square barrel-shaped. The front hem is slightly shorter than the back hem, 50 cm wide, 30 cm chest diameter and 85 cm long. The placket is opened from the armpit, weighing more than 30 kilograms, and the armor is placed in the home of Teacher Li Zhong for safekeeping. On August 3, 1959, Teacher Li Zhong presented Li Hongji's armor to the state, and Pan Guofan, cultural relics unit of Guizhou Nationalities College, transferred it to the Beijing China History Museum for collection, which later transferred the object to the Museum of the Chinese Revolution. It is now preserved in the exhibition hall of the Museum of the Chinese Revolution.
Bidding farewell to the old man and coming out, I searched behind the village front house in Yuna, walked slowly in front of the cave where the hero of the village had hidden, and wandered in the vegetable field where the hero was buried, looking for the hero's footprints. And as the years passed, the hero trailed silently, not even a tombstone. Standing on the vegetable field where the hero was buried, I thought of Gong Zizhen's poem "Falling red is not a merciless thing, it is more protective of flowers when turned into spring mud". Yes, when Li Hongji was born, in order to protect the people of his hometown from oppression, he rose up from the pole and turned into a piece of dirt after his death to nourish the landscape of his hometown.
Walking down from the village, standing on the wind and rain bridge by the creek and looking up at Yuna, the sun suddenly drilled out of a cloud, and the sun poured down on the earth like running water, like a magical brush, outlining the beautiful outline of Yaona Village - the traditional stilt house and brick houses in the village under the sun shine together, and the green trees and houses are integrated, like a beautiful natural landscape painting.
I think: In the new era, the young man will definitely write a new chapter of his own beauty.