Author: Wu Xiao
When it comes to Beijing's flyovers, it is so famous that some old Beijingers will say to you with Beijing-flavored words: "Flyovers? What's that? That's the bridge that Tianzi walked. The Son of Heaven is the Emperor! When the emperor went to the Temple of Heaven to worship the place where he passed, the jade bridge specially built for him did you know? Hello! "In fact, the reason why the flyover is famous is not only this reason, but also because from the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, it was an entertainment center frequented by ordinary people in Beijing. It is said that like the famous cross-talk masters Hou Baolin, Liu Baorui and other veterans of the music and art circles, before liberation, they often performed there, and people could enjoy various cultural and entertainment performances there. The overpass is also a commodity market where people can choose from a variety of low-cost daily necessities, as well as clothing, hats, shoes and socks. Therefore, in those years when cultural life and materials were very scarce, the tianqiao naturally became a place where ordinary people flocked to it. Over time, the reputation of the overpass was greatly shaken, and the natural fame became famous.
Located in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Hohhot City, in fact, earlier also had one of its overpasses, which is Dazhao Dongcang, legend has it that from the late Ming Dynasty, Alatan Khan built Dazhao three or four hundred years, Dongcang has been a bustling place for entertainment, shopping and dining for the common people of Naturalization City, until the 1950s and 1960s.
Outside the east wall of the Daicho Temple, entering through the round arch on the east side of the Daicho Temple, with the exception of a few houses, it is a vacant lot about half the size of a football field. There have been people here since the early morning, but it has to be really lively after eight or nine o'clock in the morning. The rich and idle slowly stepped in, the people in short dresses walked in, and the dolls rushed in with running belts... Higashikura began to get noisy.
The most attractive of course is the monkey play, adult dolls around a tight air, people both want to squeeze forward to see clearly, but also afraid of being caught and bitten by the monkey, and wait for the field to slowly quiet down. Monkey people put on colorful clothes for monkeys, lead them with ropes, let them pick up knives, guns and sticks to compare, or turn their heads and grimaces, making the adults and children onlookers very happy. After a while, the monkey trickster would send a monkey to walk upright toward the audience with a small basket. Often read know that this is asking for money, those dolls will run backwards with a roar...
The art of the handle also opened the field, the male general style wears a hand-sewn undershirt or bare body, a wide cloth belt tied at the waist, and wears corseted lantern pants at the bottom, their performance content includes bare-handed brick shooting, spear piercing throat, dancing knife flying hammer, etc., the female handle style is often a red jacket and green pants, performing some dancing gun and stick flower fist embroidery leg kung fu. The crowd of onlookers also made a burst of applause from time to time...
On the other side, it was much quieter, it was the villain book stall. The stall owner removes the cover of the villain's book and pastes it on a large panel or a large white cloth for people to choose. The vast majority of people reading were children, sitting on rows of low, long wooden benches, watching quietly with relish. Occasionally, the lively and quick-witted child would exchange books with each other when the stall owner was not paying attention, so that they could spend money on two books for one book.
Pulling foreign films is also very popular with children, which is often referred to as dioramas. A wooden box with a bracket has a visual hole in the front, and the children climb up to the hole and look at the hole, and through the inner lens, they can see the pictures, there are landscapes, cities, and foreign figures. The right hand of the la yang piece pulls a rope to change the picture at any time, and the other line is connected to the small gong and small drum cymbal on the box, and the sound of the bang is made with a foot, and the rap explanation is carried out according to the content of the picture, which is very attractive. Of course, it can't be seen in vain, it is the first to collect money, although it is not expensive, but most of the children do not have money in their hands, so they stand next to it and coax: "Wang Bali looks at Wang Bali while looking..."
The storyteller has begun. One is a big drum book, two people performing, one playing three strings, the other singing when he talks. The other is storytelling, where only one person performs, one table and one fan and one wake up wood. Whether it is a drum book or a commentary, the performers are very eloquent, with their mouths hanging in the river, eyebrows flying and dancing, painting and painting, which is extremely attractive, which can capture the hearts of the listeners, so that the audience's state of mind fluctuates with the storyline and the fate of the characters, or sadness or joy, or anger or resentment. Every time at the critical moment, but also the most exciting time, just listen to a "want to know what happened later, and listen to the following decomposition", suddenly stopped, and began to ask for money.
Unlike the colorful and engaging storytelling stalls, fortune tellers' stalls are relatively deserted, and they generally wear melon skin hats, a pair of round cake brown glasses, a goatee beard, and sit on a few bricks with a folding fan in their hands. In front of him, a white cloth was laid out, on which was painted a gossip chart of yin and yin pisces, and some words such as Mai Shenxiang and marriage fate were written on both sides, quietly waiting for someone to come to the fortune telling...
Tricksters are also very popular nowadays, especially by children, to see how he uses a few playing cards to conjure up a flower, or a small goldfish that jumps around alive on a white paper, and what is even stranger and more exciting is to swallow a few needles and then swallow a cotton thread, and then pull the thread with his hand, and pull out the thread wearing several needles from his mouth, and the needle dangles on the line with a white light, and people are stunned to see it...
The most appetizing thing is the variety of food stalls. There are a complete variety of dry goods sold, including white roasted seeds, sugar roasters, salty roasted seeds, egg roasters, twist flowers, hemp leaves, sugar and oil spinners, moon cakes, dry tenants, and rose cakes. There are also mung bean cakes and oil fruits, cold powder, cold cakes, rice dumplings and so on. When the children saw these, they couldn't walk, pestered their parents to ask for this and that, cried if they didn't buy it, and finally could only buy the same to coax the child. Otherwise, when you go to the stall where the candy blower, the dough kneader, and the candy painting are drawn, you still have to rub it for half a day.
On the other side is a stall hypermarket, farmers are choosing farm tools such as hoes, sickles or shovels, housewives are repeatedly comparing in front of the cloth stalls, choosing their favorite and inexpensive cloth, and the eldest daughter-in-law is chattering and laughing in front of the incense powder stall. Selling clothes, shoes and hats, selling needles and threads, selling pots and pans, selling paper and pencils and ink, it is also around a water leak...
It was almost noon, and people began to go home one by one. At this time, the bungalow shops near the East Warehouse Gate were lively, and the guys in small restaurants such as bun shops, caviar restaurants, knife-cut noodle restaurants and other small restaurants shouldered a towel and stood in front of the door to warmly invite diners, whether regular customers or raw customers, all with smiles on their faces, respectfully invited to taste.
The noodle shop is a very popular Shanxi-style small restaurant with good quality and low price. It is said that the dough cutting master is very skilled, bare head with a large piece of kneaded dough, two hands of the face cutting knife left and right to open the bow, the cut noodles fly into the pot, like a fish into the water in the pot tumbling. Pour a spoonful of fried pork whistle in a bowl and pour a little vinegar to clove the garlic, which is very delicious. Legend has it that their fried pork whistle is a century-old soup, and for a hundred years a pot of old soup was added to the proportions of meat, water, and of course, ancestral condiment packets every day. Therefore, the taste is particularly mellow and unique. The traditional stir-fry dishes at this restaurant also taste authentic, and dishes such as oiled meat, slippery tenderloin, and dried croquettes are also well received. (To this day, in the old city of Hoshi, there are several restaurants with the brand of the boss summoning noodle restaurant, and they still have a large number of diners every day.) )
At that time, there was also a noodle restaurant that was more popular with diners. The noodle shop has three large facades, one for the kitchen, and the other two with a few unpainted tables and wooden stools, the table top is greasy and can no longer see the background, on which is placed a porcelain pot filled with vinegar and a bowl of fried red pepper noodles. Each bench was full of people, either eating or waiting. From the clothing of these diners, it can be seen that either the workers in the city or the peasants in the countryside, in any case, most of them suffer. The bed of the bird noodles is very large, and a core can press half a kilogram of noodles. The pressed noodles are placed in pieces in a large wooden cage drawer with a diameter of about one meter, and then two people carry them to the large pot outside the door and steam them. The master of the fire was thirty or forty years old, a disabled person, with only half-cut legs on both legs, and the upper half wrapped in the rutted skin of the carriage, and he could only walk on his knees, and he knelt there and pulled the bellows. The bellows is also specially made, nearly one meter long, two feet high, the rod is not the common form of two strands (two round wooden sticks), but a relatively thick square wooden stick, pulled up very heavy, the sound piece is very large, but the wind is strong, blowing the flames inside the stove are white. The scent of the noodles wafted out of the cage drawer, and when it was time to open the pot, the two men carried the cage drawer into the room, and the room was suddenly covered with steam with the incense of the noodles. A large bowl of coarse porcelain holds half a bowl of salt soup, which contains some soybean sprouts, yam strips or rotten pickles, diners pour vinegar into the bowl, dig up a spoonful of chili peppers, stir it with chopsticks, tear open the noodles and put it in the bowl and mix it beautifully, some people are spicy and squeaky, some are hot and sweaty. Although the sitting posture and eating are not good, they eat fragrantly, eat steadily, eat out of emotion, eat out of nostalgia. Of course, many people still have to follow the habit of scooping the remaining bowl bottom with half a spoonful of boiling pot water to drink before leaving satisfactorily.
At that time, The Great Summons Dongcang was always full of tourists, shoulder to shoulder, always bustling, noisy, this is the style of the city, is the life of the people, is the customs and culture of the naturalization city for three or four hundred years, and lasted until the mid-1950s. In the past few decades, especially since the reform and opening up, the social progress and economic development, the appearance of Hohhot City has been greatly improved, and Dongcang no longer exists, replaced by green belts and boulevards, which are more harmonious and unified with the entire Dazhao Scenic Area, and integrated, but the round arch gate of Dongcang still seems to tell people about the former glory of Dongcang. Its kind of ancient rhyme, that kind of smell of the city, that kind of customs and culture, although after a long time of polishing, still integrated into all corners of Hohhot, accompanied by people's daily life, no loss, no demise, and bring people unlimited memories and imagination...