Reading Xiangxi (Phoenix Town II)
The Tuo River Winds Around Fenghuang Day and Night. Only when one leafs through books can one faintly hear, in the wind, the clashing of arms in Fenghuang's history; as the years recede, the murderous spirit of battle gradually fades into nothingness amid the green hills and waters. In the 1980s, when Shen Congwen was rediscovered and crowned a master of modern literature, Fenghuang seemed to...
This article has been compiled from historical materials on 'Zhangjiajie Tour Guide Network' (33519.com · Specialty Foods / Cuisine / Customs section). Prices, business hours, administrative divisions, and statistical data mentioned in the text may already be outdated. Before traveling, please refer to the latest announcements from merchants, scenic areas, and local competent authorities; the parts involving folk legends and folk customs are local historical and cultural anecdotes, provided for cultural reference.
The Tuo River Winds Day and Night Around Fenghuang
Only when people leaf through books can they faintly hear, in Fenghuang's history, the clash of arms in the wind; as the years recede, the murderous spirit of battle gradually fades amid the green hills and waters until no trace remains. In the 1980s, when Shen Congwen was rediscovered and crowned with the title of master of modern literature, Fenghuang seemed to bid farewell entirely to its wartime years and began to appear in the world's view as Shen Congwen's hometown. Fenghuang became a wild-green paradise beyond the world. A Tuo River winding past the town was once the waterway by which Jiangxi merchants who had moved here loaded boats with tung oil sealed in wooden barrels and carried it downstream to other places, bringing back other precious goods in exchange. On both banks stood row upon row of stilted houses. Many heads slicked with pomade, and many more not yet washed or combed, would poke out from the windows facing the river to greet the boatmen and sailors about to depart, asking them to bring back a box of rouge or a piece of cloth; then amid the clamor of shouts, the merchant boats would gradually cut through the autumn waters and vanish into the distance. In the stilted houses on this side, calm quietly returned, and amid the clatter of washing, a day's life began. The Jiangxi people's skill at business enabled them to accumulate wealth. In the Shawwan area where the Tuo River bends, they built the Jiangxi Guild Hall, the Wanshou Palace. Inside the Wanshou Palace stands the Xiachang Pavilion, which still today rises tall in the wind, with flying eaves and upturned corners, grand as a landscape. In the Shawwan area where the Jiangxi Guild Hall is located, the current gradually slows and swirls into a broad, calm stretch like sleep. If you have a little courage and board a boat that has not been securely tied, imitating the boatman as you pole slowly through the green waves, then as long as you do not panic, there is indeed infinite charm in it. But if you want to be free of all worry about danger and use both eyes solely for the scenery, it is better to take a sailor's boat.
Tuo River Jumping Rocks
Located in the Tuo River channel outside the north gate of Fenghuang Ancient Town. First built in the 43rd year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing Dynasty (1704), it was one of the main passages in and out of Fenghuang Ancient Town in olden times. During the Miao Rebellion of the Qianlong and Jiaqing reigns, the Fenghuang Restoration Uprising of the 1911 Revolution, and the War of Liberation, this was always a main route for attacking Fenghuang Ancient Town. The jumping rocks are 100 meters long in total, with 15 red sandstone piers arranged in a row across the Tuo River bed.
Transportation in Fenghuang
The most common means of transportation is the motor tricycle. One yuan is enough within the town; leaving the town costs 2 yuan or 5 yuan depending on the length of the route. In addition, there are minibuses in Fenghuang running to and from nearby attractions such as the Southern Great Wall, Huangshiqiao, Ala Town, and Qiliang Cave, concentrated in the area near the Xinhua Bookstore, which locals call the "Big Roundabout." Just get on a motor tricycle and tell the driver you want to go to the "Big Roundabout."
The Simple, Clumsy Boatmen, People of Fenghuang
The boatmen on the Tuo River are no longer Jiangxi sailors, though quite a few of them still carry the label of Jiangxi ancestry. But they are all people of Fenghuang now. Not tall—medium in height—not strongly built, even somewhat thin and weak, they speak authentic Fenghuang dialect. When I came here on previous visits, they were still in their own privately run era, each calculating for himself. With the boat-poling craft handed down from their ancestors, they had bought a boat, and in twos and threes they scattered along the riverbank. When there were no visitors, they gathered together, rolled cigarettes, or smoked a Laosi Cheng... When someone came, they would cheerfully come over to greet them, exchange a few modest words of deference with their fellow boatmen, and whatever the guest casually gave—one or two yuan—with a shout of "Sit tight," they would row off. The boat went downstream, either to the Rainbow Bridge or farther still, all the way to the foot of Tingtao Mountain where Shen Congwen's grave is located.
On this visit, several scenic areas in Fenghuang had already been leased at a fairly reasonable price to the Zhangjiajie Huanglong Cave Tourism Company for a term of fifty years. Not only were ticket prices now uniform everywhere, but even the boatmen had become employees of the company. We walked down along the north gate city wall and happened to see a group of boatmen gathered together collecting their monthly wages. The leader called out "Old Huang the Second, Old Zhang the Third," and one hand after another reached out, took the money, sat on the stone steps to count it, then stuffed it into a trouser pocket and sat back down among the crowd, waiting for someone to call them to set off.
The boats are all of a uniform natural wood color—not great gilded tour boats carved with dragons and phoenixes, but the crescent boats of ordinary river-dwelling families from childhood. They have merely been standardized in size and left unpainted, coated only with clear oil. Above is a yellow canopy like a stretch of sky, and on the upper ends of the square railings are lightly carved patterns of flying flowers and curling leaves. Floating on the green waters, they are elegant yet full of rustic charm.
Once aboard, I chatted with a boatman about the difference in income between being an employee now and being the owner of his own boat before. He smiled shyly and said: "If we're talking about making money, of course it was more before, but now with unified development and management, it's a good thing." His eyes were clear and simple, without any melancholy or displeasure, and he felt no resistance at all to the Zhangjiajie people's cross-border operation. The people of Fenghuang are not particularly shrewd in business. For a long time, although local products were abundant, the area was cut off from the outside world, which made prices here extremely low. The information revealed by the farmer on the Futian mini-truck—that a catty of tangerines was as cheap as garlic and scallions—could be seen everywhere here. The tangerines are locally grown, sweet and large. When you go to buy them, they tell you to taste one—not like businessmen in other cities, who carefully tear off a single segment for you, but rather they stuff a big, red one into your hand whole. And it is not only tangerines. They also grow kiwifruit—in the city this thing is called kiwi, and 10 yuan gets you about five or six; here it is three mao per catty, and 10 yuan buys more than you can carry. And these prices truly cheat no one, old or young, guest or local alike. You speak your dialect from wherever you come from, and you buy at the same price as a local. This clumsiness of the people of Fenghuang in business is exactly what lets visitors here set their minds completely at ease and enjoy themselves.
The stretch of water at the north gate is very broad, and the small boat moved slowly along. It was an overcast day, the sky gray and dim, and the distant Nanhua Mountain had also lost some of its emerald green, like a silent screen. On both banks, the sound of washing clothes—thump, thump—filled the ears, making the early-morning town seem all the more empty and still. Several hundred swallows, their tails grown long like scissors, wheeled low over the water, an extraordinarily spectacular sight. On the water from the north gate to the east gate there is a small waterfall. The boatman reminded us to hold the gunwales. After a second in which my heart seemed to stop beating, the small boat had already settled back onto the calm water. Looking back at the drop we had just passed, the water poured down like a cascade, surging without cease. The boatman said that on the return trip he would have to pass this place again, and that with only her own strength she could never get up it, so she had to rely on another boatman on the river to pull the boat up.
Moonlight on the Creek Bridge at Night
Moonlight on the Creek Bridge at Night is one of the eight ancient scenes of Fenghuang, now known as Mist and Rain over the Rainbow Bridge. The Creek Bridge is the Rainbow Bridge, the largest ancient bridge in Fenghuang, built in the Hongwu reign of the Ming Dynasty. The local people built this bridge to reconnect the "dragon's neck" feng shui that Zhu Yuanzhang had destroyed. The Fenghuang Subprefecture Gazetteer records: "The bridge spans the Tuo River, more than fifty zhang long. The river is calm and the wind still; the bright moon hangs in the sky, and clear light brims everywhere. Near at hand are the misty woods on both banks; far off are the cloud-wrapped trees of a thousand hills—all enter a world of glazed crystal. Strolling on the bridge, one seems to be placed amid the isles of the immortals." Today's Rainbow Bridge is a reconstruction. On the bridge are shops and folk performances; the shops sell antiques, calligraphy and paintings, and batik crafts, and it is very lively.
Shen Congwen left his native soil as a soldier, established himself in Beijing with the title of a master of literature, ended his life with the designation of an expert in cultural relic research, and finally returned to Fenghuang.
The Stilted Houses Along the River, Leisurely and Endless
The stilted houses by the river have gradually taken on a look of age and decay, and there are not many of them left.
Beside them, new buildings have already crowded in—mosaic-tiled outer walls, deep blue glass, trailing green plants swaying on balconies, especially bright amid the piles of old wooden buildings. The old stilted houses are a heavy, almost ochre-red color, washed by wind and rain until they have turned black and dark. Occasionally a window facing the river is pushed open, and in that instant it gives rise to countless romantic fancies; for a moment cameras and gazes all turn toward it, yet for a long time nothing stirs. A piece of white gauze by the window hangs motionless, and there is no Cuicui or Yaoyao poking her head out to call crisply to the boatmen and sailors. And in a faint melancholy, as the water ripples, that window has already become a distant scene, while other stilted houses come toward us as close-up views, and so there arises yet another round of uneasy expectation, and yet another sigh after it has passed.
Gradually we left the town area, and the stilted houses no longer appeared in groups but only sporadically. One of them, though built along the water, had a foundation entirely of stone, with flying eaves and walls, and an extraordinary bearing—that was Huang Yongyu's Duocui Tower, naturally also built in the antique style.
The Shrimp-Scooping Women of Shawwan by the Rainbow Bridge
The small boat had already passed the Rainbow Bridge and arrived at Shawwan, where the water was especially calm. The Wanshou Palace looked indistinct from afar, but the Wanming Pagoda in the green waves, after being washed by spring rain, was fresh and striking. The Wanming Pagoda was rebuilt on the foundation of the original paper-inscription pagoda at Huang Yongyu's urging. In the past, the written paper of scholars was strictly distinguished from ordinary garbage, so it had to be burned in a paper-inscription pagoda. Yet this symbol of a flourishing culture that once burned with the fragrance of brush and ink was torn down during the Cultural Revolution. It was not until 1987 that it was rebuilt at Huang Yongyu's urging.
Outside the town area, the Tuo River is very quiet; by now one can hear only the sound of the bamboo pole breaking the silence of the water as it is lifted. The river water grows ever more richly green, yet it has long been clear, so that one can distinctly see the green algae swaying in the water. It was still the early spring season with a lingering chill, yet in the waist-deep water several women were scooping river shrimp. Wearing waist-high rubber boots and holding shrimp nets, they slowly swept them left and right, then lifted them up, the nets bringing with them water weeds and a pile of stunned river shrimp. After returning home, they clear away the weeds, wash the shrimp clean in a basin, light a fire, put them in the pot, and slowly dry them until they turn wine-red; then they can be taken to the street and sold by the cup. But for such a cup, who knows how long the woman must endure the cold in the water.
Tuojiang Stilted Houses
The Huilongge stilted house complex is located at Huilongge in the southeast of the ancient town, facing the old official road in front and hanging over the Tuo River behind. It is one of the ancient building complexes in Fenghuang Ancient Town with strong Miao architectural characteristics. The stilted house complex is 240 meters long in total and belongs to the architecture of the Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China; more than a dozen households still live there today. The stilted houses are all divided into upper and lower floors. The upper floor has complex craftsmanship and fine, exquisite workmanship, with a hip-and-gable roof with upturned corners, carved railings, and doors and windows; the lower floor is not used as proper rooms, but the hanging lower portions are all carved, with golden melon or various animal-head and floral patterns. The corridors or rooms projecting outward on the upper and lower tie beams hang suspended above the river channel, forming a unique sight.
Shawwan Scenic Area
The Shawwan Scenic Area gathers the essence of Fenghuang's mountains and waters; five of the eight scenes of Fenghuang are concentrated here. Among them, the Wanshou Palace, also known as the Jiangxi Guild Hall, has more than 20 rooms including the main hall and side halls, as well as an opera stage, with exquisite craftsmanship and well-preserved condition. Outside there is also a stele forest of Zhu Xi, made from rubbings of authentic Zhu Xi calligraphy provided by Huang Yongyu. To the south of the Wanshou Palace is the Xiachang Pavilion, with three tiers of double eaves, each tier carved with different ornaments, and the scenery seen from each level is different; especially when the wind passes, the bronze wind chimes on the upturned corners ring out with a long, lingering charm.
Shen Congwen Buried at the Foot of Tingtao Mountain
After the boat docked, we walked along the stone-slab street by the river, and before long we reached Tingtao Mountain, where Shen Congwen's grave is located. We casually followed a small path up the mountain, with sparse bamboo groves and unknown trees along the way. Halfway up the slope there is a stone tablet bearing Huang Yongyu's calligraphy: "A soldier either dies on the battlefield or returns to his hometown." The brushwork is free and unrestrained, while the inscription is profound and enduring. Shen Congwen left his native soil as a soldier, established himself in Beijing with the title of a master of literature, ended his life with the designation of an expert in cultural relic research, and finally returned to Fenghuang.
I had long heard that the tombstone was made of natural multicolored agate stone. I expected it to strike me heavily with an especially solemn dignity. But it did not. I could hardly believe that was a grave—no fence, no tomb mound, just a small patch of grassy ground on which a not particularly dazzling stone had been casually placed. Had I not read the materials, I would have thought it a stone picked at random from the mountain. On it is a line chosen by Shen Congwen's wife, Zhang Zhaohe, from Shen Congwen's posthumous text "Abstract Lyricism": "Think as I do, and you can understand 'me.' Think as I do, and you can 'know' others." It is in the hand of Liu Huanzhang, husband of Shen Congwen's niece Shen Chaohui and a sculpture professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Behind it is a elegiac couplet by Shen Congwen's fourth sister-in-law, Professor Zhang Chonghe, now at Yale University: "Unbending and unyielding, his writing like the stars; both kind and yielding, a person with a child's heart."
I truly saw, before this simple grave, dried wild chrysanthemums placed on the tombstone, along with milk vetch picked from the fields and some wild grasses scattered before the grave. I do not know how to describe the simplicity I saw, and the shock given me by all the inscriptions of his relatives interwoven together. Through reading I gradually drew closer to this master—not only through his almost household-known Border Town and Changhe, but also through his many literary essays and his later bitterness and endurance during the Cultural Revolution. He always smiled gently, or else was silent. When during the Cultural Revolution he was once assigned to clean the women's toilets in Beijing, what he wrote to Huang Yongyu was: First, treat the people and the land with love; second, when you fall, get up quickly and keep going forward—do not linger to admire the place where you fell and delay matters, do not stop to lament; third, forever, forever embrace your own work and never let it go.
Everything finally passed, and the soldier returned to his hometown, to remain there forever.
The Master Was, After All, a Countryman
Time and again in Shen Congwen's writing, I see his weariness with and escape from the humdrum city life as a countryman; and countless times, amid the clatter of mahjong and the hammering of high-rise construction in the city, I have savored that passage from his Candle in the Void:
I need quiet, to go into an absolutely solitary environment and digest the concrete and the abstract in life. The best place is to sit on a big rock by a small river in front of a temple, a rock bleached and polished by sunlight and rain. When the rainy season comes, green velvet-like moss grows on it. Once the rainy season passes, the moss has dried, and on a patch of un-withered moss bloom tiny blue and white flowers, with thin-legged spiders crawling beside them. The river water gurgles through the crevices of the rocks, and the pebbles and clam shells in the water are all clearly distinct. Beside the rock grows a large tree, its branches dark green, its leaves all fallen. I need such a place, for a month or a day. I must be completely cut off from external things before I can draw close to 'myself' again.
At dusk, hearing a thrush singing in a bamboo garden by the lake made me feel sorrowful. For these sounds were truly familiar to me, yet seemed completely strange. Twenty years ago such sounds often carried me away to cities of tall buildings and brilliant lights, when in fact I was then a little rogue, sitting on a big rock by a small river, a tributary of the Yuan River, daydreaming before a stretch of clear waves. Now I have actually come to live in the dream of twenty years ago, and have even grown weary of it, and I have come to understand myself: I am, to the end, still a countryman. But I am already very, very far from the countryside.
Reading such words makes me feel all the more sorrowful—partly because this is likewise my own panic and loneliness. And partly because, though I am lonely and panicked, I can never quite wield such words as well as they deserve. And now Shen Congwen has at last come to rest by the river he longed for, beneath the rock. In the hills bloom small blue and white flowers.
Shen Congwen's Grave
In 1988, Shen Congwen died of illness in Beijing. Part of his ashes was scattered in the Tuo River, and part was buried at the foot of Tingtao Mountain in Fenghuang. Shen Congwen's tombstone is a natural multicolored agate stone quarried from Nanhua Mountain, weighing about six tons, with seal-script carvings by Liu Huanzhang. The grave is extremely simple, blending into the wild chrysanthemums and orchids of the mountain, so plain as to make one sorrowful.
Zhunti Nunnery
Located on the south side of the ancient official road at Huilongge in Fenghuang, it is a single-eave brick-and-stone post-and-lintel building with a flush gable roof. The nunnery was built in the fifty-fourth year of the Kangxi reign of the Qing dynasty (1715) and rebuilt in the twelfth year of the Jiaqing reign. It is 20 meters wide, 15 meters deep, and 10 meters high. The stone main gate is semicircular, and above the gate are painted flowers, grasses, insects, and other colored paintings. Entering the main gate, one ascends fan-shaped stone steps to the inner gate. The inner gate is also semicircular, with a foundation of local red sandstone and walls of gray brick, with two stone columns on each side. On either side of the stone gate is a round carved wooden lattice window; legend says these are the eyes of the Zhunti deity, gazing across the river at the Wanshou Palace. Inside the nunnery are numerous Buddha and deity statues, their gilded bodies gleaming, with abundant incense offerings. Behind the nunnery is the scenic Tianma Mountain, with ancient trees reaching the sky, lush and verdant. Following the mountain path behind the nunnery upward, there is a pool of mountain spring, birds chirping, and the subtle fragrance of mountain flowers—full of the charm of a winding path.
Gazing at Pavilions from the Stone-Slab Street
Fenghuang is a small city. Coming down from Tingtao Mountain and following the stone-slab street back is one full circuit around the city. Like every city, Fenghuang's main road is also a bustling commercial zone; the road that runs through it, like that of every city, is lined with shops. But Fenghuang's charm lies by the Tuo River. So this circuit around the city is the essence of Fenghuang.
The stone-slab road is sparsely traveled. On both sides are stilted houses and antique-style mosaic buildings, the latter being the deep courtyards of a new generation. A middle-aged man who looks like a high school teacher, off for the weekend, carries a bamboo basket on his chest, reversed, teasing his child not yet one year old. The young girls coming down from Tingtao Mountain and those heading toward it all, without exception, run over to tease the little child. The father, generous and gentle, answers every topic, and once the crowd has passed, he turns back to the child, murmuring and cooing. An old man, carrying another kind of small bamboo basket, sells dried river shrimp. I think of the young woman I saw earlier from the boat, scooping shrimp from the river, and I stop the old man to buy shrimp—three big cups for one yuan, enough to stir-fry a big plate with bitter melon. The old man's face is all wrinkles. As he helps me pour the shrimp into a plastic bag, he asks me: 'Sister, won't you buy a little more? Country stuff, good to eat.' So I buy three more cups.
After passing Huang Yongyu's Duocui Tower, one looks up and sees Huilongge. The Qing court, to guard against Miao uprisings, once converted the pavilion into a fort; later the fort was also destroyed. Now Huang Yongyu's Duocui Tower, with its layered eaves and flying corners, rises straight above it.
To the left of Huilongge is the Zhunti Nunnery. In the old days Fenghuang had many temples; I visited only one—the Dacheng Hall, the sole surviving rear hall of the Confucian temple complex now inside Fenghuang No. 2 Middle School. That hall, which once sacrificed to Confucius, has now lost all its splendor; only two osmanthus trees still flourish. Most of the others have been destroyed or fallen into ruin, and the few that remain, such as the Sanwang Temple, I almost missed one by one. The Zhunti Nunnery was one I missed. The nunnery was originally built in the fifty-fourth year of the Kangxi reign (1751), destroyed by fire, and rebuilt in the twelfth year of the Jiaqing reign (1807). It is said that in the nunnery are the eyes of the Zhunti deity, staring fixedly at the Jiangxi Guild Hall opposite, meaning to keep all the business of the Jiangxi people in view, lest the wealth of the Fenghuang people all fall into the pockets of outsiders. And what makes me stamp my feet in endless regret is that in the summer of 2001, Huang Yongyu once sweated here, painting ten impromptu works on the nunnery walls, all signed with names like 'Old Commoner of Wenmiao Lane, Wenxing Street, inside the former North Gate of Fenghuang' and 'A Commoner of This City.' Such free-spirited works I foolishly missed.
The Brush Can Hardly Paint the Air of Antiquity
By now the sun is gradually rising, and the stone-slab street is full of people coming and going. In the old days it is said that blacksmiths and butchers gathered on one street, bustling beyond measure. Now the blacksmith shops are long gone, the butchers have moved to a special market, and the shops are left to genteel families, selling calligraphy, paintings, and curios, or making batik and silverwork. Only the food and drink trade—no matter how society develops, people cannot go hungry—has flourished with particular vigor, and so it remains a hubbub of voices.
A little farther off, in the gateway arch of the East Gate beneath the Rainbow Bridge, sketchboards are piled full. A group of students is sketching from life, and passersby occasionally stop behind them to glance at their drawings. For many years this ancient small town, with a style all its own apart from other towns in Xiangxi, has drawn countless students from elsewhere to sketch here, and without exception they all paint the city gate and the stilted houses. In the old days, when the stilted houses were still intact and clustered together, most sketchers leaned by the river to paint the stilted houses. In recent years the stilted houses have gradually dwindled, and so the stone-slab street of the East Gate, the city gate, and the scattered wooden buildings that still keep their original appearance have become another representative of antiquity, for them to daub and paint.
It seems the mood of nostalgia has been spreading all along, and is not, as the literati of the newspapers and magazines at the end of the century lamented, a newly arisen epidemic. We always long for the past, for the crisscrossing field paths, for cocks and dogs heard along the roads. We also long for stone-slab streets and wooden buildings, not steel-and-concrete structures painted to look like gray-brick tiled houses.
But time, after all, has flowed away, and the past will never return. Even if these children strive to leave traces of yesterday on their canvases, they can only use colorful strokes; in the flowing of color they depict the old traces before their eyes. The stone-slab road, the leaning wooden houses, the city gate and walls imprinted with the marks of time—Fenghuang is just like the way it appears in these paintings: it cannot hold back the pace of advance, and beyond its antique air it grows ever more brightly colored.
The Tuo River still flows, but it will never again stage the story of river prostitutes and boatmen. That young man called Bozi, cherished by a woman, did not pilot the little boat with the blue awning and delicate carvings, nor could he possibly come every month to collect wages from the Huanglong Cave Tourism Company. His love and his longing have all gone far away with the waters of the past.
Xiong Xiling, Premier of the Republic of China
An inn by the river beside the North Gate city wall wrote its own advertisement. I don't recall the exact words, but the gist was: The little shop sits by the river, facing a small bridge and flowing water. A wall's breadth behind the house is the birthplace of the great painter Huang Yongyu; twenty meters to the left is the residence of Xiong Xiling, Premier of the Republic of China's cabinet; a few hundred meters to the right is Shen Congwen's former residence. The wording is both elegant and distinctive, and it takes full advantage of favorable timing, place, and people—surely business must be booming.
And so it was. The owner is a carpenter, and amid a pile of wood shavings he was squinting with one eye to gauge a position, about to snap a chalk line. A dozen or so college students traveling together rushed up to him and asked to stay. He stood up and smiled apologetically, saying: 'Sorry, I've already got twenty-some art students staying here, really no room to squeeze anyone in. I'm truly very sorry.' The students laughed and left, saying next time, next time, we'll come again next time. The owner laughed too, saying next time I'll save places for you.
It is hard to imagine that such a small city could hold so many people of major influence in so many fields, and all of them within that one circuit of the stone-slab street.
Xiong Xiling (1870–1937), courtesy name Bingsan, called himself 'a man of Gan' and was known as 'Xiong the Phoenix.' When Huang Yongyu met Qi Baishi, the old man, then ninety, still asked about Xiong the Phoenix. Xiong Xiling was a jinshi of the twentieth year of the Guangxu reign (1894). In the twenty-third year of Guangxu (1897), he served as director of the Changsha Shiwu Academy, and with Tan Sitong, Liang Qichao, Tang Caichang, and others organized the Southern Study Society and founded the Xiang Daily. In the twenty-ninth year of Guangxu (1903), he also ran the Changde Normal Training Institute, Changde West Road Normal School, and Changde Middle School. In the first year of the Xuantong reign (1909), he served as financial supervisor of the Three Eastern Provinces, and the following year as salt commissioner of Fengtian. After the Xinhai Revolution, he supported the republic, and during the Yuan Shikai government he served as cabinet premier; owing to differences in political views, he resigned the premiership after 171 days. In his later years he abandoned politics and, using his personal influence, called for and founded the Beijing Xiangshan Orphanage, taking in and educating homeless, impoverished children stricken by disaster, and managing its affairs for as long as twenty years, until his death from illness in Hong Kong in 1937. Xiong Xiling's former residence is in the Xiong family lane of Wenxing Street in Fenghuang, a courtyard-house compound—exquisite and small rather than magnificent. In the rooms are displays of texts, photographs, and also stationery and manuscripts, along with a couplet by Cai Yuanpei: 'Weary of roaming the sea of officialdom, he returned to the hills to try his hand at an orphanage; bending his back to the task and exhausting himself to save the world, one regrets there is no army of Laozi.'
Among the photographs in the former residence is one of Xiong Xiling with his later wife, Mao Yanwen. Mao Yanwen came from the great Mao clan of Zhejiang, gifted in both talent and beauty. After the Xinhai Revolution, she studied successively at the Jiangshan Xihe Girls' School, the Hangzhou Women's Normal School, the Wuxing Hujun Girls' School, the Beijing Women's Higher Normal School, and Nanjing Ginling Women's University. In the autumn of 1929 she went to the United States to study at the University of Michigan, majoring in secondary education administration. After receiving her master's degree in the summer of 1931, she traveled in Europe and returned to China together with Wu Mi, who was then studying in Europe. Wu Mi had long pursued Mao Yanwen bitterly, but in 1935 Mao Yanwen married the sixty-six-year-old Xiong Xiling—thirty-three years her senior, a 'loyalist of the former Qing' and a 'bureaucrat of the Republic'—and together with Xiong ran the Xiangshan Orphanage. After Xiong's death in Hong Kong, Mao handled his funeral affairs and never remarried for the rest of her life. Later she went to the United States for a time, and in her later years settled in Taiwan, never willing to say a single extra word about Wu Mi.
A Brilliant Brush Wins a Fine Match
Xiong Xiling had a reputation as a talented scholar. On the evening of his marriage to Mao Yanwen, he composed his own love song: 'How the world turns back in hindsight; I feel the years, having weathered so much sorrow, my sickly face grown thin. I wish to seek a new life, only through spiritual striving. Fortune turns, spring returns to the withered willow. Beyond the tower the rivers and mountains are so fair; there is a needle-goddess to embroider mandarin ducks in fine stitch. At Huangxie Pu, hand in hand. The music of courting the phoenix plays a new tune; I dare boast of clouds, of old Lai in the northern suburbs, of reclusion and farming, broom and dustpan. An educational life together growing old, caring for others' young as my own. And more than that, a warm family. Five hundred infants to tend with diligence, cradles everywhere needing a loving mother. Heaven made the match; I have found a fine spouse.' This lyric is set to the tune 'He Xin Lang,' tender and sincere in its expression of love, with none of the stale clichés of talented scholar and beautiful lady. Though people of the time argued much over Mao Yanwen's not marrying Wu Mi, from Xiong's poems one can see that the genuineness of his feeling, the firmness and sincerity of his character, and his wholehearted devotion to the Xiangshan Orphanage would have made Mao Yanwen feel far safer than Wu Mi, who was caught his whole life in the pursuit of romantic love and even consulted Chen Yinke about a two-wife system.
Afterward, Xiong wrote another lyric inscribed on his own ink painting of lotuses, 'Reflections in the Lotus Lake': 'Green garments swaying, in the emerald waves, untouched by the slightest dust. Standing slender and graceful, waving white feathers, together they occupy what the world has never seen. Two small ones without guile, flying together untiring, good friends despite the years between. Powdered and rouged cheeks, naturally made a fine match. Suddenly one feels ten thousand kinds of tenderness, a single purity, a blessing one can savor. Soft words in the wine, how swiftly the sweet hours pass. Even if long together, year after year like this, one still feels the time is not long enough. Beneath the flowers all one's life, morning and evening keeping each other company.' This lyric uses objects to express feeling, with no trace of contrivance. A sixty-six-year-old man writing words of such deep and genuine feeling is worthy both of his reputation as a talented scholar and of his title as a master of the lyric. Xiong Xiling's second marriage, after the death of his first wife, must have been very happy. After the lyric is an inscription: 'The lyric above was written on the ninth day of the second month of the yihai year as a honeymoon memento, inscribed on this painting as a gift to Yan; now I record it as well, to fill a wall of the Cifan Hall. Written one day before the beginning of autumn of the yihai year, by Xiong Xiling of Fenghuang.'
Yet Xiong Xiling's life's writings have not been passed down. Apart from the two volumes of the Xiangshan Collection published before Liberation, when Hunan People's Publishing House brought out his collected works in 1985, for some unknown reason only the first volume of the Collected Works of Xiong Xiling appeared.
Dimmed and Forgotten
These stories of the heart are a digression. Xiong Xiling's significance for Chinese history is simply beyond my comprehension. Fenghuang gave me no opportunity to understand him; my unfamiliarity with history meant that on the day I visited his former residence, my understanding of him was limited to those displays of photographs and texts—exceedingly shallow and superficial. The people of Fenghuang have not given this illustrious figure any further introduction; the old house where he grew up is submerged among a cluster of similar buildings, and because of its great age it has gradually begun to show signs of decay. I think any visitor from elsewhere, coming in search of Xiong Xiling for the sake of the name of the first cabinet premier of the Republic, if lacking the proper preparation beforehand, would upon arrival find his impression of him—apart from plainness—if not disappointed, then at least very faint.
In front of the former residence, I saw a young tour guide chatting with the girl at the ticket booth. He said: 'Oh, my hair isn't combed properly? No wonder they didn't say I was handsome today.' I don't know whether he had already finished explaining things to his tourists; even if he had, his account of history would certainly not exceed his concern for his own appearance.
Fenghuang falls far short of satisfying visitors' quest for glory and relics. I have never been able to grasp just where the people of Fenghuang's attention truly lies. This indifference to glory, this silence toward the dead who have passed—perhaps it is a plain and practical attitude toward life, but such an attitude is also, is it not, a squandering and wasting of history? Xiong Xiling should count himself lucky; there are many more whose traces we can now scarcely find in the city of Fenghuang. Zheng Guohong, one of the 'Three Commanders of Dinghai'; Tianxing Liu, the Nanshe poet known alongside Liu Yazi as 'Southern Tian and Northern Liu'; Chen Quzhen, King of Xiangxi... this series of illustrious figures has been completely submerged in the dust of history. The people of Fenghuang have not brushed away a speck of dust for them, to let us catch a glimpse. The former residence of Tian Xingxu, commander-in-chief of Guizhou, now has only a vermilion gate and an inscription left, beside which is written: 'Food and lodging provided.'
I can from the bottom of my heart accept the simplicity of Shen Congwen's grave, for that was what he longed for. But the people of Fenghuang's squandering of history leaves me dejected. We are to look to the future and forget yesterday, but if yesterday—which once gave us spiritual support—is entirely cut off, and we carry a total blank ignorance of history, can we really march forward with light packs?
This makes me think of what happened to Shen Congwen after he gave up writing in 1949 and transferred to the History Museum to do research. There in the museum, besides doing his own research, he often went out into the exhibition halls and voluntarily explained things to visitors. In the eyes of his friends, relatives, and students, it was an extremely tragic scene. Wang Zengqi, having seen with his own eyes Shen Congwen explaining to an audience, could not help sighing: 'From a university professor to a museum docent, Mr. Shen did not feel he had lost any face. In his manner he was not only content but positively in his element. Only when acquaintances saw him explaining did they inevitably feel a pang of sorrow.'
When Xiao Qian recalled those days, he too felt a pang of sorrow. He said: "Once I accompanied some foreign guests to visit the Forbidden City, and it happened that he (Shen Congwen) was the one giving the tour, holding a pointer and explaining things with great seriousness. Watching him, I felt deeply saddened—I thought, this is work for a young man, how could they make him do this? Fearing I might affect him, and fearing I might wound him, I kept my distance and did not go up to greet him."
Shen Congwen's actions were a tragic silhouette of that era, yet those who once heard his explanations were truly fortunate. Today, we can only stand silently before the departed, knowing nothing of the past and of history.