Seeking My Roots in My Hometown (2)
(2) Record of Huilonggang In my earlier ignorance, well into my twenties and thirties, I still did not understand the origins and history of my hometown ancestors. And when I asked my close relatives and clan members, not one of them could explain the details of the ancestors either. It is said that the ancestors once passed down a genealogy, but unfortunately it was destroyed in the early years after Liberation. Later, the elders of the clan could only recall fragments about the ancestors' origins, unable to give a complete picture. So I made up my mind to gain a detailed understanding of the development and lineage of my family's ancestors...
(II) Notes on Huilonggang
In my earlier years I was ignorant, and though I had already lived more than twenty or thirty years, I still did not understand the origins and development of my ancestral family in my old home village. When I asked my close relatives and clan members, not one of them could explain the details of our forebears either. It is said that our ancestors once passed down a genealogy, but unfortunately it was destroyed in the early years after Liberation. Later, the elders of the clan could only recount scraps of memory about our ancestors' origins, unable to give a complete picture. So I made up my mind to gain a detailed understanding of the development and lineage of my family's ancestors.
At the end of the twelfth lunar month in the year Yihai, I was spending the New Year in my old home village. During the holiday, with guidance from clan members, I went together with my eldest brother, nephews, nieces, and sister's son to Huilonggang, about two kilometers from the old home, to search for the ancestral tomb. Huilonggang lies at the foot of the high Yangqi Mountain in Liujiaping Township, Sangzhi, facing Guanxijian Village across the river. The terrain is relatively high; the ridge is bare and flat, with only a few sparse tea trees, and the ground has all been cultivated, some of it turned into good farmland. At the edge of a field, my eldest brother led me to the ancestral tomb with its standing stone stele. The tomb is divided into three sections:
The middle section is carved with the large characters: “Old Gentleman Li Gongxian.” The small characters beside it read: died on the 18th day of the first month of the Dingwei year of the Guangxu reign, at the hour of Chen. Below the center are carved the names of sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, and great-granddaughters. The left and right sections are carved with the epitaph. That epitaph, worn by the years, had become mottled and hard to read. After my eldest brother had determined the location of the ancestral tomb, he lit incense and candles, performed the kneeling rites, then carefully wiped the epitaph clean with a cloth dipped in water, and the characters on the stele gradually became faintly legible. I took out my notebook and copied the epitaph down character by character. The original text had no punctuation; for ease of reading, I have punctuated it here based only on the original text:
Since the Tang dynasty, powerful clans and noble families have been called Li. The Li of Sangzhi came from Jiangyou. The first and most distinguished among them was the Li of Lord Shengxian. The Lord's founding ancestor, Mai Tan, moved to Sangzhi to escape the bandit turmoil at the end of the Ming dynasty. The Lord was of the fifteenth generation. The Lord's grandfather was Anguo. He begot Xingchun, who was the Lord's deceased father. He was endowed with talent and spirit, and in his time was renowned for his writing; the family, once prosperous, began to decline through his accumulated burdens, and the Lord rose after him, at one point so poor he had not a speck of land to stand on. Yet in carrying out the wishes of his deceased father Xingchun, he never lacked in devotion, settling his parents at dusk and inquiring after them at dawn; to old age he was tireless, his filial piety was inborn, not something feigned for praise. In his early prime, he devoted himself to the family livelihood, diligent in farming and weaving, without a moment's idleness from dawn to dusk, and in the end was known as a man of complete prosperity and generosity, sharing poverty and hardship with all his kin, and for the building of bridges and roads and for orphans, widows, the aged, and the sick who had no one to turn to, he always helped according to his means, without a thought for himself. His nature was especially firm; in integrity he constantly avoided what was improper, and from his whole household to his neighbors all respected him. Yet he also deeply regretted his early lack of schooling, and so engaged famous teachers to instruct his sons in reading, though unfortunately none succeeded. Only when his grandsons Dehua and Deming had just come of age, both exceptionally bright as children, did the Lord, gravely ill, call them to his sickbed and command them, saying: “I and my son both failed to achieve anything in learning, a regret for two generations. You must strive on your own behalf, and take care never to let your resolve fall away because the civil examinations have been abolished.” Because of this, the brothers Hua and Ming were moved to study with vigor, and in the end made their names known in the world. His virtuous wife, a lady of the Gui clan, at fifteen married Lord Shengxian, conducting herself with propriety and prudence; from the rice and salt of a single household to the great matters of entertaining guests and assisting at sacrifices, there was nothing she did not arrange with order and method, a model worthy of emulation. Though the family had not a wall to stand against, the lady bore it all with calm, only practicing frugality. She divided a single day's food into two days' portions, and took several tasks upon one body, to the utmost of toil, sparing nothing for the family; thus in her prosperous years, at eighty, she still supervised the household affairs, leaving nothing of food or grain to waste, and for this her grandsons, great-grandsons, sons' wives, outside kin, and servants all emulated her. She had a husband; sons two, Shiliang and Shichen; Liang married a lady of the Liu clan, Chen married a lady of the Liu clan; daughters two, the elder married Mei, the younger married Zhong. Grandsons eight: from the elder line, Jie, Gui, Xin, Mao, Hua, and Ren; Gui died young; Jie, Xin, and Ren pursued farming; Mao studied medicine; Hua, courtesy name Longfei, graduated from the Hunan Provincial Second Normal School and served successively as principal of the county higher primary school. From the younger line, Deming and Dezheng. Ming, courtesy name Chonghua, graduated from the Hunan Provincial Agricultural School, studied in Japan in the second year of the Republic, attended the Agricultural University, and now serves as president of the county agricultural association. Zheng, courtesy name Shuzheng, graduated from the county higher primary school and served successively as a teacher in a national school. Granddaughters three, great-grandsons thirteen, great-granddaughters nine. A throng in one hall, grand as geese pausing and swans waiting, as prolific as pepper seeds and melon vines, truly at the height of prosperity.
The Lord and the lady both lived to the age of eighty-three, and were buried together at Huilonggang. After some fifteen years, his grandson Chonghua and the others, fearing that the Lord's and the lady's virtuous words and benevolent deeds might fade with the passage of time, wished to carve stone to transmit them far into the future, and commanded Guang to compose this account. Guang was a longtime friend of Chonghua and his brothers; knowing his writing unworthy of transmission yet unable to decline, he has respectfully written down the major points as above.
Respectfully composed by the bagong Peng Longguang
From the inscriptions on this ancestral tomb, one can clearly calculate that the tomb's master, Mr. Li Sheng, was born in 1824 and died on the 18th day of the first month of 1907. The stele was erected by his grandson Li Chonghua, and the epitaph was composed by Li Chonghua's friend Peng Longguang, a bagong. The stele was erected in 1924. Further, from the content of the epitaph and the accounts of the clan elders, the origins of the Li ancestors of my old home village may be roughly as follows:
At the end of the Ming dynasty, an ancestor named Li Mai Tan came to Sangzhi from Jiangxi to escape bandit turmoil. The place where he put down roots was Muerping near Zengjiakua in this township, and it is said that Li Mai Tan's tomb is there. The generation-name sequence after Li Mai Tan is: “Mai Yong Shuang Wan Yin, Da Zheng Guo Zai Min, Wen Shun An Xing Sheng, Shi De Chang Kang Ning.” The earliest ancestor to settle at Lijiagang was named Li Anguo, followed in order by Li Xingchun and Li Shengguang, all single-line transmissions. After Li Shengxian, two sons were born, namely Li Shiliang and Li Shichen. After these two sons, eight grandsons, three granddaughters, thirteen great-grandsons, and nine great-granddaughters were propagated; these descendants in turn multiplied, and this constitutes the present population of more than a hundred Li clan members at Lijiagang.
Additionally, according to a manuscript left by my sixth uncle, after the Li generation-name character Ning, the elders added a new Li generation-name sequence:
Mei Yu Jia Zhuo Ju, Wan Zi Qian Nian Hong.
Chen Xi Gao Zhao Yao, Shi Dai Ying Xiong Qiang.
Li Yi Chuan Jia Ben, Tuan Jie Li Liang Da.
Xue Er Shi Xi Zhi, You Heng Ze Cheng Gong.
I estimate that this newly added sequence was composed in the 1920s or 1930s. Its generation-name order is entirely linked in verse; eight lines of verse with forty characters are forty generations, and reckoning twenty-five years to a generation, it can extend a full thousand years. Within this thousand years, our descendants need not dispute over generation names; they need only follow this sequence in choosing names.
Returning from paying respects at the ancestral tomb at Huilonggang, I felt the harvest was no small thing. That epitaph recording our ancestors, though in diction it may be, as its author modestly said, “unworthy of transmission,” and cannot be mentioned in the same breath as the many famous works of history such as Han Yu's “Sacrificial Address to the Twelfth Nephew,” “Epitaph for Liu Zihou,” Ouyang Xiu's “Sacrificial Address to Shi Manqing,” Su Shi's “Stele of the Han Wengong Temple at Chaozhou,” or the Ming writer Zhang Pu's “Record of the Tombstone of the Five Men,” still this epitaph cannot be replaced by any other famous piece. Thus it has its own precious historical and cultural value. For us Li descendants of Lijiagang, the content provided by this epitaph precisely makes up for the lack of a genealogy. Therefore I am deeply glad to have found the development and lineage of my ancestors, and those figures of the old home village from the past have also appeared before me one by one, relatively clearly. We descendants ought to inherit the aspirations of our forebears, sum up life's experiences and lessons, strive to carry them forward and expand them, and seek to contribute more to the prosperity and flourishing of the entire Chinese nation!