"Chuanzi water, pinzitang, tic-tac-toe road, twenty-eight su walk Nanyang." This folk song is recited by everyone in Shimoyu Village, and it describes the geography of Shimoyu Village. The Great Light Creek flows through the Tendai South Mountain, and there are many villages on both sides of the creek, and the village of Xiatang is on the north bank of the Big Light Creek. The river that flows through the front of the village is customarily called Wuxi. Every autumn, when the leaves of the black oak trees on the mountain are red, a cluster of small yellow chrysanthemums dot the path on the shore, swaying in the autumn wind. Among the ten scenes of xiatang, there is a scene of "Juxi Yundi", and people also call this stream Juxi. According to the "Tiantai County Gazetteer", "In the Yuan Dynasty, there were two surnames of Xia and Tang who moved here to settle down, originally named Xia Tang Village, and later evolved into the current name due to the harmonic sound of the dialect. "In the current village of Xiatang, most of the residents are surnamed Tang.
"Chuanzi Shui" vividly speaks of the three mountain streams of Shimoyu Village. The village of Shimotang is built on a mountain, facing the Great Light Creek, and the east-west village is wide and pointed in the middle, shaped like a boat, moored on the north bank of the creek. The three pits flow from the mountain through the village and finally join the Ōtam Creek. The three pits from west to east are The Shangdian Houmen Pit, the Zhanghoumen Pit and the Muxi Ao Pit, and the Three Pits happen to form the Chinese character "Chuan". The longest one is the Muxi Ao Pit, where the water is clear and the villagers wash their clothes and vegetables. At the southern end of the pit, a bridge shed was built for the villagers to chat on weekdays. The bridge has been converted into a concrete bridge in recent years, but there are also long wooden chairs on both sides for people to rest in peacetime.
The bridge shed is the name of the rooftop people for the bridge built on the wooden bridge, and now people commonly use another name - the covered bridge. The covered bridge in Xiatang Village is built on the Dayan Creek and is the main bridge for villagers to enter and leave the village, and the bridge is called Zhongshan Bridge, named after the ancestral residence of the Tang clan in Zhongshan County. Just after New Year's Day in 1950, the villagers gathered together to discuss the construction of the bridge, because the original crossing of the creek had to take twenty-eight steps, which was extremely inconvenient whenever there was a big water. Presiding over the construction of this bridge was Tang Yuli, a villager who served as the township mayor of Daonan Township and had a certain prestige and good reputation in the village. In order to facilitate the villagers' access, Tang Yuli thought of building a new bridge. But the township chief, who had read books and studied medicine, did not build a traditional stone arch bridge, and the drawing he drew was a bridge shed that no one in the village had ever seen, and this strangely conceived novel bridge aroused the curiosity of the villagers.
The timber for the bridge was taken from the mountains, and after the thick cypress trees were cut down, they were put on ropes and carried by strong young people to the front of the village. The piers on both sides are made of stone blocks by the village's wall masonry masters. When the piers on both sides were built, the bridge was also completed, and the bridge was made of five thick cypress trees. The day of the bridge was the most exciting moment for the villagers, and at the bridge, scaffolding was erected with pine trees with thick bowls. With the joint efforts of more than a dozen young people, the bridge was pulled onto the piers on both sides of the river. After that, it is much simpler to build a bridge shed on the wooden bridge, and the two sides of the shed on the bridge are strung together by two oblique columns to form an arch, and a horizontal strip is set up on top of it, thus supporting the roof of the shed. Benches are built on the wooden railings on both sides of the bridge, and tile houses are also built at both ends of the bridge.
After the completion of the Zhongshan Bridge, the villagers felt its benefits. In front of people's eyes, a wooden bridge with a flat beam is actually covered with shacks, which can shelter the villagers from the rain and the sun, which is not available in the familiar stone arch bridge, and what is more pleasing is that there are benches paved with fir trees on both sides of the bridge for the villagers to rest. In Tang Yuli's heart, building this Zhongshan Bridge was the most proud thing in his life. The Zhongshan Bridge was renovated in 2001, but it was basically left in its original state, although a new bridge was built a few meters upstream of the Zhongshan Bridge, but the old man still liked to walk through the Zhongshan Bridge, like to lean on the bridge railing, sit on the bench.
"Pin zi tang" refers to the three mouth ponds in the finished glyph shape of the village. The flowing mountain streams make The village of Xiatang come alive, and the calm pond is like a mirror, reflecting the rustic folk customs and the tradition of cultivating and reading heirlooms. The pond in front of it was planted with lotus flowers, known as the lotus pond. Every year, in the middle of summer, when the lotus flowers are in full bloom, the students in the nearby academy chant poems by the pond. The pond where the two mouths are connected in parallel is called Shuangtang in the village, and the shore of Shuangtang was also a lively place in those days. In the middle of the three ponds, there is a stage built, built between the ponds, in each performance, the pond will produce echoes, whether it is the singing cavity in the play, or the echo produced by the melody of the instrument when floating through the three ponds, making the sound more loud and beautiful.
There is a three-through house in the north of Shuangtang, which was also extremely grand at that time, but some have collapsed, some have been rebuilt, and this three-through building is called the three-through in the wall. People still remember that the Tengjiao Academy was set up in the wall, and the children in the village read and read here. During the Kangxi Dynasty of the Qing Dynasty, the owner of this house was Tang Hengzhu, who was a candidate for a jinshi. He took the name Tengjiaoxuan, which means dragon soaring. In Tengjiaoxuan, Tang Hengzhu reads in the rain and rain, and lives a leisurely life of a reader. When he saw that many children of his clan did not have the opportunity to go to school, he decided to build a academy in Shimoyu Village. So he expanded Tengjiaoxuan and founded the first academy in the village, Tengjiao Academy, with four acres of land as the academy's funding, and two acres of mountains, and the woods on the mountain were used for the construction of the academy.
More than fifty years later, there is another academy in Xiatang Village, Dongshan Academy, which was built at the foot of Dongshan mountain at the east end of the village, and the villagers call it the Big Study. The academy was built by Tang Ximeng, which was four years after the Qianlong Dynasty. The scale of Dongshan Academy is larger than that of Tengjiao Academy, and the initial courtyard buildings are a total of seventeen rooms, divided into two entrances, built according to the mountain, and the left and right wings of the pavilion road are winding and the carved fences are densely packed. Later, it was expanded into three entrances, and more than 20 houses were built in the west. For the style of the academy, the "Records of Dongshan Academy" has this description: "Outside the gate, there are several trees planted with cypress trees, listed as barriers, green and verdant, and the steps are fascinating. Climb upstairs and look out... Streams and streams, the sound of water and pine waves, bamboo rhymes to the, can be dusty and annoying to think also. "Such a quiet environment is indeed a good place to read. Now the building of Dongshan Academy has basically collapsed, and the fish pond downstairs has been preserved.
In the Qing Dynasty, there were two academies in Xiatang Village. The Tang family has always passed on poetry to the family, re-teaching and learning, and reading diligently, known as the family training of "the widow is full of gold, it is better to teach the son to go through the scriptures". Reading makes people reasonable, reading makes people become virtuous people, and the clear pond water is like the open mind of the reader, perhaps this is the reason why people still preserve these three ponds.
"The well is the road", the four intersecting paths in the village just constitute a "well" character, the cobbled path is so familiar at the feet of the villagers, which road leads to the three thorough, which road leads to the ancestral hall, the villagers will not get lost. There are three buildings in Shimoyu Village. In addition to the three-through wall on the north side of Shuangtang, there is also a house called the three-through wall on the west side of it. The other three-through building is the Shangdian Sanjiao in the southwest of the village, which is more complete than the Shangdian Santuo. The daughter of Zhang Wenyu, the left attendant of the Ming Ministry, once married to Xia Tang, and the husband's family was the master of the three throughs in the wall, and the daughter of the waiter married into the Tang family, which added a lot of face to the Tang family. Built during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, Shangdian Santuo was once a three-generation showman, and has a poetic name - Huancui Lou. The shangdian built on the mountain has a total of three entrances, the cobblestones in the front road are paved with the pattern of yuanbao, the middle road is the most spacious, and the last entrance building has been built on the hillside, and there are several stone steps on both sides. There were five plaques hanging in the courtyard at that time, but the plaques have disappeared and the words on them have long been forgotten.
The Tang Ancestral Hall is just next to the main road at the foot of dongshan Mountain, facing the Great Light Creek, and the place is commonly known as the crab land. The main hall of the ancestral hall is three rooms wide, and there are box rooms on both sides, and the existing building was built in the Qing Dynasty. In order to trace the outstanding merits of the ancestor Taizu, it was named Chaoyuan Hall, and the plaque of Chaoyuan Hall was hung under the beam of the main hall. Retrospectively, the Tang clan moved to Tiantai in the Song Dynasty, when the Song Dynasty crossed south, and many scholars and doctors also came to Jiangnan. Envious of Akagi's towering beauty, Shan Gong moved from Qingtian to the west of Tiantai Castle and settled in Lang Tangtou, and Shangong became the ancestor of the Tendai Tang clan. By the thirteenth Yu Zhonggong moved to Tiantai Nanshan Xia Tang, it was already the early years of the Yuan Dynasty, and from then on, the Tang clan gathered yu Si, diligent and thrifty, and accumulated benevolence. Yu Zhonggong also became the ancestor of the Tiantai Nanshan Tang clan, and the village of Xiatang has a history of more than 670 years.
There are also a number of small ancestral halls in Xiatang Village, built for the Tang family's houses, just west of the Tang ancestral hall built a two-bedroom ancestral hall, the ancestral hall has now partially collapsed, and a stone arch in front of the ancestral hall makes people feel that there will be a story hidden in it.
This is a chastity archway, the archway sits northwest to southeast, four pillars and three floors double wing stone structure. The whole archway is magnificent, supported by four stone pillars, under the stone pillars are built stone pedestals, the outer two pillars are stabilized with drum stones, and the middle two pillars have two pairs of stone lions on the front and back of the stone platform, commensurate with each other. The two lions on the front are finely carved and have different looks, the male lion on the right has a wide mouth, contains a rollable stone bead in its mouth, and a hydrangea ball is stepped under the right front paw; the female lion on the left, under the left front paw, is a playful little lion, and there is a naughty little lion on the back, looking at the lioness, a look of natural happiness. Also on the back is a pair of lifelike stone lions.
The railings above the middle two pillars are engraved on both sides with the words "Cousin Tang Heng Han's Wife Yang's Filial Piety Workshop", and the words are still clearly legible. Under the middle of this railing, there is a pair of hollow stone rings, according to the village elders said that it was used to hang lanterns, and now only the one on the right is stored. These few words on the railing explain the ins and outs of this archway, but who can tell the story hidden behind it?
The upper part of the archway has been destroyed, and from the Tainan Tang Family Genealogy, we can still read the description of the upper part of the arch. There is also a stone plaque of "Jie Xiao Liu Fang" in the small ancestral hall in the village, and the villagers say that this stone plaque comes from this archway.
From the description of "Twenty-Eight Stays walking in Nanyang", we feel the good feng shui of Xiatang Village. The ancients divided the stars visible in the sky into twenty-eight groups, called the twenty-eight houses, seven in each of the four directions of the east, west, south, and north, the east green dragon, the north Xuanwu, the west white tiger, and the south suzaku. The choice of the site of Xiatang Village reflects the concept of ancient feng shui, facing the water and back the mountain. At the east end of the village, there is a turtle and snake mountain to guard the mouth, and under the snake mountain is built a Mizuguchi Temple. The Guanbang Bridge between the two mountains is a stone arch bridge, standing at the head of the bridge looking at the distant village, you can't help but think of this folk song that has been recited for generations, and the scenery in the folk song is not only the style of the village yesterday, but also the style of today.
Source: Rooftop News Network
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