The recent news about the Jingtian red wine home in HufangQiao has touched the melancholy of the old Beijingers, which of the children who grew up in the south of the city have not eaten the fried cake of Jingtianhong? Diners poured in a long line of tens of meters, wanting to taste the taste of childhood again...
The south of the city is the place where the culture of Jingweier flourishes, do not believe it, look at the relief murals in the Hufangqiao Station of Metro Line 7: those famous historical figures, those historical events that shake the ancient and the present, are really the wind and the flow, the hero land.
Perhaps because there are allusions and legends in every eye, there are many old memories that happened here like rock formations, which are covered by a thicker history, for example, the place located on the east side of Hufang Bridge called Wanming Road, in the early years of the Republic of China, almost became the "new urban area" of Beijing.
My grandmother's house was a hundred years old
Grandpa was asleep.
In the conversation box (radio) there was Ma Lianliang's "I am watching the mountain view from the castle tower", and the spiced peanut rice in the enamel plate had not yet been eaten--the second pot in the wine cup was drunk with a fine light--he lay on the bamboo recliner and snored, and the round fan in his hand was covered on his stomach, and it was covered with a layer of old locust tree shade. In the afternoon, the street is quiet, and the old lady in the white coat at the intersection pushes a small box cart covered with cotton jackets, shouts "popsicles, small bean popsicles", and is lazy as if she wants her children to go home for a nap.
At that time, the small bean popsicle was five cents a piece, the big ice cream was a dime, and the parents of the dual-time workers did not have time to take care of the young me, so my grandmother took me to her house at No. 3 Wanming Road, Hufang Bridge.
The architecture of my grandmother's house is very peculiar, very different from the style of other buildings in Beijing. The street is a two-story small building with green brick and gray tiles, the high window is covered with plastered window covers, the wall is carved with exquisite patterns, even the balcony guardrail on the second floor is European,If you want to enter the yard, you have to walk through a long and narrow black corridor, the yard is lined with gourd racks, layers of gourd leaves and enchanting gourd whiskers, hanging large and small gourds and loofahs, the sunlight sifts through the leaf gaps, and the speckled shadows sprinkled on the ground are dark green. In addition to the street is a building, the other houses in the courtyard are bungalows, if you want to go to the second floor, you have to go in from a spacious door in the courtyard, climb up along the narrow and steep wooden steps, those wooden planks have decayed to the point of a thousand holes, every step of the step has a sense of falling, and the solid wood floor of the second floor residents' homes, so that I was very surprised, after all, at that time, the vast majority of Beijing citizens' homes, the indoor floor was still paved with bricks or ashboards.
When I returned to my grandmother's house on the first floor and told her about this great discovery, my grandmother, who was pasting a matchbox, said in a strange tone, "So what, our room used to have a wooden floor." ”
The house of her grandmother's family was applied for by her in the 1960s with the street, and it is a 22-square-meter "big one-bedroom". About the history of the house, she is not clear, only know that when she first moved in, the floor was solid wood, the quality was particularly good, "Later, your mother, your uncle they got married, there was no wood to beat the furniture, they demolished the floor, who knew that the bottom is a big pit more than a meter deep, which has many thick bowls of rectangular wood to support the floor, and later understand that this is the practice of moisture-proof in the old years." ”
It wasn't until many years later, when I found the history of Wanming Road and my grandmother's house in the book, that I knew how old this "old age" really was.
Wanming Road runs from Zhushikou West Street in the north to Yong'an Road in the south, named after the ancient temple Of Wanming Temple. According to the "Chenyuan Zhiluo", "Shuntianfu Zhizhi" and other books, Wanming Temple is the former site of the Yuan Dynasty ShuiShui Temple, rebuilt during the Ming Wanli period, and rebuilt by DusiGu Zhilin during the Qing Kangxi Period, the temple is magnificent, called a giant brake, but unfortunately this temple was abandoned at the end of the Qing Dynasty. In the third year of the Republic of China (that is, in 1914 AD), the municipal government began to build roads, according to the "Old Records of the Old Beijing", "from the north of yong'an Bridge to the south of Hufang Bridge, Junxing repaired to Tuma Road, the traffic is very convenient, and in the north of it, such as Xiangchang Changed to Xiangchang Road, Wanming Temple changed to Wanming Road" - but Zhu Qiju, who was then the Chief Minister of Internal Affairs and Municipal Governor of the Beiyang Government, had a more grand plan, and he wanted to build a "new urban area" around Wanming Road.
The location of the "new urban area" on Wanming Road is also the result of coincidence. During the Qing Dynasty, a large-scale temple fair was held every year on the first day of the first lunar month in Changdian. Guangxu thirty-four years, near the factory began to build Xinhua Street, if the temple fair is suspended, then the New Year can really be a big scenery, just not far away from the Wanming Road with a large open space, so the factory Dian temple fair moved here to hold, and a run is three years. Every year in the first month of the year, vendors gather here, acrobatic singing and dancing, noisy, and here has become a bustling place where merchants are stationed. According to Zhu Qizhao's conception, the new urban area should have an entertainment center like Shanghai's "big world", and Wanming Road has a certain commercial foundation and is "still to be developed", so this place was chosen.
Zhu Qizhao, Director General of the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Zhu Qizhao himself is an industrial wizard, and he is also very "new", he requires that the architectural style of the new urban area must be "Western-style", so it has attracted many foreign architects to bid. In a short time, many Western-style buildings quickly rose along the streets of Wanming Road - the house of my grandmother's family was built at that time. In addition, the newly completed "Xinming Grand Theater" was the latest style theater in Beijing at that time, the "Chenghua Garden" bathhouse was attached to a high-grade barber room, which was a place where dignitaries and nobles liked to visit, overseas Chinese businessmen also opened "Chen Jiageng Rubber (Glue) Company" and "Ma Baoshan Biscuit Company", and the supporting municipal construction was also remarkable: Beijing's earliest traffic police post and electric lamp post were set up in the center of the intersection of Wanming Road and Xiangchang Road. A pioneer in transforming Beijing from a feudal city into a modern city."
The building where Chen Duxiu threw leaflets
Of course, two of the most eye-catching buildings are the Oriental Hotel and the New World Amusement Park.
Founded in 1918, the Oriental Hotel is the first modern hotel in Beijing to be invested and managed by the Chinese, with lights, fans, heating, flush toilets, hot showers and other rarities at that time, especially worth mentioning the "standard" of installing telephones in each house for the first time, in addition to the purchase of 7 cars for the VIP to use in the hotel, and in 1918 there were only 154 cars in Beijing.
The Oriental Hotel, which now stands on Wanming Road, is newly built, and when I was a child, it was the old Western-style western-style building next to it, now called "Old House 1918 Cafe", lying in a small garden full of exotic style, simple and elegant, and there were waiters dressed like Andersen's "staunch tin soldiers" at the door, wearing white gloves, opening the door for every car that drove to the door. All this made me strange and curious, I did not dare to go in, I could only sneak inside through the wrought iron fence carved into the shape of a vine, under the crimson parasol, a few white chairs were always empty, as if it had been opened but the actors had never played on the stage.
In the old photo, the left building is the Oriental Hotel, the right building is the Great World Amusement Park, and the middle road is Wanming Road
Completed in 1917, the New World Amusement Park is a four-storey Western-style building invested by Chinese businessmen and built by British builders contractors, with a three-story minaret on the roof, "shaped like a steamship".
According to the literary historian Zhou Jianduan recalled, the first floor of the "New World" is a mass entertainment area, tickets are sold at the door, the ticket price is thirty copper pieces, after purchasing tickets, you can enter the field to play at will, with snares, air guns and other games, the most surprising thing for Beijing citizens is that there are four "haha mirrors" in the field, the mirror surface is uneven, and the portraits reflected are strange and strange, which makes people laugh. The second and third floors are equipped with shopping malls, cinemas, photo studios and theater gardens. However, the citizens flocked to three scenes: one was the Beijing class's hipster plays, all sung by actresses on stage, Jin Shaomei, Fu Zhifang (later became Mr. Mei Lanfang's wife), etc. were all famous here; the second was the juggling field, Where Bai Yunpeng's Jingyun Drum, Xu Dogzi's Double Reed, Liu Jingzhai's Ancient Color Tricks, Wan fandom and Zhang Mazi's counterparts were all performed here; the third was the civilized drama class invited from Shanghai, performing costume plays and fashion plays, which swept the Nine Cities. The fourth floor is a restaurant, with a roof garden on the roof, seasonal flowers for guests to enjoy in the spring, summer and autumn, and a café in the summer, where you can enjoy the flowers while enjoying tea.
In 1914, it was completed at the western end of Wanming Road as a "New World Playground"
A major event occurred in the "New World": on the evening of June 11, 1919, Mr. Chen Duxiu was arrested while distributing leaflets on the roof garden of the "New World" with the "Beijing Citizens' Declaration" drafted. This historical event has been performed in detail in the movie "Breaking New Ground", whether it is a set of light bulbs decorated at the entrance of the "New World", or the Beijing opera sung in the theater, or the black and white movie projected by the old-fashioned projector on the screen, or even the fence style that Mr. Chen Duxiu leans on when he distributes leaflets, which is similar to the real "New World", which shows the intentions of the crew.
Unfortunately, the good times of the "New World" were not long-lived, first of all, the Chengnan Amusement Park was built outside the north altar wall of the Xiannongtan Temple, and there was competition with it, and second, the bad management of the family, there was a major accident in which the guest fell from the building and died, which caused litigation and led to a sharp decline in tourists. In 1928, shortly after the Nationalist government moved the capital south, the New World collapsed, and was once changed to Bai Chongxi's barracks, and later changed to the Beiping Prisoners' Shelter, until it was completely demolished after the founding of New China... Anyway, I walked there countless times in my childhood, but I couldn't see any trace of it.
The "Walnut Society" was originally a cooperative
"Your grandfather is asleep, let's go to the 'Walnut Society'!" Looking at my grandfather snoring on the recliner, my grandmother put down her work and said to me.
In the 1980s, when my grandmother was the deputy director of the Wanming Road Street Office, after lunch, she always liked to take my hand to check the hygiene. Our grandchildren went south along Wanming Road, west through the Oriental Hotel, and then south to Dachuan Hutong, around Zhushikou West Street, from the "New Daxiang" department store to turn back, so walked a big circle. In the afternoon, the sun was shining in the Dachuan Alley, and the bricks on the walls, the broken tiles of the roof, and the fading grass that fluttered with the wind on the bricks and tiles made the five-year-old feel a little sad.
There is a question that I have always been confused about, that is, what exactly is the "walnut society" that my grandmother said? Because she took me around this circle, at most went to the state-run small store to buy me two pieces of Yili chocolate wafer or butter ball candy, and did not go to the place where walnuts were sold, but I was embarrassed to ask her, afraid that she would think I was hungry, until I read Mr. Liu Qing's "History of Entrepreneurship" in middle school, and I understood that my grandmother's Hebei accent was originally "cooperative" - many people called the state-run store that way at that time.
So round down, back to the gate of Wanming Road No. 3, the shade of the big locust tree has been tilted for a few points, but Grandpa is still sleeping, I will move a bench to sit next to him, steal the spiced peanuts and rice in the enamel plate to eat, so that when he wakes up and finds that the plate is empty, he will smile and slap my ass with a fan and say: "Look at my eldest grandson!" ”
There were many stories about No. 3 Wanming Road later, under the leadership of the reform-minded grandmother, in the nineties of the last century, the uncles broke the east wall and opened a "Wandong Restaurant", until then people realized how high the house in the early years of the Republic of China was, and actually built a hanging building indoors without looking depressed. A few years later, the hotel was closed and restored to its original appearance, but My grandmother moved to the building to live, which was empty for more than ten years, during which there were various gossip saying that it was going to be demolished. Who knew that in the subsequent widening project of Zhushikou West Street, it actually survived, but unfortunately, the big locust tree was uprooted at some point.
The last time I was back there was in the summer of 2016, a few months before my grandfather died. At that time, my grandfather was nearly ninety years old, and in order to facilitate the treatment of the Friendship Hospital, he moved back to the old house to live. I happened to go to Wanming Road to run an errand and stopped by to visit his old man's home. He held my hand hard with his big hot hand, listened to my broken thoughts, drank more water and eat more vegetables, and kept nodding his head. When I was leaving, I crossed the road and looked back, and he was still standing looking at me, and he was standing exactly where the big locust tree was.
Everything will eventually pass away, and everything will still be there.