A year in Yabian Village, 365 days in rural China
Walk through the 24 solar terms and touch the thousand-year-old texture of Chinese daily life
(The online store has been pre-sold, please click on the bottom of the article "Read the original text" to book) The Navy's new book is finally coming out again, although our Peking University Society is known for publishing humanities and social sciences, but in today's drastic changes of the times, non-fiction writers for China, I think it seems to be more urgent value than talking about literature and history.
The Navy is already a well-known non-fiction writer who has won many awards, but life doesn't seem to become richer through writing, or a little struggling, maybe this is some kind of life's mission, non-fiction writing is the need to breathe with reality?
This new book, "Cliffside Farming", is a warmer, more poetic, and warmer book, which is very different from the color of his famous "Cliffside Report".
Intense emotions settle down, and you can see something more distant and long.
I posted the foreword to the book,
Everywhere in the origin of agriculture, there are ravines, but there is very little flowing water. The valleys that used to have water are gradually drying up. The Wei River is not far away, all the valleys are connected to the Wei River, and the ability of all the valleys to nourish the Wei River is getting weaker and weaker, and the Wei River is gradually approaching to break off. If there is no water, there is no greenery. Most of the mountains are naked and yellow, but there are also burnt red and dark colors. It is difficult for people to stretch out in the dry sea. Relying on the weather to eat and the land to survive, every day of agricultural life is like a battle, a cycle a year, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose nothing. This is most of the area west of Longshan, and since the Qin and Han dynasties, it has often been referred to as Longxi or Longyou. Since modern times, the glory of Longxi has gradually disappeared in the historical smoke and dust of Jin Ge Iron Horse, because it is close to the desolation of no grass, and the resounding title of this area is Dingxi, Xihaigu. On the edge of the cliff, in this dry sea.
Over the Longshan Mountains, there is a similar scenery in the northern Shaanxi Plateau; Across the Yellow River, Shanxi's landform remains fragmented; Crossing the Taihang Mountain, although Shanxi, Hebei, Luyu and Henan are no longer vertical and horizontal, they still lack rain and water, and they are red and yellow. This large loess area contains the Loess Plateau and the Loess Plain. This is the birthplace of Chinese agriculture and gave birth to Chinese civilization. There are three major agricultural origins on the earth - the Fertile Crescent domesticated wheat and barley; millet and millet were domesticated in the Yellow River basin of China, and rice was domesticated in the Yangtze River basin; The bordering regions of North and South America domesticated corn, sweet potatoes, and potatoes. All three of these regions are around 30 degrees north latitude, and none of them are actually the best places on earth. Obviously, it was the worst environmental pressures that gave birth to the origins of agriculture and ignited the flower of civilization. The cliff is located in the middle of two important archaeological sites in the Neolithic period of China, Dadiwan and Majiayao, 98.4 kilometers away from the Dadiwan site in Qin'an in the east and 96.8 kilometers away from the Majiayao site in Lintao in the west. Cliffside, 35.12 degrees north latitude, Dadiwan, 35.01 degrees north latitude, Majiayao, 35.31 degrees north latitude. The latitudes of the three places are almost the same. The Dadiwan site dates back to 8000-4800 years ago, and carbonized grasses and cruciferous rapeseed were collected from the site, which fully proves that millet is a native species in China and the earliest domesticated in China. The Majiayao site dates back to 5200-4400 years ago, and in the latest excavations of the site, a large number of animal and plant remains have been found, which are believed to be "in the process of introducing crops such as barley and wheat, cattle and sheep to livestock, as well as metal smelting technology from the West to China, the Majiayao culture and the subsequent Qijia culture played a special role". With the village as the core, within a radius of 50 kilometers, there are many prehistoric sites belonging to Tongwei and Longxi counties, and a large number of painted pottery patterns show the cultural characteristics and life traces of agriculture. The vast loess plateau from Majiayao to Dadiwan belongs to the Weihe River Basin, and this vast and arid loess plateau is today's Dingxi and Xihaigu. Since the birth of agriculture for 10,000 years, the loess region has been the place where civilization was born, although the former city and the mountains are difficult to find, but along the grotto corridor, from Luoyang to Wusheling Mountain, it shows how prosperous the history of the loess is. From a modern and even contemporary perspective, China's loess region is an underdeveloped region. Although the North China Plain is still China's breadbasket today, the Loess Plateau has indeed become the most backward place, with every city, large and small, pumping water from the surrounding area and groaning to maintain modernization. From the present to the history of the Loess Plateau, people will imagine that in the Middle Ages and ancient times, perhaps the Loess Plateau was rich in water and grass, and fertile fields were all over the land. Not really. As early as the 60s of the 20th century, Mr. He Bingdi deduced the conclusion that the loess area has always been an arid land based on the mutual corroboration of archaeological materials and ancient documents. According to the origin of the loess, the loess region is characterized by aridity. He deduced that China's oldest form of agriculture was not directly related to the Yellow River, a large river that flooded the river, nor was it irrigated. According to the geography and topography of the ancient cultural sites, the core area of Yangshao culture is the Jing and Wei basins in Shaanxi, the Fenshui basin in the southwest of Shanxi and the western part of Henan, and the eastern half of Gansu extended to the west, overlapping with many later Yangshao culture and other ancient cultural areas in Gansu. It extends eastward to the Loess Plain, overlapping with many later Longshan cultural sites.
On the whole, the Neolithic sites in North China provinces, except for some parts along the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River in Gansu and Shanxi, are mostly in the tributaries of the Yellow River or smaller tributaries of the tributaries. The ruins are mostly in the loess plateau and small hills, which are more than ten feet to hundreds of feet above the river surface. This proves that China's earliest agriculture was not irrigated agriculture, but dryland agriculture. A large number of prehistoric and Shang era sites, no evidence of irrigation has been found. In the 10,000 years since the invention of agriculture, the Loess Plateau has experienced different climatic environments, with extremely cold stages and relatively warm stages, but in general, drought is the true appearance of the Loess Plateau. "Facing the loess with its back to the sky" is also a humanistic summary soaked in a long time. Based on the almost constant drought, we can infer that during the hunter-gatherer stage, the people who lived on the Loess Plateau were clearly in a barren state. The Loess Plateau, where only mountains and valleys exist in forests, lacks more wild beasts and wild fruits. When people walk out of the woods, they see meadows. "If you are poor, you will think about change", and the smartest people invented the cultivation of wild millet and millet, and agriculture was opened. This land with the least future of hunter-gatherers gave birth to the most promising agriculture. The history of the transformation of the Golden Ranch into a "bitter world" human race cannot be divided into linear and completely different stages. The hunter-gatherer form, the agricultural planting form, and the nomadic form after the domestication of animals should have overlapping periods. To this day, there are still hunter-gatherers on Earth. There are no archaeological sites in the village, so it is impossible to determine whether there were human settlements in the Neolithic period, but based on the surrounding archaeological evidence, it is believed that the first agricultural cultivation occurred in the large area where the village is located. It is an indisputable fact that even though the village has a relatively short history of human settlement, it is deeply impregnated and influenced by agricultural culture. In the pre-Qin period, the Longxi Plateau should have been a state where nomadism was stronger than farming. The Qin people repeatedly conquered and gradually grew stronger with the Rong people on the plateaus along the Wei River. By the time of King Zhaoxiang of Qin, the Qin people had already sat in Guanzhong, enjoyed the benefits of agriculture, and had the courage to devour the six kingdoms. During the reign of King Zhaoxiang of Qin, Qin destroyed the Yiqu, and ordered the construction of the Great Wall of Qin between Longxi County, Beidi County, and Shangjun for the nomadic raids of the Jierong people. At that time, the Longxi Plateau should still be dominated by nomadism. The edge of the cliff is ten miles away from the Great Wall of the Warring States Qin, and the area where it is located should be a pasture where the Rong people gallop on horseback.
Sima Qian also said in the "Historical Records" that Longxi "animal husbandry is the world's rao", which shows that during the Qin and Han dynasties, the Longxi Plateau was a golden pasture, and animal husbandry could export high-quality war horses, which was the pillar industry of the country. After the Song Dynasty, especially during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the population of the Longxi Plateau surged, the reclamation expanded, and gradually became a complete agricultural area. Due to the lack of rainfall, the barren land is difficult to support the high-density population, so it has become a land of "bitter armor". The transition stage from pastoral to agricultural areas in Longyou area should be the stage of large-scale settlement of village population. It was also during this period that the Chinese population doubled from 200 million to 400 million, and these newly growing populations depended on the newly spread of potatoes and corn from the Americas on the one hand, and on the other hand, they inevitably relied on the increase in yields and the expansion of planting areas of existing crops such as millet, millet, rice, and wheat. Behind the expansion of the planting area is the ecological degradation process of turning grassland into arable land. The main mountain of the village is Dongshan. This is the concept of orientation in Feng Shui. The construction of the village is also completely based on Kanyuxue. The main hill on which the village depends, in fact, there are villages all around, but our village is on the west side of the mountain. According to Feng Shui, other villages are correspondingly leaning on the South Mountain, North Mountain, and West Mountain, but in fact, everyone is backed by the same mountain. At the top of the mountain, there is an ancient castle. It is impossible to know when the castle was built. Maybe it's the Ming Dynasty, maybe it's the Qing Dynasty, in short, with the degree of collapse and fall, it is much earlier than the Republic of China period. Standing on top of the castle, the altitude displayed by the mobile phone positioning system is 2220 meters. From the bottom of the fort, the area of the village resembles a giant with open arms, and on the terraces of the main trunk, courtyard houses made of rammed walls are built in turn. On the left, there is a deep ditch, around the valley, forming an arm bend, lined with loess beams that have been broken by landslides year by year; On the right, there are outstretched arms, pointing to the far north, covered with horizontal terraces. The stream of the deep ditch on the left side has been flowing at the bottom of the foot, the stream that joins the county tends to the Wei River, and the terraced fields on the right side are also closed at the foot end. In the village land, two-thirds of the plot in the left arm bend is the sunny land facing north and south, and the remaining third is surrounded by the river ditch to form the opposite two yin land. The land with the right arm bent is the sunny land facing east and west. The cultivated land in the village generally tends to the Evening Sunshine Mountain, and there is a good sunshine time. Historically, it has been a great place to grow millet grains, which have been bred year after year, feeding generations of farmers in the village. The central location of the village, at an altitude of 1,980 meters, is located at 35.6 degrees north latitude and 104.51 degrees east longitude. The cultivated land of the village was gradually developed, and the altitude is basically between 1910 and 2130 meters. The area above 2,130 meters is the only remaining mountain, and it has been preserved because of the slope of more than 60 degrees. However, in the early 1990s, the village ushered in a new wave of reclamation, and the forest area demarcated at the beginning of the reform and opening up of more than 2,130 meters was also reclaimed, and even the plots inside the castle were cultivated by neighboring villagers. At that time, my grandmother was 80 years old, and she sighed while watching the future generations in the village open up the wasteland: "Dig the side of the beam, the door hole is deserted, you villains are all blind tossing, and one day the land at the door of the house will not be able to be planted." "In 1998, the Yangtze River flooded, and returning farmland to forest became a national policy, and all areas above 2,050 meters were returned to forest. Since then, the land cultivated by the villagers has been concentrated between 1910 and 2050 meters, which is 80 meters lower than before. After another 20 years, sure enough, a large number of people in the village went out to make a living, the land was abandoned, and some people locked the door after entering the city, and the door was full of artemisia grass. From the "miscellaneous grains" to the area to which the singular village belongs, geographically, it is called the transition zone from temperate semi-humid to semi-arid, with an average annual temperature of 7.7 °C, precipitation of 300-600mm, and a frost-free period of 120-170 days. Rainfall, frost-free periods, light, and altitude are prerequisites for crop growth. The high altitude of the village land and the scarcity of rainfall make it not a suitable area for crops. Combing through the past planting history, as a village in the cold and arid plateau area, the variety of crops that have been successfully planted is still relatively rich. According to the harvest season, farmers divide the crops suitable for planting on the plateau into summer grain and autumn fields. Among them, summer grains include winter wheat, spring wheat, rye, lentils, peas, broad beans, soybeans, arrowtongue beans, and triangular beans; Akita includes flax, wheat, oats, artichoke, millet, millet, buckwheat, corn, hemp, and sorghum. Vegetables are also grown in the village, such as cabbage, cabbage, melon, radish, beets, carrots, onions, leeks and garlic. After the birth of mulch, farmers successfully planted cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, watermelons, and tomatoes. These vegetables and fruits are transplanted through the purchase of vegetable seedlings, and there is a plastic film to protect moisture, and the survival rate is extremely high. "The grain sown must be mixed with grains for disaster." As early as the Warring States Period, Chinese farmers learned how to use crop diversity to overcome the loss of crops caused by various natural disasters in order to ensure a surplus of grain. The planting structure of the village is also to introduce as many grain varieties as possible, sow seeds in different seasons, and stagger the peak to deal with disasters that may come at any time. Crops that are difficult to adapt to on the plateau are eliminated after one or two plantings; All the crops that can be cultivated on the plateau have been preserved. "Raising cattle for ploughing the fields, raising pigs for the New Year, raising chickens to lay eggs for oil and salt." The farmer's planting is repeated again and again, and he does not dare to delay it for a year. In the long time of farming, everything is slowly changing. The five grains in the hearts of the ancient Chinese include rice, millet, millet, wheat and mushroom; or hemp, millet, millet, wheat, and soybean. North Ma Nan Rice. After evolution, except for rice in the south, which is still the staple food, the rest of the native crops have gradually weakened from miscellaneous grains to withdrawn from the historical stage under the squeeze of wheat, potatoes and corn. In the global integration and exchange of crops on the earth, the four families of rice, wheat, corn and potatoes won in the end. As a direct result of the arrival of corn and potatoes in China, China has an additional population of 200 million. Since the 1950s, China has promoted industrial civilization and modernization with an unprecedented high degree of organization. By the 1970s, improved seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides were imported into the countryside one after another, and the yield of crops had made a qualitative leap. The agricultural labor that our ancestors had worked hard to feed them for generations gradually became surplus. This technological improvement has increased China's population from 400 million to 1.4 billion. At the same time, the changes in grain production brought about by science and technology have changed the structure of grain cultivation, and farmers with surplus grain are no longer worried about hunger, but are looking for cash income to cope with the capitalization of the outside world. Industrialization and urbanization continue to suck away the vitality of the countryside, and eventually, the village is eroded like a wind and clouds. From the Guanzhong Plain to the west along the Wei River, the planting structure of thousands of villages in China's agricultural origins has been adjusted again and again since the 1990s. Forest fruits occupy a large amount of arable land, kiwifruit, apples, pears, cherries, grapes, medicinal herbs...... What to make money and grow what has become the first choice of farmers. Food cultivation is becoming less and less important. According to He Bingdi's research, Chinese agriculture originated on the Loess Plateau, and dry farming is the original appearance of Chinese agriculture. However, after the development of rice cultivation in the south and the rise of irrigated agriculture in the north, the Loess Plateau in Longxi still has the mode of extensive planting and thin harvest, relying on the sky for food, and has become an agricultural area with the most difficult planting conditions. It is this place with the worst planting conditions, and it has also responded to the call of the times, and the grain planting area has been pressed again and again, and the cash crops have been continuously expanded. Winter wheat cultivation, once overwhelming in the village, is no longer a top priority for agricultural production. The peasants began to live on the principle of having enough to eat. Only flax has been cultivated in order to ensure the freedom of edible oil. Most of the remaining land is used to grow corn and artichoke. The yield per mu of plastic film corn developed in the new century is generally more than 1,200 catties, and the yield is stable and guaranteed, and it has become an iron-core crop that cannot be defeated, with a selling price of about 1.3 yuan per catty, which can guarantee the income of farmers. Artichoke is also cold and drought resistant, and the yield per mu is more than 2,000 catties, which can also guarantee economic income. This seems to conform to the planting regulation of the market, but in fact it is the consequence of the contradictions of industrialization itself. Everything that agriculture has created is transforming agriculture. In the memory of Chinese peasants, the most profound event is the cessation of the "imperial grain and national tax" and the issuance of subsidies for growing grain. The intuitive driving factor of this great turning point is the change of policy, and the core reason for promoting the policy shift comes from the transformation of agricultural society by the industrial revolution. Agrarian China made great strides toward modernization, and by the beginning of the 21st century, it had been completely exempted from the "imperial grain and national tax", which had been in operation for half a century. In the past half century, China extracted the surplus value of agriculture for the accumulation of primitive industrial capital, and finally successfully completed the industrialization transformation, which made it possible for industry to feed agriculture and cities to feed the countryside. From the agrarian revolution to the exemption of the "imperial grain and national tax", nearly half a century was the intersection of China's transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, which was a complex transformation of the old and new social forms. Chinese peasants, who grew up in this half-century, have experienced complicated world events. The old peasants, for the life of the new century, sighed with the vicissitudes of life: Now is heaven and a blessed nest. Young peasants, who had gone out to work, had seen the world, and had not experienced much hardship, complained that the countryside was too depressed while comparing life in the city. After 10,000 years of social transformation in agriculture, cicadas nest like chrysalis in the most inconspicuous folds of the earth, receiving transformation. Is agriculture still important? In the past, the agricultural village was characterized by the recycling of resources and the sustainable farming methods, resulting in a complete production model. Agriculture combined with industrialization, agriculture that produces agricultural products in an industrialized manner, is fundamentally different from the traditional agriculture of the past. In today's China, only in remote villages can you still find a trace of the old agricultural atmosphere. Change continues, and even in remote villages, what was left of farming is rapidly disappearing.
The streamlining of crop cultivation has directly led to the weakening of crop diversity. Former cereals have withdrawn from cultivation, and the germplasm of some crops is on the verge of extinction. This will change the ecological chain. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs has jointly issued the "National Medium and Long-term Development Plan for the Conservation and Utilization of Crop Germplasm Resources (2015-2030)", and some endangered germplasm has been collected in various places in the past. However, the storage of seeds in farmers and fields, and the storage of seeds in warehouses and scientific research institutes are two concepts and two endings. In pursuit of planting benefits, farm fertilizer and organic fertilizer are no longer necessary, and the application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides has become a must. The restoration of soil fertility must be cycled by returning organic fertilizer to the field. Long-term use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides can lead to serious damage to the soil structure. It is a type of depletion agriculture. There is also the use of plastic film, which is difficult to degrade and will cause non-point source pollution. After the simplification of crop structure, the dietary structure of farmers has also undergone essential changes. In the era of low crop yields, farmers experienced a painful hunger that went from being well fed to being well fed, largely resolved quickly over the past four decades. Refined essential oil has become the daily diet of farmers, and this dietary structure has actually become worse than the days of mixed grains in the past. From the perspective of human health, this is a new concern, and this is a new problem after eating. Today's urban population, for the most part, does not care much about agriculture. In the minds of many citizens, grain is equal to grain and oil stores, and vegetables are equal to supermarkets. Consumers of food no longer care about food production, which is not so much the progress caused by the refinement of the social division of labor as the neglect of human beings. Agriculture has a history of 10,000 years, and the history of agriculture for 10,000 years is not only the history of agriculture, but also the history of mankind; It is not only the history of mankind's pursuit of progress, but also the history of mankind's self-preservation. In the long history of agriculture, the Chinese have always emphasized that "the people take food as the sky". Agricultural civilization, follow the law, follow nature, and obtain the value of life. This is the source of Chinese civilization, and it is the agricultural civilization that has laid the foundation of Chinese civilization. The circular concept and sustainable development model formed by the long agricultural civilization are very important to human beings. Contrary to the sustainable development of agricultural civilization, in the past two hundred years, mankind has been oblivious to the "Anthropocene". 10,000 years is too long, 10,000 years are in a hurry, the world is always impermanent, difficult and weak also have explosive power, and the grand will inevitably come to an end. 10,000 years later, industrial civilization struggled for resources to benefit, and the loess that originated from agriculture fell into a new loneliness. Among the farmers who farm in the village, the post-50s, post-60s, and post-70s are the backbone, and there are very few post-80s, and none of them are post-90s. In the past 10 years or so, when I returned to my hometown and communicated with grain farmers, the most common sentence I heard was: No matter how it develops, people always have to eat grain! The rescue record "Lü's Spring and Autumn Period" says: "The husband is also the one who does it, the one who gives birth to it is the earth, and the one who raises it is the sky." This is the best definition of agriculture by the ancients. It is the heavens, the earth and the people who have nurtured agriculture.
Agriculture was born 10,000 years ago, and the geological age is in the Holocene. In the Holocene alone, ice ages and warm periods alternated to create a series of climate changes that were devastating for agriculture, but after the catastrophe, people and agriculture regained their vitality. It can be asserted that all the land has experienced distortion. People who come to work on the land of the village are not so much for livelihood as for survival. It is conceivable that many people in many villages go into the village alone, trying to accumulate and exchange land for a living. Those who prosper grow into family trees. There are also some people who, due to diseases, natural disasters, and calamities, find it difficult to gain a foothold, and run away from their villages or disappear. On the one hand, there is the growth of hope, and on the other hand, there is the melancholy of defeat. In 2022, the writing of this book officially began. With the 24 solar terms and agricultural activities as the longitude and latitude of each other, I try to record the microcosm of the changes in agricultural China with the picture of rural life, and leave field notes for those crops and farming methods that have disappeared and are about to disappear. I lived in the countryside until I was seventeen or eighteen years old, and I was supposed to be a man who knew farming well. However, when I put pen to paper to actually write a work about farming, I fell into embarrassment. For example, I am not proficient in the use of agricultural tools, the grasp of phenology, and the characteristics of crops. The long country life of my childhood was more of a supporting role in labor. When I returned to the village, I wanted to find the peasants of Lao Zhuang, each of whom was a history book of agricultural labor. I set myself the goal of spending every solar term in the village throughout the year. But this is more difficult than the writing itself, because because of work, I can't take time off to go to the village on all the solar terms. The old man I saw today can talk about the story of the crops, and if I go back in two months, he has already passed away. It was a salvage record. In the past, there was a lack of literate and hyphenated people in the villages, and most of the villages had no documents, only living and inherited memories. Living inheritance, the long history is impossible to verify, and the reliable and specific historical context mostly stays within a hundred years. Human memory, at the arrival of another hundred years, will be ruthlessly obliterated. The book focuses on the time span of 100 years, from 1920 to 2020. In the past 100 years, the transformation of agricultural society by industrial civilization and the shaping of acquaintance society by commercial economy have reached the extreme. During this period, the three generations have experienced the beginning, continuation, and climax of the change. Change collides in three generations, there is a clash of cultures, there is a clash of civilizations. The drastic changes, from micro to concrete, seem to be turned upside down. The words and deeds of the peasants, agricultural labor, life concepts, ideals and beliefs, and worries and worries in the book are not only soaked in the history of agricultural civilization, but also mixed with the cramped and adaptation to cope with changes. The 100 years of farming entanglements of three generations are as quiet and poignant as the loess.