In 1893, Fengzhen in the Late Qing Dynasty in the eyes of a Russian (6)
March 8th
Monday
It was cloudy in the morning. It leaves at 7: 3 Our road extends along a canyon, and the terrain gradually descends towards the west where we are heading. This canyon is no more than 3 Russian zhangs wide, and there is a winding river running between the gravel-covered banks in the middle. This is the Chahambulak River. There is a narrow piece of cultivated land on both sides of the river, and in some places the cultivated land has been open to the hillside. We walked for 15 minutes from the factory and saw a beggar starving to death. It is said that this man lived in the factory not long ago with his mother, wife and two sisters. Hunger and poverty first forced the family to sell two girls: one was 14 years old and sold five taels of silver; A 9-year-old sold two taels of silver. Later, the old woman also starved to death. About two months ago, the unfortunate wife ran away with a notorious Lama in Chahar. Since then, he has been begging around naked. About a week ago, people found him dead here. Probably no one gave him a place to spend the night, so he died in cold and hunger. It seems that the residents in Changbulang Gorge are very scarce. We met a poor little village on the side of the road at 8: 25. It is called Xiaobulang, which means Koizumi. It is named after a stream that flows out of a ravine on the side of the canyon and flows into the Chahambulak River. There are many such streams here. They flow to the canyon where we are walking, and meet with Chahanbulake, making Chahanbulake wider and wider, and almost flooding the whole canyon not far down, leaving only a place for people to farm and walk. There is not a village composed of adobe houses or mud huts at all. From here on, people live in caves. The village we first saw was Hongshaba village. We walked to the village at 9: 1 and immediately took a photo of it. At 9: 5, the canyon suddenly opened up, forming a large meadow. Local residents used this terrain to build a good village here, called Big Elm. There are nearly 6 families living in mud huts in this village, and there are also some caves. We counted the shops here, and there are twelve. There is an ancient stone temple with a stage at each end of the village. At the beginning, these two temples and stages were obviously magnificent, but now they are very shabby. Since then, the number of stones on the road has increased significantly, but the valley itself has still been well cultivated and the stones in the ground have been cleaned up. At 11: 3, we came to three small villages, all of which were named Helaoer, and the distance between them was no more than 15 feet. After we left the third village, we drove for another half an hour and stopped at Shuimo Village.
after resting for a whole hour and a half, we went on our way. After 3 minutes, we walked past a big village called Daizhou Yaozi. From here, the road slopes down sharply. Despite the bad weather, the farmers in the fields around are still busy working: they are all raking the ground and crushing the hardened clods with a tool called a "shovel". A roller is a stone roller that rotates with an iron shaft in a rectangular shaft frame. It began to snow heavily at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. Despite the spring, the air still feels a little damp and cold. Half an hour later, we passed Miaogoumen Village, which was full of caves. Along the way, until the place where I stopped, there was always a large snowflake like cotton wool, and I could hardly see the place near the road. It's really boring to walk like this. You can only see the mule in front of the car and a stone on the road that is crushed by your wheel every once in a while. It snowed so heavily that even the village on the roadside looked as if it were separated by a thick fog. At 3: 4, we walked past Cullen Village, where there were at least forty families, some of them were earthen houses and some were caves. At 4: 3, I walked to a very broken village called Zhujiawan. Finally, at 5: 3, I finally came to Shirenwan Village, which I had been looking forward to for a long time. In fact, I'm not interested in this small village with no more than 3 households, but I heard that the name of this village comes from two ancient stone men not far from here. I've wanted to take a picture of this historic site since early morning, urging the driver to catch the car quickly. But now the heavy snow keeps falling. What can you do with it? The stone men used to be in the south of the village. After we passed the village, we saw them standing on the field on the right side of the road. We took a look, and it turned out that these were two stone carving monks. They stood face to face as if they were in a Taoist temple. We couldn't look at them carefully, because the snow covered us and the stone man. Starting from Shiren Bay, the river approaches the cliff on its right. Therefore, in order to avoid difficult uphill, the road will cross to the left bank of the river as usual. But now that the river has almost flooded the whole valley, it is neither possible nor meaningful to wade across the river, because the road on the left bank has been flooded and it is no better than the road on the right bank. So we had to climb the hillside and drive along the road at most two Russian feet wide and nearly twenty Russian feet high. This section of the road is only about three leagues, and then it goes downhill until it reaches the ground. We walked on the flat ground for half an hour and arrived at Meidai Village, where the night was scheduled. However, we did not enter this "treasure land" at once. Next to a small temple on the edge of the village, there is a small land injection. Now, just like every time the snow melts, water accumulates in the depression and becomes a big puddle. It is said that cars can't pass through it. The circumference of the puddle is not more than thirty feet, but we walked around it for 45 minutes from the field, and the result was that we entered the village from the other end of the village. I asked, "then why not fill this land?" That way, there would be no puddles. No matter people in the village or passers-by, wouldn't it be necessary to take such a detour? " -"but who will fill it out? This land doesn't belong to anyone. Everyone has his own land to plant! " This is the answer, which accurately reflects the social life in China.