December 31, 2022, the last day of last year; January 1, 2023, the first day of the new year.
The Internet is full of joy, but I am a person who does not like the excitement. So, I carried a mobile phone holder and walked through the old city of Huizhou, stopping and looking for a place of freedom and leisure.
walked up to Chaojing Gate and took a video on the newly built city wall more than 10 years ago, briefly introducing the history of Huizhou City Wall.
The last large-scale construction of the Huizhou City Wall was during the Hongwu Period of the Ming Dynasty. The original perimeter of the city wall was more than 4,700 meters and there were 7 gates. The city wall is extremely strong and easy to defend but difficult to attack. In the fourth year of Xianfeng (1854), Taiping Army Zhai Huogu led more than 10,000 troops to besiege Huizhou Fucheng. The city was not captured for a month. In 1923 and 1924, in order to attack Chen Jiongming Sun Yat-sen twice led the Yunnan-Guangxi allied forces to besiege Huizhou, but failed to capture Huizhou. In 1925, the National Revolutionary Army, with the elite Huangpu Student Army as its backbone, had just conquered Huizhou. The first person to climb the city wall despite artillery fire was General Chen Mingren, the founding general who later led the Hunan Uprising. In view of the solidity of the Huizhou city wall, Chiang Kai-shek feared that Huizhou would be occupied by warlords and local armed forces again, so he issued a demolition order and demolished the Huizhou city wall.
Go east from towards Jingmen . We can walk along the newly built city wall to the top of the old city wall. After walking for more than a hundred meters, we went down a flight of stairs and walked to Beimen Zhi Street.
Beimen Zhi Street is a historical and cultural district in Guangdong Province. It was originally the main road into the city from the north gate of Huizhou City Wall. A small part of Beimen Zhi Street, which was adjacent to West Lake, has been demolished and built into the Kandi Hotel; some old buildings are still left in the part of Beimen Zhi Street adjacent to Jishan.
Old Street naturally contains many stories. "Huizhou Chronicles" records that during the Xianfeng period, a tiger broke into Beimen Zhi Street. During the Northern Song Dynasty , Yuan Geng wrote such an incident in "The Story of Shooting the Elephant". An elephant broke into Beimen Zhi Street. When the crowd couldn't stop the attack, a tax official named Meng bravely stepped forward and shot an arrow through the elephant's ear. The elephant got angry and trampled the tax collector surnamed Meng until he was reduced to a human figure. Then, after damaging many surrounding houses, he walked away.
Wuji is a private restaurant frequented by many Huizhou people, and the Miaowu where Wuji is located is even more worth visiting. This place was originally the office of the military, and it has been inhabited by the Miao family, a famous educational family in Huizhou for generations.
In winter, walking through Beimen Zhi Street, the sunshine is filled with a kind of vicissitudes of life.
Walking directly up from the north gate, I came to Zhongshan Park. The hill where Huizhou Zhongshan Park is located is called Zhaoshan. From the establishment of the Xunzhou General Administration Office in the Kaiyuan period of Emperor Wen of the Sui Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty, Huizhou's administrative offices were basically located in Xushan. With more than a thousand years of Huizhou's history, Jishan has always been the political center of the Dongjiang River Basin.
Mount Zhao is also the highest point of Fucheng. Under Mount Mount, there are the homes of ordinary people living in Fucheng.
Walk a hundred meters down Zhongshan South Road and walk into an alley called Baizishu. There is a house in the alley, which according to research was built during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty. This is the earliest ancient dwelling discovered in Huizhou. The thick Nanyang Pontianak wooden door, the hard red sandstone door frame, and the stone steps glow with the light of hundreds of years of history.
Going further west is the pedestrian street built in the 1990s. What was fashionable at that time has now gradually become deserted.
Crossing the pedestrian street, I walked into a deep alley.
Huizhou Fucheng has nine streets and eighteen lanes , Xiangling Lane, Erya Lane, Dingdong Lane, Liujiao Lane... The winter sunshine in Lingnan is particularly warm, but there are few people moving in the lanes, making it particularly quiet. This also fulfills me, a person who particularly likes to look for old traces of the city in silence.
Human fireworks have been floating in the sky above these old streets and alleys for thousands of years. Walking through these long alleys is like traveling through the clouds and smoke of history, listening to the fading footsteps of history.
I chose Jindai Street as the end point of the Fucheng crossing. This is a representative neighborhood of the ancient city of Huizhou.
In a long and narrow alley, I found Plum Blossom Pavilion, the former residence of Zhang Youren, a famous township sage in Huizhou. Zhang Youren was born in 1876. He participated in the Revolution of 1911 and served as county magistrate. He presided over the construction of highways from Huizhou to Zhangmutou and from Huizhou to Pingshan. He risked his life to protect patriotic overseas Chinese and had many literary and historical works. This is a legendary and benevolent senior who can be said to be the last legacy of the traditional scholar-bureaucrat spirit. God bless you, Zhang Youren passed away in 1974 at a great age, only two years shy of turning 100 years old.
I didn’t see plum blossoms in front of the Plum Blossom Pavilion, but I was also satisfied. Human spirit does not necessarily have to be placed in external things.
On December 31, 2022, I went to bed early due to fatigue and did not hear the New Year’s bell.
In his sleep, the bell of history has been ringing for more than a thousand years.
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