When it comes to Jiangnan, people will subconsciously think of small bridges, flowing water, , black-sailed boat, . Urbanization is becoming more and more intense. The farther away from the Jiangnan poetry and painting, the more we like to label such a label to Jiangnan. There are three more places in the same place - more water, more bridges, and more deep houses and courtyards. Every tourist who comes to the same place will walk to the Three Bridges, visit , Tuisiyuan , and take a wooden boat. I was "labeled" and stood at the top of Stone Arch Bridge , watching the wooden boat floating by under the bridge. I vaguely heard the eldest sister who was erecting the boat pointing at the stone bridge under my feet and talking about its past and present life. The tourists on the bridge looked fascinated, regardless of whether Shiqiao's life experience was history or fabricated.
For tourists, the life of sitting in a light boat to see the scenery in the south of the Yangtze River is poetic and distant. But for the people of Jiangnan in the old days, they had to take a boat when going out. A boat is to a water town, just like a horse is to a grassland, and a car is to a city. To understand the water town, you must find a boatman - they are the most ordinary individuals in the water town, but they are more suitable for endorsement of the water town than anyone else.
I walked past a stone arch bridge and called the boatman. Most of the words on the other end of the phone were filled with Wu dialect, and I didn't understand them. In addition to determining the time and place of meeting, the boatman said, "See you on the bridge tomorrow!"
"See you on the bridge tomorrow!" The people in the water town are familiar with this sentence. The literati wrote poems to the girl who was watching the scenery on the bridge by the window to make love, and the woman waved goodbye to her husband who was about to sail fare on the bridge. What kind of scene will the boatman and I meet on the bridge? I imagined many scenes, and the pictures were in line with the Jiangnan I remembered, but I didn't expect that when I met, the boatman stood on the bridge from a distance - a bustling road bridge, a narrow river passed under the bridge, like a slender earthworm, winding in the building forest.
This is the Wen'an Village on the southeast edge of the ancient town. Unlike the pink walls and black tiles in the ancient town, Wen'an Village has now become a community, and many residential buildings have been built. Before
, boats were a must-have tool for traveling at home in the water town. Especially in ancient towns like Tongli, which are surrounded by rivers and lakes, each household must prepare at least one.
"Here, the river is opened, but the river is so narrow, but it is connected to the sea. Every morning, neighbors push the door open and set off with a boat moored at their doorstep. The farming boat is filled with farm tools, and the fishing boat is loaded with nets. This narrow river becomes a bustling street, and the boat will be blocked when the market arrives." The master was calm and moved out the stool, took out the tool box, sat on the small cement field facing the river in front of the door, and began to demonstrate the skills of making wooden boats.
Tongli boat craftsmen have a tradition that they seal their swords after October every year and do not start construction until March of the following year. We visited the wrong time and we did not see the wooden boat being made. The boatman pulled out a few pieces of wood from the pile of wood behind him, moved out two smaller models of the ship, and demonstrated the shipbuilding process from scratch. He opened the toolbox, took out the ink bucket and streaked the wood, and then saw the three-meter-long wooden board along the ink and saw the three-meter-long wooden board below. After the wooden board is sawed off and placed on a horse stool, you will take out the planer from the tool box and open it.
"This wooden board is to be the central axis plate of the bottom plate of the wooden boat. When installing the wooden boat, it is added to both sides with the central axis plate as the center. Therefore, the specifications of the wooden boards added on both sides must be completely unified. Otherwise, after the ship is ready, it will be difficult to control due to the unstable center of gravity." The master explained while explaining, and in just over ten minutes, he had changed seven or eight tools from the toolbox. This toolbox was created for the shipmaster when he was a master, and it has been used for fifty years this year.
"In the past, building a wooden boat was as grand as building a house. The house was for living, and the boat was for hiking. After the bottom of the boat was laid, two hundred red envelopes should be packed according to customs to show that you can move forward. After the boat was built, you had to pull up a red silk rope, beat gongs and gongs to declare your neighbors. The posture was as lively as putting a beam on a new house!" The master stopped the work and was immersed in the memories again.
And the world has changed: the roads are well connected, fast and labor-saving. Nowadays, every household in the same place, even the master himself does not need a wooden boat. The pier outside the gate of Tongli Ancient Town has been abandoned for many years. Even the crisscrossing rivers have been filled with many.
In the past, the river was a highway, and Tongli was prosperous because of the river; later the river became a protective belt, and when the small bridges and flowing water in other places had disappeared, Tongli still maintained the appearance of the water town. When the wooden boat was about to disappear from the lives of the people in Tongli, tourists flocked to find the families of small bridges and flowing water, and the lost Jiangnan.
I suggest that the boatman make the wooden boat into a smaller and more refined souvenir than his model. Tourists who come to Tongli should remember Jiangnan, while wooden boats are a kind of longing that can be taken away. The boatman shook his head: "If the boat cannot be rowed in the water, then he cannot be called a boat. I am just a boatman and I will only do this job in my life!" The boatman did not want to make the wooden boat "a thought that can be taken away", he just wanted to make the wooden boat a thought of a water town.
Life on the boat no longer belongs to the people in Tongli, but it is the reason why countless tourists come to Tongli. Every once in a while, the master also goes to the scenic spot to maintain the wooden boat. As he walked past the stone bridge, the elder sisters who were rocking the boat greeted him.
He was rocking the boat while watching whether the old boat was and . Although the people in the same room had bid farewell to the wooden boat, he still stubbornly believed that the water town still could not come and go without boats.
text has partially deleted and modified the original work according to the online dissemination method.
Written by: Lei Hu. Photography: Ruan Chuanju. Content from: "Scenery of China·Tongli"
