Xue Yingdan China Supplement
A city is like a person, with its own unique personality and appearance. The development of urban personality is often related to the long-term infiltration of the history, humanities and folk customs of the region and the personality and blood of the people who were born and raised there.
Not long ago, I went to Shaoxing with the China Newspaper Supplement Research Association to collect news. I felt and touched the city up close, and I gained more emotional projection and discovery about it. It seems to have two completely different faces - the softest and the strongest, which are always intertwined in the mind and in front of the eyes, passing through history and reality, and coming towards the face.
This city is soft and gentle, but also tough and strong, with a sense of chivalry and bravery. Just like the village evening I watched in the Potang Village Auditorium that night, it originated from the two major types of opera in Shaoxing - Yue Opera and Shao Opera. You sing and I come on stage. The Yue Opera is lingering and soft, making you cry like you are complaining, and the Shao Opera is high-pitched. Excited and cheerful, two completely different temperaments are displayed on the same stage harmoniously and without any sense of contradiction. Thinking of the local saying that "Yue opera begs for wives, Shao opera conquers the world", I can't help but smile, don't they represent the softness and strength in the bones of Shaoxing people.
The origin of the name of the city Shaoxing has a lot of roots. In 1131 AD, Zhao Gou, Emperor Gaozong of the Southern Song Dynasty, fled to Yuezhou. Looking at Kuaiji Mountain in the distance, he determined to "Shao Zuo Zhongxing and revive the Pi Xu for a hundred years", which meant inheriting the emperor's legacy, reviving the country, and taking "Shao Zuo Zhongxing". "", so the era name and the name of the city were changed to "Shaoxing".

However, people's deep impression of this land can be traced back to the 36-year-long Wu-Yue hegemony war after the Spring and Autumn Period. This war ended with King Fuchai of Wu committing suicide with his face covered on Gusu Mountain, and the powerful Wu Kingdom was declared extinct. Back then, Fuchai defeated Yue and Qi and competed for the Central Plains. He was so high-spirited, but because he did not listen to the advice of his old minister Wu Zixu, he ended up with the destruction of his country and his family. Before committing suicide, he ordered people to cover his face with white cloth because he was ashamed and had no face to see this loyal minister in the afterlife. Whether Fuchai was a stubborn king who lost his country or a man of character with a pure heart is another matter, but Goujian, a character, stood up from this period of history and became a spiritual role model for a nation to strive for strength in the past 2,000 years.
The idiom "sleeping on straw and tasting gall" was born in such a major historical event. In the late Spring and Autumn Period, Wu and Yue fought frequently. In the Battle of Fuju, Goujian, the King of Yue, and the only 5,000 Yue people were forced to retreat to Kuaiji Mountain by the Wu army. Goujian chose the latter. He took his family and "served as a minister in Wu" for three years. He fed Fuchai's horses, looked after the grave of Fuchai's father Helu, and even tasted the urine of the King of Wu to diagnose diseases, which greatly satisfied Fuchai's sense of conquest. Three years later, Fuchai felt sympathetic and released Goujian. After returning to Yue, Goujian was determined to avenge his humiliation, slept on straw and tasted gall, worked hard to govern, and finally destroyed Wu.
He slept on straw and tasted gall for 10 years, never forgot the "Huaiji Shame", "Three Thousand Yue Armies Can Swallow Wu", and finally survived after death, which is "the most rigid"; to revive the country, he bent the king's waist and endured humiliation for his dream, which is "the most flexible". This is probably the softness and rigidity that was initially injected into Shaoxing's genes. Shaoxing's "spirit of courage and sword" was nurtured here.
History rushed in front of us and whistled away. In each frame and each character, we see Shaoxing, with two faces of softness and hardness constantly switching, so vivid and lively.
"I can't be a man, but my heart is as fierce as a man"! This is Qiu Jin, the "female hero of Jianhu Lake". As a famous female democratic revolutionary in modern times, she shouldered the national justice with her weak shoulders, and finally died with passion and generosity at the age of 32. She firmly believed that "the Chinese revolution must go through bloodshed to succeed." In Qiu Jin's hardness, we see a kind of bravery and chivalry of sacrificing one's life for justice.
At the former residence of Lu Xun in Xintaimen, Dongchangfang, Shaoxing City, we met Lu Xun, who "faced thousands of people's criticism with a cold brow and bowed his head to be a cow for children", Runtu's playmate in Baicao Garden, and was called "the hardest bone" by Mao Zedong. He was a man of iron and steel all his life, using his pen as a proclamation, and always fighting. On the streets of Lu Town, tourists gathered around a local resident who played Ah Q. His ignorant, self-satisfied and unaware eyes portrayed "Agui" vividly. As a local cultural tourism landscape, Ah Q's "time travel" brought Lu Town back to the literary classics. The actor turned around and said to the reporter in a dramatic way: "I pity his misfortune and am angry at his lack of struggle!"
And the leader of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, who sat in a rattan chair and smoked a pipe with a stern face, also had a very tender time. He was very tender to Qiu Bai, Rou Shi, Xiao Hong, and his son Hai Ying. He regarded Qiu Bai as a close friend and once gave Qiu Bai a couplet written by an ancient poet: "It is enough to have a confidant in life, and this world should treat it with the same feeling." When Qu Qiubai was being followed by the Kuomintang, he ignored his personal safety and accepted Qiu Bai and his wife to live in his home four times, even giving up the master bedroom.
In Shen Garden, Shaoxing, we relived the sad and infatuated love story of Lu You and Tang Wan in front of the calligraphy stele of "Red and Soft Hands" by Chai Tou Feng, and got to know the man named Zhao Shicheng behind the stele.
"Red and soft hands, yellow wine, spring scenery all over the city and willows on the palace walls. The east wind is bad, the joy is thin, a heart full of sorrow, and years of separation. Wrong, wrong, wrong!..." The poem "Chai Tou Feng" makes people cry. Lu You and Tang Wan were young, talented and beautiful, and they loved each other passionately, but they were forced to separate by Lu's mother. In ancient times, the measure of whether a woman was virtuous was not how strong her love was, but that love should be restrained. Lu's mother disliked her son's indulgence in love and not thinking about fame, so she wrote a divorce letter and Tang Wan became a divorced woman.
Although the mountain alliance was still there, it was difficult to entrust a letter. Lu You wrote the famous poems "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong" and "Mo Mo Mo" for this. Alas, but what can he do? It was the man named Zhao Shicheng, who was a royal relative, talented and handsome, who stood up at that moment, fearless of rumors, married the divorced daughter with a "ten-mile red makeup", guarded her affectionately for ten years, and made a vow of "not taking concubines during life and not marrying again after death", which made us read another realm of love - protection, respect, understanding, and trust. Many years later, the couple met Lu You by chance when they were visiting Shen Garden. Zhao Shicheng "took the lead" just to make the reunion of the former lovers come true. Tang Wan died of depression at the age of 28, and Zhao Shicheng closed the door of his heart from then on. 13 years later, he resolutely asked for troops to fight, a modest young man galloped on the battlefield, and finally died for his country. Lu You's love has been passed down through the ages in poems, and Zhao Shicheng's love has finally become a phoenix nirvana. In my heart, compared to Lu You's "pain", Zhao Shicheng's "cherishing" is more admirable. With the generosity and righteousness of a man, he practiced that love is not just about romance, but also about giving and fulfillment. Zhao Shicheng's love interprets the softness and strength in the bones of Shaoxing people to the extreme.

The last stop of this field trip is Shengzhou. It is said that Shengzhou is famous for two things, one is Yue Opera and the other is "robbers", the former is very gentle and the latter is very "hard". In the streets and alleys of Shengzhou, we can always hear the melodious Yue Opera accents flowing out from small shops and residents' homes, making people feel like they are in a paradise. The children of Shengzhou Yue Opera Art School sang "A Sister Lin Fell from the Sky" in unison by the waterside pavilion, making people deeply intoxicated with the gracefulness and softness of Jiangnan. The saying of "Shengzhou Robbers" reflects the other side of the character of this land, which is fierce and competitive, and the people are strong. On that day, at Shengzhou Houtu Tea Co., Ltd., we carefully tasted the pearl tea and eyebrow tea produced here, and the tea fragrance was fragrant. This tea company, which started from a small workshop, has gone through 30 years of hard work. Now its products are exported to neighboring countries centered on the Sahara Desert, as well as green tea markets such as Europe, America, and Central Asia, and its annual tea exports have reached more than 20,000 tons. The company's CEO is Yuan Pengzhong, a shrewd and capable middle-aged man. He speaks Shaoxing Mandarin with great force: We are bosses during the day, sleep on the floor at night, drive BMWs, and roll up our trouser legs to get off the ground. There are only two words to describe anything: hardship!
I remembered what Laozi said in the Tao Te Ching, "The softest thing in the world can overcome the hardest thing in the world." Soft and tough, strong but unyielding, soft and hard as two opposing and unified forces, are engraved in the genes and blood of Shaoxing people, becoming a kind of energy, a kind of wisdom and pattern.
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