Shen Congwen was a prominent Chinese writer in the 1920s and 30s before war and chaos enveloped a generation. Though Shen hailed from a remote region in Western Hunan – a mountainous, ethnically diverse place known as Xiangxi – his stories concerning “the human spirit” found wide readership with the urban young in places like Shanghai. His writing painted a world where Han infantrymen rubbed shoulders with the exotic Tujia and Miao in a land of lush hills and jade rivers. Yet Shen’s Xiangxi is a paradise flawed, caught in limbo between ancient ways and an encroaching modernity. His stories are riddled with conflict and simmering with mute pathos.
His hometown of Fenghuang is a place where, as Shen Congwen once wrote, “Land was scarce, so most people’s houses were dangling-foot houses, half on land, half on stilts built over the water.” The writer’s grave is located on the outskirts of the river town in a quaint hillside memorial garden.
I arrive on a damp spring afternoon to pay my respects. There’s a sombre wooden plaque that reads: “Mr Shen Congwen, our country’s famous writer and historian, was born in 1902 in Fenghuang and died in 1988 in Beijing.”
Despite the fact that Shen was a mostly apolitical writer, that fact that his works were banned until the 1980s is largely eclipsed. He didn’t write again after the Cultural Revolution, busying himself in the Chinese Museum of History as a curator instead. Rehabilitated in 1978, Shen was at last able to revel in the global adulation bestowed on him as he influenced a whole generation of new writers.
Fenghuang’s status as a top regional tourist destination is in no small way due to the evocative stories sketched by Xiangxi’s famous master wordsmith. Though the riverboats now carry sightseers while the colourfully clad Miao and Tujia ladies hawk tourist trinkets, there still lingers some residue of Shen’s world. Modern development has been kept out of the old town, and along the cobbled backstreets, I let my imagination populate the cafés with the colourful cast of merchants, prostitutes and soldiers that inhabited Shen’s Zhen’gan – as Fenghuang was then known.
There’s a great deal of military reference in Shen’s work. This is because Fenghuang, owing to the Miao rebellion of 1854-73, had been made part of the Military Preparedness Circuit. Testament to this martial legacy, the Southern Great Wall can be visited just outside Fenghuang. Though it’s nowhere near as long as it’s northern counterpart, the Wall is still an impressive Ming rampart designed to serve the similar purpose of protecting the Han from conflict with “barbarians” as the southern aboriginals were referred to.
It’s clear that imperial China invested a great deal of energy managing this hostile region. But to understand exactly why Chinese rulers considered it so vital to placate Xiangxi, one should travel to Hongjiang, another ancient river town.
When the bus swings onto a riverside road flanked by verdant mountains and the occasional wooden farmhouse, you really get a good view of Shen Congwen’s pastoral world devoid of the tourist tat that furnishes Fenghuang. Hongjiang Town, however, is a very different settlement from the wood-stilted Fenghuang, a place instead comprised largely of crumbling Mao-era tenements. Its dingy, sombre constructs of red China, however, hide from view another historic marvel, namely Hongjiang Ancient Town.
Unlike tourist-friendly Fenghuang, this marvellous quarter of winding stone alleys and ancient residents has hardly been developed for tourism. There are no cafés or karaoke joints, just a few informative wall plaques, some refurbished residences and, of course, the mandatory gate ticket.
Exploring this maze of lurching Tudor-esque manors, Xiangxi’s mercantile history is gradually unveiled. There’s a Suzhou Guildhall, the Anti Salt Smuggling Bureau and the Fu Xingchang Opium Room to wander through. Countless businesses were established by outsiders like Yang Sanfeng Business Firm founded in 1368 by a Jiangxi native, and Yang Yizhai’s Wood Firm opened in 1874 by a family from Shaanxi. There’s even a rather luxurious ancient brothel. All this suggests this was a long flourishing trading centre, attracting business types from all corners of the empire.
“Hongjiang is located at the confluence of two rivers, the Yuan and Wushui, so it was a key place on the north to south transport network,” explains my guide, Zhang Bin of the Hongjiang Ancient City Culture and Travel Company. “Salt, silk and even opium travelled through here.”
Indeed, western Hunan’s waterways connect with Guilin to the south and Sichuan to the west, making Xiangxi a vital trade corridor on China’s imperial highway, as Shen often notes in his masterwork the novella Border Town. No wonder such efforts were made to stamp the area with an imperial seal.
If you looked at landlocked Xiangxi on a map, a place far from any discernable frontier, you’d be forgiven for wondering why this was a region of unrest. But owing to mountainous terrain, ethnic groups unwilling to submit to Han dominion could persist in remote areas far removed from mainstream affairs.
Near the city of Jishou, I get a taste of the terrain Han forces were up against in the Miao hamlet of Dehang. Once you get past the dolled-up tourist area, replete with minority dance troop and Miao handicraft stores, Dehang offers a spectrum of country treks through ravines flanked by columns and pillars of striking karst scenery. This is Xiangxi at its most breathtaking and bucolic, the Miao still working the rice paddies with buffalo, while on all sides the craggy peaks loom like stone skyscrapers.
Back in Jishou, a grimy, unremarkable third-tier city, local journalist Zhang Jin leads me to another hidden treasure, the Ancient City of Qianzhou. According to the tourist blurb, “Qianzhou was the ancient seat of Jishou, a solid fortress and the base camp of the Southern Great Wall during the Ming and Qing dynasties.”
From the look of it, Qianzhou was clearly a Xiangxi garrison town, evident in the recently reconstructed city walls and towering gates as well as the catalogue of military heroes the town produced. It’s also a quintessentially Han settlement, home to a Confucian Temple, notable residences and a Chan Buddhist temple. But what local authorities have done to distinguish Qianzhou from other ancient locales in the region is to set up artist workshops in the city where local creatives can sculpt, paint and sell their wares.
Around the Pond of the Hu Family, a number of classical-style teahouses have been established where one can while away an afternoon sipping any number of locally produced teas. My favourite establishment is doubtlessly Youwei Shuba (The Flavoursome Book Bar), a teahouse that doubles as a bookstore. Of course the works of Shen Congwen, Xiangxi’s most celebrated chronicler, dominate the window display.
