11/26/2005 12:32:00 AM|||The Zen Master|||After my interview with the Fuyang Ribao reporter, I finally headed to what had been my intended destination for the day--Longmen (Dragon Gate) Village--an ancient town 10 kilometers outside the city. The town is in a state of stunning decay, Ming and Qing dynasty buildings and archways with faded characters crumble over narrow streets, populated by well kempt cats, scraggly dogs, pig-tailed children, and weathered grandparents, hunched over on stools stringing plastic badminton racquets with neon strings--the local cottage industry, I guess.
One familial clan dominates, the descendants of a man named Sun Quan, who was a king during the Wuyue Kingdom. Around 95% of the town's population even today bears his surname, Sun, and a line of descent parallel to that running through Longmen Village was responsible for the production of China's Republican hero, Sun Zhongshan, better known to English speakers as Sun Yatsen. One of the town's own favorite sons was Sun Kun, who isn't that interesting except for the fact that he built ships for one of the most intriguing characters in Chinese history--and my own personal favorite--Zheng He, the eunuch from Xinjiang who captained a fleet of Ming Dynasty treasure ships throughout Southeast Asia all the way to India.
Despite its semi-illustrious history, Longmen Village today is a shell of its past, albeit a beautiful one. In open courtyards, 400-year-old furniture sits under overhangs, unpreserved and unprotected against the bottoms of overexcited tourists, inquisitive youngsters, and jaded locals. My guide to the town, a young, bored Sun descendant, seemed both excessively proud of his family's long and distinguished narrative and untouched by the splendor and ruin (and the splendor of the ruins) that surround him. The only thing that really lit him up was when he mentioned a number of Chinese TV shows that have been filmed in the town.
Still, walking through this town was an almost mystical experience, especially after all my time in big-city China, a classification under which even this current interlude in (relatively) green, moist, Hangzhou falls. Husked corn dried on the side of a pond, men eating cloud-like dumplings in a small shop called out an invitation for me to try some, the setting sun cast the town into stunning shadow. In all, it was well worth the strangeness of the events that came before it to visit this place, as it is now, and witness such spectacular living ruin. |||113293840232930385|||A village visit
