A HEROIC PAST
Zhaohua ancient town marks scene of dueling heroes and staunch generals come to life, Huang Zhiling reports in Chengdu.
After the opening ceremony of the Culture and Tourism Development Conference of Sichuan Province was held on the square in front of the Zhang Fei Temple in Langzhong city in early November, participants visited the time-honored temple holding the tomb of Zhang Fei.
This legendary general in the Three Kingdoms (220-280) guarded the city for seven years and is the personification of bravery.
The temple, first built 1,700 years ago and rebuilt 152 years ago after a flood, has many statues honoring Zhang. Visitors are captivated by their vivid depiction of the duel between him and Ma Chao, another great hero of their time.
The duel took place in front of the Jiameng Pass in Zhaohua ancient town in Guangyuan, the northernmost city in Sichuan bordering Northwest China’s Shaanxi province.
According to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, as Zhang could not defeat Ma, he proposed a continuation of the duel at night. Lit by hundreds of torches, the duo continued their fight in front of the pass. Both heroes tried their best, but in vain, to suppress the other.
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a classic novel. Almost every Chinese knows its stories of loyalty, bravery and wisdom of the heroes who were entangled in fighting after the royalty of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220) weakened and later founded the three kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu.
Jiamen Pass still exists in Zhaohua. Its tower was built in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). In ancient times, people in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, had to come to the pass on their way to Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) in Shaanxi.
In 211, Liu Bei, a native of North China’s Hebei province, came to the pass from Jingzhou in Central China’s Hubei province to establish his military base for the establishment of the Shu Kingdom (221-263). Shu is the ancient name for Sichuan.
With the ambition of reunifying the country, Zhuge Liang, prime minister of the Shu Kingdom, led troops out of the pass six times to fight against troops of the more powerful Wei Kingdom (220265). Jiang Wei, a Shu general, led troops out of the pass nine times to fight against the Wei troops after Zhuge’s death.
Zhuge’s successor Fei Yi served as Shu prime minister in Zhaohua instead of its capital Chengdu to command troops to resist the Wei troops. Fei was assassinated after getting drunk by a Wei general who had surrendered. Fei’s tomb in a tranquil courtyard in the town is a popular visitor’s destination.
Storytellers in Zhaohua still narrate the 1,800-year-old stories of the heroes of the Shu Kingdom in teahouses, according to Pu Huaping, an official with the Zhaohua district bureau of culture and tourism in Guangyuan.
Zhaohua ancient town has well-maintained buildings that take visitors back to imperial times, including the local magistrate’s building, the site of an ancient local government, an imperial examination hall and the Confucius Temple.
In the magistrate’s building, visitors can see the list of 182 magistrates working in Zhaohua from 285 BC to 1956. They would be impressed with the story of He Yiyu, a magistrate of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). He is the only magistrate recorded in the TwentyFour Histories, official records covering the long period of time since around 3000 BC to the Ming Dynasty.
He cared for common people in Zhaohua and was held in high esteem. When he tried cases, he would educate or punish the guilty in the magistrate’s building instead of jailing them.
During his three-year term in Zhaohua, there was not a single prisoner in the jail, because he believed that the guilty would become worse in the jail under the influence of other inmates, and their relatives might bribe people in charge of the jail if they wanted to meet their jailed loved ones, corrupting the social atmosphere, guides in the Zhaohua ancient town say.
During major holidays, performers in ancient attire show how magistrates in a bygone era tried cases in the magistrate’s building, Pu said.
Walking around in the more than 2,300-year-old town, history buffs admire its ubiquitous low buildings in the ancient Chinese construction style.
An archaeological find in 2014 just outside the town confirmed Zhaohua’s claim to antiquity.
Before building a road outside Zhaohua that year, Guangyuan’s cultural heritage bureau invited the Sichuan Provincial Cultural Relics and Archaeology Research Institute to find out whether there were any relics beneath the planned construction site.
A two-month investigation uncovered the ruins of an ancient city built in a rectangular shape that covered nearly 50,000 square meters. Archaeologists called it the Baiyanba ancient city site.
Judging from pottery pieces unearthed at the site, archaeologists thought it dates to the Western Zhou Dynasty (c. 11th century-771 BC).
It is the second pre-Qin (before 221 BC) site found — after Sanxingdui — and the first of the Western Zhou Dynasty in Sichuan, according to Gao Dalun, former director of the institute.