In search of a scholar's spirit

Local women wash clothes on the riverbank in Fenghuang.

Viewing flowers from horseback zouma kanhua is what the Chinese call superficial tourism. Many of us would prefer to stay awhile and try to absorb the culture of an unfamiliar place. But in a country as vast and variegated as China, you'll miss a lot if you avoid brief trips entirely. You'll learn at least a little on a short visit, and if the place is alluring, you can start to imagine making a longer one someday.

Last weekend found me in such a place, on a whirlwind trip to the area of south China made famous through the work of the great scholar Shen Congwen (1902-1988), who wrote stories and essays about his home region along the western border of Hunan Province.

Its terrain of astonishing natural beauty is marked by centuries of meticulously constructed human habitation. The landscape impresses upon the visitor the realization that the dreamlike images of striking mountain peaks, sinuous rivers, stone arched bridges and ancient villages portrayed in traditional Chinese paintings come right out of real life.

Shen Congwen was born in the town of Fenghuang Chinese for "Phoenix" the name ostensibly

Many artists visit Fenghuang to gain inspiration. Artist Li Jianhua captures the essence of an elderly Miao woman on her journey to the beautiful town.

derived from a legend about two of the magical birds coming upon the place and hovering over it, reluctant to abandon such a stunning locale.

The Tuojiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze, flows through here. Lining the steep banks are gabled houses of stone and brick, three to four stories high, with tile roofs, wooden latticework framing doors and windows, and balconies with wooden balustrades. In spots where the banks overhang the water, stilts support the homes.

Deep in the folds of the mountains, in an area inhabited largely by Miao and Tujia ethnic minority peoples, this region used to be accessible only by days-long journeys over rutted dirt roads.

Since the 1990s, however, with the improvement of transport and expansion of the tourist industry, narrow flagstone paths and stone steps along the Tuojiang as well as more spacious newly-paved plazas further back are now crammed with visitors, most from other parts of China.

The nearest large airport is in Zhangjiajie, established only two decades ago at the heart of a region by the same name, now under protection as a natural reserve, incorporating parts of several adjoining rural districts; from there, a constant flow of tourist buses carry people along winding paved roads to Fenghuang, a trip of about 90 kilometers.

The boom has brought obvious benefits to the locals; among the 36,000 residents, hundreds have turned their private homes into hostels or restaurants or opened shops on the street level, many specializing in Miao hand-wrought silver jewelry or Tujia hand-woven hangings.

Visitors take a boat trip on the Tuojiang River to get a close look at Fenghuang, which means phoenix. Photos by Guo Guoquan

With two colleagues from Beijing, I had spent one night in Changsha, capital of Hunan, where we'd gone to attend a half-day meeting; and one night at the Wangfu Hot Springs resort, on the edge of the Zhangjiajie reserve, where we donned bathing suits and clambered from one stone-lined pool to another, basking in water with a natural temperature hovering around 40-42 C.

From there, we set out mid-morning Saturday in a caravan of three cars, stopping once en route to visit Wang Village, more commonly called Furongzhen, or Hibiscus Town, after a novel set there by writer Gu Hua and further popularized in a 1986 feature film. This also is a picturesque community full of shops and restaurants, but lacking the dramatic river vistas and towering cliffside architecture, and more snug and touristy in feel. It does seem to be a good place to pick up Chairman Mao buttons and other "cultural revolution"-era relics, however.

Upon reaching Fenghuang in the late afternoon, we left our cars and crossed the river on foot over a rather daunting succession of stone pilings to get to the private boarding house on the other side where we were spending the night.

On either bank, we shooed away photographers insistently soliciting business although the next day we would succumb to one for a group picture, three of us wearing wreaths of flowers that local women weave and sell for a few yuan.

Dinner a few doors away from our lodging was replete with fresh vegetables punctuated by red peppers and lubricated with the local drink of choice, mijiu or rice wine.

In the morning, after a breakfast of noodles at tables set up on the street, we headed for Shen Congwen's former house, now a museum. The exhibit concludes with a photograph of him and his wife, Zhang Zhaohe, both looking happy and relaxed during their last return visit to Fenghuang in the 1980s. Shen died in Beijing in 1988, a loss marked on the front page of the People's Daily, and his widow passed away in the capital in 2003.

Our next activity was a boat ride down the Tuojiang in a pole-powered vessel reminiscent of the gondolas of Venice. Along the way, young women in Miao native garb entertained the passing tourists from floating stages, singing, dancing, playing flutes and beating drums. Upon disembarking, we followed more narrow paths to the graveyard where Shen's remains were placed after central authorities authorized their return to his native place.

Shen's life spanned most of China's tumultuous 20th-century history. In childhood, he played along the river; as a young man he served in a local militia and as secretary for a local warlord; and in the 1920s he went to Beijing and Shanghai and began his prolific writing and teaching career. His most famous work, the novella Biancheng, or Border Town, about an adolescent girl coming of age under the care of her grandfather and set in the area of west Hunan the author knew so well, was published in 1934.

Having failed university entrance exams, the largely self-taught Shen spent the war years in Kunming, southwest China's Yunnan Province, where numerous northern universities had moved to escape the Japanese occupation. After the war, he taught at Peking University; later he worked at the national Museum of History.

Labeled a "rightist" in the late 1950s, he lived in obscurity for the next two decades; with his good name and reputation finally restored in 1978 and the success of the movie version of Border Town (1985) increasing his fame, he spent his final decade in Beijing.

In contrast to the bustling crowds in the commercial part of Fenghuang, Shen's burial ground, set on a steep forested hillside, is a quiet and somber place, befitting the writer's reputation as a champion of ordinary people who sought to fathom the human spirit through lyrical prose. An inscription on the rough boulder marking his grave, written by his wife's sister, describes him an open hearted soul who never flinched in the face of adversaries but always acceded to family and friends, and compares his writings to the stars.

(China Daily 04/19/2007 page19)