Yun Luo led Yan Chenyu through the gate of Zhuxi Jiachu, which was a tree-lined path formed by the interlaced branches and leaves of osmanthus trees. The tall osmanthus trees on both sides were lush and formed a natural tree-lined welcoming avenue that would not be exposed to the sun even under the scorching sun. The bamboo forest and osmanthus trees intersected at Zhuxi Jiachu, and the elegance of the owner of the house was evident.
The flowering period of sweet osmanthus is mostly around the Mid-Autumn Festival, which can last for about 20 days. However, the peak flowering period is only about a week. At this time, the weather is clear and the dew is cold, so there is also a saying that "the cold dew silently wets the sweet osmanthus". When the flowers bloom, the whole garden is filled with a clear and lingering fragrance, which is intoxicating.
If you come to visit the garden at this time, you can enjoy the sweet fragrance to your heart's content. When the breeze blows, the tiny osmanthus flowers will fall like rain, covering your hair and clothes.
The small building you see now is a "cong", with wooden carvings as screens and vines hanging down. There is a couplet on the lower floor of the building in front of the door: The air is pure like orchids, and the heart is empty like bamboo; the joy is in the water, and the tranquility is in the mountains. It has the flavor of Confucius' "The benevolent enjoy the mountains, and the wise enjoy the water".
From the name of the small building, we know that this is where the owner stored books and read. Osmanthus has always been closely associated with people's successful careers in the old days. Huang Zhiyun planted osmanthus and placed it in the garden in the hope that his descendants would be talented and successful in their careers.
Cong is located in the east of Dongshan and the southernmost part of Qiushan. The mountain and the building are cleverly combined, and the building has become the most elegant ending of Qiushan. The stone steps in the mountain lead to the building. The building is backed by Qiushan and faces south. It has three bays and a total of six rooms upstairs and downstairs. It avoids the main tourist route in the garden and its architectural style is relatively simple.
There is a small courtyard in front of the building, with a sycamore tree planted, the trunk of which has leaned out of the eaves. It has a sense of "the lonely sycamore tree in the deep courtyard locks the autumn". There is a large window in the shape of a crabapple flower on the east wall, and through the window are a few banana branches that rustle even when there is no rain. The water-ground brick flower window on the west is the largest window in the garden. Through it, the whole Dongshan Xuanshi and winter plum can be seen.
What’s even more amazing is that it is on the same horizontal line as the circular lattice window on the west wall of the winter scene, so our sight can actually pass through the winter scene to the slender bamboo in the spring scene.
Ji Cheng said in Gardening: "The scenery is in borrowing". Although the courtyard here is small, with only one sycamore tree, the banana and winter plum trees on the wall and the sycamore tree in the courtyard are cleverly "borrowed" through the flower window to create a quiet and indifferent interest.
At the southern end of the bamboo viewing area in the north of Geyuan, there is a pond with beautiful scenery. There are pavilions, terraces, pavilions and corridors. There is a rockery made of yellow stones by the pond, and fish swim in the pond leisurely.
Morning Smoke Gate. Su Dongpo has a poem that says: "It is better to eat without meat than to live without bamboo; no meat makes people thin, no bamboo makes people vulgar." There are bamboo forests everywhere in Ge Garden to show that the owner is not vulgar. Going over the cong, in the southern part of Ge Garden is the daily living place of the owner Huang Zhiyun, which is a group of traditional buildings facing north and south, with a house in front and a garden in the back.
Opposite the gate is a luxurious screen wall with large eight-character polished bricks and carved bricks. Mr. Chen Congzhou said in "Garden Talks": "The gorgeous screen wall is covered with water-polished bricks. There are carved patterns, and the word "Fu" is embedded in the middle, just like the one on the gate of the garden, and it is exquisitely made."
Jin Xuefang, a Qing Dynasty scholar, said that Geyuan was "a place where celebrities gathered". It is said that during the heyday of Geyuan, the residences were themed "happiness, wealth, longevity, wealth and happiness", arranged vertically, with five rows of mansions opening one after another, and originally there were more than 200 houses.
Although only the east, middle and west lanes are preserved, every hall, beam and pillar shows the exquisite and luxurious home life of the owner, proving the wealth of Yangzhou salt merchants. The three lanes of the residence in the southern part of Geyuan have different themes, namely, happiness, wealth and longevity. The corridor between the two blue brick walls is called the fire lane, also known as the fire avoidance lane and the wind and fire lane.
The east road house has three rows of front and back houses. The eaves, tile drips, doors, windows and pavilions are all decorated with deer patterns, which symbolizes fortune. As the saying goes, food is the most important thing for people, so let's take a look at the Huang family's "kitchen" first. This is the last row of houses in the east road, with a layout of three rooms and two phases. There are seven beams from the ridge to the eaves, and there are central columns (standing posts) in the mountains. It is a very typical unit form of Yangzhou folk houses.
The original kitchen has long been abandoned. In order to allow people to have a more intuitive understanding of the historical situation, the house is restored according to the traditional kitchen layout. There is a large pot stove in the kitchen. Food boxes, wine jars, benches and other kitchen utensils are placed. Standing in it, you can carefully imagine the scenes of the cooks and servants coming and going, making soups and preparing delicacies.
During the Qing Dynasty, salt merchants were obsessed with delicious food. It is said that Huang Zhiyun's daily breakfast consisted of bird's nest, ginseng soup, and two eggs. His son Huang Xiaoyuan prepared more than a dozen kinds of snacks and porridge to entertain guests in the morning. This also shows the Huang family's wealth and extravagant lifestyle. There are still two anecdotes about Huang Zhiyun's exquisite diet that are widely circulated among the people.
One day, Huang Zhiyun was free and flipped through his notebook. He saw the note "one ounce of silver per egg" under "two eggs". He was very surprised and said, "Even if eggs are expensive now, they are not this expensive." He immediately called the cook and reprimanded him for cheating.
Unexpectedly, the cook said: "The eggs I deliver every day are not comparable to the eggs on the market. The price of one tael of silver each is very cheap. If the master does not believe me, I will find someone else to taste them carefully and tell the difference." After that, he resigned and left.
Huang Zhiyun selected a new person to replace him. The price of eggs dropped, but the taste was not as good as before. He changed several cooks in a row, and the same thing happened all the time.
Finally, they had to ask the original chef to cook again. As a result, the next day, the eggs tasted the same as before. Huang Zhiyun was puzzled and asked the chef: "How did you make the eggs taste so delicious?"
The cook said, "I have hundreds of hens at home. Every day I grind ginseng, white atractylodes, red dates, etc. into powder and add it to the feed. That's why the food is so delicious. You can send someone to my house to take a look and you will know." Huang Zhiyun sent someone to check, and it was just as he said. From then on, he never mentioned changing the cook again.
Carrying meat and stewing Huangshan bamboo shoots, Huang Zhiyun loves bamboo by nature. Not only does he have bamboo in his name, he also plants bamboo in his home and names his garden after bamboo. He also has a bamboo-related hobby: he likes to eat bamboo shoots.
Of course, the bamboos in the garden are all ornamental bamboos, and the shoots are not edible, and even if they are edible, they are limited. So Huang Zhiyun likes to eat Huangshan shoots the most, and she has to eat them while they are freshly dug out of the ground.
But Huangshan is far away from Yangzhou, so how can one eat fresh bamboo shoots? This seems like a fantasy to ordinary people, but it is different for the wealthy salt merchants. He does not have to make the painful choice of poor scholars like Su Dongpo.
Well, someone had designed a movable stove specifically for him. After picking bamboo shoots in Huangshan, he would immediately wash and cut them, and then stew them in the pot together with the meat.
Then he asked the porters to carry the stove to Yangzhou. When they arrived in Yangzhou, the bamboo shoots and meat were ready. It is easy to imagine how much money was spent on this dish of bamboo shoots and meat.
This is a restaurant with three rooms and two corridors, and its structure is very sophisticated. The beams and columns of this hall are made of nanmu, so it is called Nanmu Hall. The restaurant has a round structure and raised beams, and the materials are rich. The ends of the beams are slightly "rolled" and carved into arcs, and there are pavilions in front and back. The hall is decorated with wooden carved pavilion fans in the front and screen doors in the back.
The two rooms have wooden floor covers, and the surrounding walls are covered with wall panels. The hall has thick and straight columns, and the white alum stone pillars under the columns are "round sky and square earth". The lines are simple and the shape is refined. In the middle of the restaurant are three large round tables with marble inlays and round low stools. Looking at this hall, it is neat and spacious, and generous.
The screen door is hung with a landscape painting by a Song Dynasty artist and a lacquer couplet written by Jin Nong, one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou, which reads, "Drinking capacity is more than just getting drunk; elegant thoughts are wandering in the immortal world." The couplet on the pillar reads, "The four seasons of joy are the afterglow of the family; the taste of the great soup is reading."
The restaurant is built with round columns, round beams and round rafters, and there are round tables and round stools in the hall. Couplets on the columns are used to express the feelings of life through wine and soup. It is obvious that this is a place for banquets and gatherings. "Round" means reunion and reunion. The owner's mind and interest are revealed in the couplets inside and outside the building.
There is no mistake in the poem, post, content, and read the book on 6, 9, and bar!
This is the "Qingmei Hall" where the Huang family receives general visitors and handles daily affairs. "Qingmei" means beauty in purity. Being an honest official and being a clean person is a state of mind that people pursue.
There are corridors on three sides of the hall, and the hall structure is simple but exquisitely made. In addition, the hall is 60 cm lower than the floor level outside the south gate, which shows that it is very old and can be considered a relic of the Ming Dynasty.
The lower ends of the beams have round curves, which are called "Bao Si" or "Ba Hai" by craftsmen. The wooden pads at the ends of the beams are carved with Ruyi cloud patterns, which are called "Shuilangji".
The front and back pavilions are shaped like boat awnings, so they are generally called boat awnings in the south and rolled awnings in the north. A screen door is set up at the back of the main hall, and wooden carved floor-standing covers are placed between the two.
There are two couplets in Qingmei Hall. The first couplet is: "There is no other way to pass on the family heritage except farming or reading; the only way to enrich the future is to be diligent and frugal." Farming and reading to pass on the family heritage, and being diligent and frugal to manage the family embodies the traditional Chinese ideology and life attitude, and reflects the idea of "farming and reading to pass on the family heritage, diligence and thrift are the basis".
There is also a couplet hanging in the central hall: "Bamboo is suitable for rain, pine is suitable for snow; flowers can be used for meditation, wine can make one immortal." It was written by Wang Shishen, one of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou. If rain and snow add to the charm of bamboo and the posture of pine, then flowers and wine can make people feel indifferent and away from the world.
Farming and reading express the owner's respect for traditional culture, while bamboo, pine, flowers and wine convey his elegant feelings and unworldly realm. It also best explains Huang Zhiyun's dual identity as a businessman and a scholar.
The three decorations on the table represent peace and longevity. Before going to the middle road, stop to see the East Fire Lane in Yangzhou Geyuan. Fire Lane is a narrow passage built in the gates of wealthy families in feudal society for the purpose of family life. It is used to separate and combine houses as needed, and also serves as a fire and theft prevention function.
The fire lane is also the place where feudal etiquette, morality, hierarchy, and communication are achieved. For example, servants and female family members can only go in and out through the fire lane, and guests can only go in and out through the hall to the back garden. (To be continued...)