Playwright’s Pastoral Poems at Home Village

By Yao Qian

I have been participating in a program for translating the poems of Li Yu (1611-1680) into English since earlier this year. In order to better understand the poet and his life, I visited his home village during the summer vacation and traced the footsteps of my great fellow native of Lanxi, a picturesque city in central Zhejiang.

Lis former residence stands in Xiali, a village about 20 km from the downtown Lanxi. A rural bus brings me to the village on a summer morning. The village sprawls in close vicinity of the road. The large village is home to about 400 households, most of them sharing the surname Li.

At the entrance to the village, I run into Li Maolin, a 10th-generation descendent of Li Yu. I learn that his ancestors had migrated to Jiande County from Fujian Province long before some ancestors moved south to Xiali from Jiande during the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Li Yu was a 14th—generation descendent of the ancestors who had first settled down in Xiali Village.

We begin to chat while tracing a zigzagging tractor road. Past a pond and a few bamboo groves, we come to a thatched house in extreme dilapidation. Li Maolin points to the sorry-looking structure and says that it is the ruins of Li Yus house at Yinshantou, the name of the place for a relatively independent cluster of houses in the sprawling village.

I had imagined the house was long gone after hundreds of years. Seeing it, I find it hard to face the shockingly poor condition. Fortunately, I learn from Li Maolin, the village now has a plan to restore the house.

Li Yu was born in the village in 1611. At about 8 or 9, the boy followed his father to Rugao, Jiangsu Province in the north. He came back to Jinhua at 19 after his father passed away. After his residence in Jinhua was destroyed in a military rebellion, he came back to Xiali. With the help of relatives and friends, he bought a land and had a house built on it. Li Yu wrote five short poems in a row to celebrate his new villa and new life as an educated farmer.

Life as an educated farmer was simple and hard. As the village lacked water for irrigation, villagers grew corn, cotton and sweet potato as main crops. They bought rice from a nearby town. If a drought spell hit, villagers had difficulty finding drinking water. It was Li Yu that solved the water supply problem that had harassed Xiali for hundreds of years. The educated farmer initiated a water control project. After prospecting, Li designed four dams. Three ditches were opened up to lead water from two adjacent streams. After the project, village was free of water shortage.

We come to a dam named after Li Yu. It is about 5 meters tall and 20 meters wide. After days of raining, water is overflowing from the top of the dam. This dam is an engineering wonder. In normal times, the sluice is closed to let water flow over the dam into the stream and water comes into the ditch and fills the 10 ponds in the village. When a flood comes, the sluice will be open to divert the torrents before it can overflow into the village.

Li Maolin says that Li Yu was a prominent person in Xiali. He was the general manager of the villages memorial halls. There used to be 13 memorial halls in the village. Today, only one remains. This is where Li Yu handled village affaires. It is called Yonggong Hall. It is newly refurbished. I look around. One wall in the hall has an honor list carrying all the names of donators. A lot of things in the hall are new. Only a horse-head wall and the black tiles on the roof indicate that it was older than Li Yu. It was in this hall that Li Yu wrote 13 village rules. Yonggong Hall provided free meals to villagers on public memorial days and festivals.

Yonggong Hall also doubles as the village theater. In Li Yus days in the village, Xiali had a Kunqu Opera troupe composed of amateur actors. Li Yu wrote a few plays for the troupe. In wintertime, the troupe under Lis direction rehearsed and staged shows.

Li Yu later sold his property and left the village. Li Maolin tells his version about why Li left. Li helped a neighboring village to sue for the right to some woods. Li would be awarded a hall of phoebe nanmu if he helped the village win. He did help the village win the case, but the courts decision was not as favorable as expected. Some people in the neighboring village decided to punish Li Yu. In a storm night, Li fled Xiali, dressed in a leaf raincoat and bamboo hat. He left on a bamboo raft on the Lanxi River and went northeast to Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, thus ended his life as an educated farmer in his home village.□