Historical Legend of Shangbao Terrace

There is a beautiful legend about Shangbao terraced fields among the local people: I don't know what year and month, one evening, two crazy travelers passed by a hut in the northwest of Nan 'an. There is a woman in the shop who provides food, drink and accommodation for passing guests. The two lunatics drank a hundred bowls of tea first and piled them together. I ate another 100 bowl of rice and piled it together. Looking back at that woman, she didn't think they had drunk or eaten too much, but they were still smiling. The madman was grateful and asked the salesgirl, "What's the name of this place?" Shopkeeper sighed and said, "That's called Shangbao. It's a poor place in the barren hills of the Rocky Mountain." The madman put the tea bowl and rice bowl together, clutching his stomach and said, "You might as well eat one layer of mountains and one layer of fields to make people immortal." Knowing that these two people have some history, the shop-keeper quickly said, "Without mountains, fields and water, we can't live!" " The madman asked tentatively, "If only there were a bowl of distiller's grains." As expected, the shopkeeper brought out a bowl full of sweet distiller's grains. The epileptic lifted the kettle and sifted it on the distiller's grains. While sifting, he said, "Go to the castle, go to the castle, and the mountains are full of water." The next day, the woman in the shop invited the crazy guests to get up, but two guests disappeared. When I walked out of the gate, I saw layers of paddy fields on the hillside far and near, like ladders going upstairs. People will call it "terrace" in the future.

Although the legend is beautiful, it is difficult to prove. The record of Shangbao terraced fields in the history books was first found in the book Li Chongyi County's Governance and Sparseness written by Wang Shouren, a Neo-Confucianist and imperial envoy in the Ming Dynasty. According to historical records, Hakka ancestors who moved in from Guangdong came to this barren mountain to build houses and dig fields in order to make a living. Farmland is cultivated on gentle slopes, small fields are cultivated on steep and narrow slopes, and even in the crevices under the ditch, they are struggling to dig. Driving from the foot of the mountain to the top of the mountain does not waste an inch of earth and stones, so that they all turn into fields and grow food. In the Ming Dynasty, Xu Guangqi's "The Complete Book of Agricultural Administration" also mentioned this point. These terraces, row after row, are like a heavy epic that crosses the world, and can witness the wisdom and sweat of Hakka ancestors. It has become a wonder of Hakka farming civilization. Since the first black-and-white photo of Li Xueming, a famous photographer in southern Jiangxi, appeared in newspapers in the 1970s, Shangbao terraced fields have gradually become famous all over the country, so that countless photographers, writers and painters come to Shangbao again and again every year and enter the terraced fields. Let the amorous feelings in the mountains go to the outside world with photos, colorful paintings and poems, and let the tourists outside approach the terraced fields of Shangbao in batches to enjoy the magnificent scenery.