The cultural history of Herong Town

The long streets and alleys of Herong are all paved with three strips of bluestone. The buildings on the streets are all old houses from the Ming and Qing dynasties with high steps along the wind and fire walls. The shops are one by one, and there is no hot or cold space. The outside of the town is surrounded by the city river and the long embankment. Both ends of the city river are connected to the Zhang River. There is the Tielong Bridge on the top and the Lower Half Bridge on the bottom. Nicknamed "off-duty bridge"), they are all stone arch bridges. The cross-street building not far from the lower half of the bridge is like a city gate, spanning the main street of Herong Town. It is a building that can be as beautiful as any ancient city building in China. It is supported by four stone pillars, with double eaves, flying corners, carved beams and painted buildings. , the stage is surrounded by majesty on all sides. There are couplets and plaques in all directions. One of them said: "Building a hundred-foot building for entertainment is just a show on the spot. Lin Qianqiu advises this to be a good thing because of the singing and dancing." Another one said: "A small place can be used for a family, a country, and the world. A small place can be a good thing." Each character is capable of literature, martial arts, ghosts and gods." Another painting said: "The several performances of former dynasty plays serve as a reminder to future generations." The east of the plaque is "Books Presenting Auspiciousness", the west is "Morality and Selflessness", the south is "Han Mo Yang Fen", and the north is "Civilization and Image". During the holidays, opera can be performed upstairs, while cars and horses can pass by downstairs. There is a stone street drainage culvert (culvert) under the street building that leads to the city river. The water outlet is a stone-carved dragon mouth, which is known as "crossing the bridge but not seeing the bridge."

There were originally nine palaces and eighteen temples in the town. After liberation, there were still Luojia Theater, Luojia Dayan Theater, and Tianhou Palace Theater. If these landscapes were not defeated in the 1950s and 1960s, , Yichang will add another good destination for tourism, and it is no exaggeration to say that it will not be inferior to Zhouzhuang and Phoenix. The Japanese invaders did not destroy all the buildings through bombing and fire. After the Zhanghe Reservoir was built, the Zhanghe River dried up and gradually declined. People also changed the stone streets into cement roads and demolished all the ancient buildings. At present, on the only century-old embankments remaining in the river (Mojia Lake and Hejia Village), due to the need for flood control, brick walls two to three meters high have been built on the embankments, again destroying the river landscape. The old river Anyone over the age of 40 or 50 knows that the century-old embankment overlooks the Shanxin Temple on the edge of Yima Pingchuan, with faint green mountains and long green water. Since Herong lives close to the water, in the spoken language of residents, it is customary to use "shangtou" and "xiatou" (i.e. upstream and downstream) to express the direction. Before the 1980s, the main commercial streets in Herong were within the city, and outside the embankment was the mule and horse trade. With the development of highways and the decline of river transportation, the streets along the river in the city and Hanoi were basically deserted, and most of the old " "People on the street" have all left the old houses where their families have lived for hundreds of years.