Miao Village Marketplace No. 8: Stone House on the Side Market

The stone house in Shanjiang Miao Village is a traffic fortress for the Miao villagers to go to market. The place of love is a place where love sprouts for the Miao family. Like this nation, it is full of mystery, legend and romance.

In people’s imagination, stone houses may be simple houses made of stones located in remote countryside. In fact, the Stone House in Shanjiang Miao Village is a unique Miao-style restaurant, just like what people call a farmhouse.

The Stone House is about 20 kilometers away from Fenghuang Ancient City. It is located in a mountain valley about 1 kilometer above the market place of Shanjiang Town. The X034 County from Fenghuang Ancient City to the Laer Mountain Platform of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau passes through the house. Within three to five kilometers around the Stone House, there are Tianxing Mountain Scenic Area of ??Phoenix National Geopark, Laojiazhai Scenic Area, a famous tourist village in Hunan Province, Liangdeng Village, the original ecological Miao Village Scenic Area, Miao Wang Mansion, Miao Ren Valley, Miao Wang Cave and other scenic spots.

The land where the stone house was built was still a piece of wasteland at the end of the last century. In this wasteland, there is a bluestone path leading to the villages behind the mountain. Children from the surrounding villages often graze cattle and sheep here. In front of and to the left are the fields of the Miao family.

Precisely because of this empty wasteland, after the market in Shanjiang Miao Village, it became the place where brothers and sisters of the Miao family meet and seek mates. Here, the young brother and sister sang Miao songs to express their love to each other, and agreed on a time and cave to meet at night.

When I was 18 years old, I graduated from the normal school of the "Huangpu Military Academy", which is called the "Huangpu Military Academy" in the Miao village. I came here from another Miao village. The Miao village was even lower than the stone house now. In a classroom made of a small and simple stone house, one person leads a group of children ranging from four to five years old to fifteen or sixteen years old, sometimes teaching the first and third grades, sometimes teaching the second and fourth grades, and A four- or five-year-old preschooler tried his best to teach the children reading, literacy, singing and playing games in this three-level compound teaching. They went up the mountain to pick up bracken and pull bamboo shoots with these children, and they went barefoot to catch loaches and snails in the fields.

Winter came and went, and in more than 2,000 days of ups and downs in six years, I traveled back and forth in this once wild place. Either on a section of bluestone or on a section of dirt road, walking back and forth. In the next two or three years, due to their persistence and seriousness when they were young, the children of the Miao family also strived for success. Although they had to herd cattle and cut grass for cooking in the morning, and cut firewood and find cattle to feed pigs at night, the children in the countryside were not afraid of hardship. I resisted squeezing time to study, and every time I took the final exam, my scores in various subjects in several grades were ranked first in the town. For a time, several parents from neighboring villages gave their children to me.

There are more and more children, and one person is really too busy. Therefore, the principal of the central school in the town sent me a young female teacher, who was a temporary substitute teacher, and said that she would enrich my teaching capabilities. During the two seasons of autumn and winter, the two of us stayed together in that simple stone house, busy with our forty or fifty children, just like a couple from a Miao village. In the morning, I carried water and she cooked. At night, we lit a kerosene lamp and together we prepared lessons, gave trial lectures, corrected homework, and discussed teaching methods. Spending time together day and night will lead to lasting love. Later, she became my current wife.

Outside that former wilderness, there are the figures of my wife and I picking out new books and carrying them to school. There are also the loving words that my wife and I left when we met and fell in love, and there are also the opinions of my wife and me. The little quarrels left over from disagreements. All this leaves us with unforgettable memories.

Later, my wife went to study again and I was transferred out of this small town. My wife and I settled down in the ancient city of Fenghuang, had children, and even less so in that village and outside of that former wilderness. Every Spring Festival, when we take our children to visit my grandma’s house for New Year greetings, my wife and I always stop for a while in front of the stone house. While telling our children the story of our teaching days at the cottage that month, we also miss the love we had at that time. Because of this, my daughter and son often tease me that my wife and I are still reliving our old relationship and feel ashamed.

More than ten years after leaving Shanjiang Town, our children have grown up one by one and started families and businesses. Sister Ma, the mother of one of our students at that time, was a shrewd Miao woman. Taking advantage of the rise of tourism in recent years, she built this stone house in that once wilderness area and started a catering business. Because this restaurant has never had a name, many people call it a farmhouse. Later, Sister Ma named it after the place and called it Stone House.

Sister Ma, a very far-sighted Miao woman, opened a canteen on the street in Shanjiang Town when her children were young (her son and daughter were both in my class). Wholesale of daily necessities. After saving some money, my husband bought a Taichung bus and started a passenger transport business from Shanjiang Town to Fenghuang Ancient Town. One of the couple runs the wholesale department and the other runs the transportation department. The business is getting better and better. They bought a Taichung bus and started a line operation business from Jishou, the seat of the Xiangxi Autonomous Prefecture, to Fenghuang Ancient City. In those years, Fenghuang Ancient City was experiencing a boom in tourism, and the couple made buckets of gold.

In the early years, when the Shanjiang Scenic Area was developed, Sister Ma was responsible for bringing tourists to the village, which was equivalent to half a tour guide. When tourists have problems eating or staying, Sister Ma greets them herself with a knife and a spoon. During one reception, 300 people were expected to come, but more than 800 people came. The villagers who had lived in the village for a long time were frightened by the sudden flow of people.

Sister Ma communicated with the village party secretary and used a loudspeaker to broadcast to the whole village, calling on all households to bring out their eggs, sweet potatoes, corn and other stocks to entertain. She provided food for more than 800 tourists and helped the villagers realize the cash flow of the ingredients.

Tasting the dividends brought by the tourism industry, the couple put aside their daily necessities wholesale business and started operating minibuses while starting a tourism catering business. Therefore, she took a fancy to the value of the hub outside the wilderness, and after several negotiations, she decided to purchase the wilderness. What kind of restaurant style to build is also a question that Sister Ma has been thinking about.

The stone house is a masterpiece created by the Miao people since ancient times using local materials. The Miao family village has nothing but mountains. In addition to flowers, plants and trees, there are many stones in the mountains, and these stones are all bluestones. There are also categories of large bluestones. Some bluestones can’t be hammered out no matter how skilled the craftsman is. Some bluestones are flat and neat in large pieces. Miao families often lay them on the flat dam at the door of their home and on the sun drying flat to dry their rice. , corn, soybeans, peanuts and other food crops, they dry quickly and are dust-free. The Miao masons who hammered it out into weights would process it slightly and use it to build the footings of the house. It is thick and stable. Once the footings are laid, pieces of bluestone are used on top, about 3-10 centimeters thick. Build stone walls, or build earth walls on these footings. Generally, bluestone is mainly built in the upper part.

Perhaps she also thought of the concept of "what belongs to the nation belongs to the world", so she used local materials, first taking the worthless bluestones from the back slope of the wilderness, and then buying some cheap wood in the mountains. , built this stone house restaurant. The stone houses, hence the name Siyi, are all made of blue stones. They are built according to the traditional houses of the Miao people and are very characteristic of ethnic minorities!

The bacon hanging above the fire hall, the sausages stored in the refrigerator, sour soup, community rice, rice fish, Yanghe, pickled beans, river shrimp, native chicken... the Miao family loves The home-cooked meals are transformed into authentic dishes on the long table through the industrious and skillful hands of Sister Ma and the villagers. Each meal and dish contains the warm hospitality of the Miao family.

Seasonal ingredients are picked and cooked freshly. You can order in front of the stone door stove and eat whatever is available in the vegetable garden. In Stone House, everything is eaten according to the season. Even the thirst-quenching tea served with meals is made from local prickly pear fruits brewed with mountain spring water, which is sweet and refreshing. When it was time for dinner, a loud toasting song started playing, and Sister Ma took a bowl of wine and went to the table to greet the guests.

With an average of thirty or forty yuan per person, we can have enough food and good food. Because of its sincerity, the Stone House has an endless stream of customers, with old customers bringing in new ones, and at least 70% of the customers are repeat customers. Every day is the peak season. At most, more than 200 people can dine at one meal at the same time.

Rice, vegetables, fruits, fish... Sister Ma contracted more than 380 acres of land and asked villagers to cultivate it. In addition to its own vegetable garden, at least half of the ingredients for Stone House come from the homes of villagers in the general barracks community where it is located. Sister Ma signed a contract with the villagers for the fixed supply of local pork. Sister Ma bought the piglets herself and gave them to the villagers to raise. Every year, when the rice fish harvest is abundant in the autumn, Sister Ma buys the rice fish from the villagers at a high price of 2.

With Sister Ma’s “Stone House” as the leader, we will drive and guide nearby Miao villagers to develop ecological planting and breeding industries. In order to solve the villagers' lack of skills and worries, she required farmers to feed their livestock with sweet potatoes, rice bran, corn and other miscellaneous grains. She asked technicians to provide free technical services throughout the process and purchase the livestock at a higher price than the market price after slaughter.

The waiters in her restaurant are also villagers nearby who are idle at home. Sister Ma’s Stone House restaurant hired 18 left-behind elderly, disabled and female villagers from the surrounding Miao family to serve as helpers, allowing these illiterate Miao women in the surrounding area to work directly in front of their homes to earn money.

Sister Ma, who dares to be the first, adheres to the Miao food culture and customs, studies while doing it, and delivers Miao-style delicacies to customers all over the world, which makes her famous in one fell swoop, and also makes Stone House go out of the mountains. Go out into the world.

The daughter and son of Sister Ma, the owner of Stone House, are all my students. Now that I have grown up, I run this Miao-style farmhouse with my mother. The mother and son have made this farmhouse famous and made a lot of money.

In the twelfth lunar month, the son of Sister Ma from Shitouwu made a special trip to the county town. He said that several teachers and classmates who had taught him participated in the glutinous rice cake festival organized by him, making glutinous rice cakes and writing Spring Festival couplets. Distributed to passers-by and tourists. Everyone who came to his farmhouse that day treated them as friends and invited everyone to try the Miao family banquet, drink Miao rice wine and eat Miao cured food together.

Making glutinous rice cakes during the New Year is an important custom of the Miao family. From the 18th day of the twelfth lunar month, the Miao family begins to make glutinous rice cakes. When we were children, whether we had a good New Year or not depended on how many buckets of rice we made from glutinous rice cakes. During the Spring Festival, visiting your mother's uncle's house to pay New Year greetings and picking up one or two loads of glutinous rice cakes is a great sign of respect for your mother's family and your uncle's family. Especially for a newly married daughter-in-law, if she doesn’t pick up two loads of glutinous rice cakes when she returns to her parents’ home for the first time during the Spring Festival, the Miao family will judge her. Either her husband’s family is petty and reluctant to part with her; I can't afford three or five buckets of glutinous rice cakes.

That day, my wife and I were invited to the Stone House to participate in our students’ Ciba Festival. At the long banquet in the stone house, we drank the rice dumplings and glutinous rice wine brewed by Sister Ma, and ate large pieces of her smoked bacon, cured goose, and cured fish...

In the stone house, there are Miao specialties have the taste of our youth and the sweetness of our love...

That day, I was drunk.

Drunk in the aroma of bacon, intoxicated in the mellow aroma of rice wine, intoxicated in beautiful memories, intoxicated in deep nostalgia.

I think: The stone house, Sister Ma and her children - our students, their heart, blood, joy and hardship have been integrated into this stone house, becoming a beautiful scenery in the Miao village.