I'm going to tell a weird story about the Yellow River Ancient Road.
My surname is Bai, and my big name is White Stone, this name is very earthy, but it is exquisite, and it means "water to cover the earth".
On the Yellow River, there are eight kings and sixty-four generals. This white surname is the surname of one of the eight kings.
This is not nonsense, the statement about the eight kings and generals is written in the book, and it is a must-have red treasure book for every river official, and even today's Yellow Committee wants to enshrine this book as the Bible for curing Huang.
Those who know the know will know that I am from a generation of river soldiers.
I believe many people don't know what a river soldier is.
At the beginning of the TV series "The Granary of the World", the soldiers who died to fetch water were river soldiers.
In the thirty-seventh year of Kangxi, ** began to set up river soldiers.
The River Soldier is a strange class.
The military uniforms of the Qing Dynasty were printed with characters, some printed with the word "brave", and some printed with the word "soldier".
Bing is a regular army, a regular army of the Qing Dynasty;Yong is a temporary recruit of soldiers and civilians, Zeng Guofan's Hunan army, and some local regimental training, are all brave.
The river soldier's uniform is printed with the word "river", which is a rather strange type of troops.
Although the river soldiers are a green battalion system, there are still slight differences. The food and salary they received were specially approved by Emperor Qianlong and distributed according to the proportion of "two battles and eight guards" (one tael per month for war silver and one tael per month for silver guarding), and they could also be promoted "from guarding and pulling out battles". If he dies in the line of duty, he will also be compensated in accordance with the military merit regulations.
It can be said that the treatment of river soldiers in the Qing Dynasty was very good, but few people were willing to go.
Not only are they reluctant to go, but even if they are forcibly arrested, or they are recruited into river soldiers, they have to do everything possible to run away.
Let me give you an example.
In the thirty-seventh year of Kangxi, the number of river soldiers was 2,000, and after three years, there were less than 800 left, and nearly half of them ran away and died. Later, it really didn't work, and in the seventh year of Jiaqing, 400 people were urgently transferred from Tianjin and Xuanhua to make up the number.
It is said that when a soldier eats food and carries a gun to fight, what is there to run, the key is that the nature of the work of the river soldier is different.
Other types of troops deal with rogues, thieves, and foreigners, but what do river soldiers deal with?
Dealing with the Yellow River, dealing with the evil objects in the Yellow River.
The Yellow River is the most tossed river, and it is also the most evil river.
In the 2,540 years since the Huayuankou Mouth in BC, there have been 543 years of overflow in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, with 1,590 overflows.
Let's take a look at the Yangtze River at the same level as it, from 185 B.C. to the middle of the Common Era, a total of 214 large and small floods occurred in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River plain, so although the river soldiers nominally defended against any floods, in fact, most of the manpower was still used to block the Yellow River.
In the Yellow River, anything impossible can happen, and in the mud of the ancient Yellow River road dozens of meters deep, it is also possible to dig out any evil object.
Everyone knows that the Yellow River is overflowing, and hundreds of people will die at a time, but everyone doesn't know that when the Yellow River is cleaned up every year, the strange objects dug out of the thick silt are terrifying!
The Yellow River was diverted, pouring for thousands of miles, and everywhere it went, people or adult fish and turtles, under the thick silt, I don't know how many unknown secret past stories were buried.
These secrets contain too many taboos, too many oddities, and so weird that people can't believe it.
There are too many strange things about the ancient Yellow River Road, let's talk about some strange things in modern times.
In the early fifties, the Yellow River was diverted, and after the river workers opened the dry Yellow River ancient road, they found a rusty iron pipe, which was only the thickness of an arm at the beginning, and the thicker it became, and it dug down for seven or eight meters. The river workers did not dare to dig any more, and when the experts came the next day, they found that the originally dry riverbed was full of water overnight, and the iron pipe could no longer be found in the turbid water of the Yellow River.
In the 60s, when cleaning up the ancient road of the Yellow River, a bronze bell of more than ten meters high was found under the silt, the bell mouth was sealed with iron juice, and when it was opened, the bronze bell was full of dense skulls, and the skulls were coiled with all kinds of yellow, orange and orange small snakes, and they refused to come out. After some investigation, the experts couldn't figure out what the bell was for, and how the snake could survive in the closed bell for so many years, and finally had to sink the bell to the bottom of the river as it was.
After the bell sank to the bottom of the water, for seven days in a row, every household heard the sound of the bell ringing.
Not to mention the ancient road of the Yellow River, let's just say that before liberation, the Yellow River Water Conservancy Association, which was responsible for the management of the Yellow River, was strange inside and out. At that time, the first head of the Yellow Committee was Kong Xiangrong, who was a descendant of the famous Confucius Sage, and the Kong family tree recorded that he was a descendant of the Kong family in Qufu, Shandong.
He also has an identity, and he is the cousin of Kong Xiangxi, the Confucian family, of the four major families at that time.
It is said that there was no Kong Xiangxi in the Kong family tree at that time, and Kong Xiangxi tried his best to please Kong Xiangrong in order to allow himself to enter the family tree, and later with the help of his strength, he also repaired his own family when he repaired the family tree.
It is said that the descendants of this Confucian saint, the cousin of the big bureaucrat, are very superstitious about the river god, he built the Dawang rice temple on the construction site, and worshiped the king and general in the Yellow River.
Not only him, but Liu Zhi, the first in Henan Province at that time, respectfully escorted the king of the Yellow River - a small golden snake into the water, hoping that the king could bless the people on both sides of the Yellow River. His incident was also included in the book "Zhongzhou Anecdotes" published by Shanghai Bookstore in 1992.
Seeing this, you may say that Liu Zhi must be a stupid and superstitious **.
But, no.
Liu Zhi is a rare good official in the ** period, he does not smoke, drink, gamble, or talk about pomp.
He served as the Whampoa Military Academy**, was one of Chiang Kai-shek's five tiger generals, and was also a good official respected by the people of Henan.
He attached great importance to education, and during his reign he built the Henan Stadium and the iconic auditorium of Henan University.
When he was transferred out of Henan, more than 20,000 people saw him off in Zhengzhou alone.
After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Liu Zhi arrived at Luohe from Nanyang to preside over the surrender ceremony of the Fifth War Zone.
Speaking of this, some people may want to ask, why are these people so superstitious about the legend of the Yellow River Ancient Road?
Are those so-called kings of the Yellow River all superstitious?
It's still the same sentence, those things in the ancient road of the Yellow River, I can't say it clearly.
Perhaps because of the strangeness of the Yellow River, my ancestor made a heavy oath that only one person from each generation of the Lao Bai family was allowed to be a river soldier, and one person must be a river soldier.
Why do you say this, you can just look down patiently.
As the saying goes, the world industry is divided into 360 lines, and among these 360 lines, there is a line of Jinmen, which is also a craft, and there are also sects, with special rules and secret methods.
The craftsman pays attention to worshipping the ancestor master, the carpenter's ancestor is Lu Ban, the thief's ancestor is Shi Qian, the ancestor of digging and participating in the line is Sun Liang, and the ancestor of this Jinmen faction is Ma Xiaosanma.
This Ma Xiaosan was born poor, but he was a natural gold customer, and he was quite able to find the method of finding gold points with one hand, and later evolved into the ancestor who turned stones into gold.
This search for gold, there have been in ancient times, the first use of metal by human beings is gold, about 3,000 years ago there was conscious gold mining, the beginning of gold mining is the first behavior, ** forcibly recruited farmers to go, and later these gold miners passed on the art of gold mining to the next generation, so passed down from generation to generation, and gradually developed into the four veins of water gold, mountain gold, yuan gold, and cloud gold, forming a unique Jinmen faction.
This Jinmen faction, after thousands of years of inheritance, also has a specific formula and secret method, there are the view of the gold mountain, the division of gold water, the search for gold line, the gold vein, the alchemy juice said, and later the Kinmen faction developed into the "river, mountain, abyss, cloud" four veins.
These four veins are called "dividing the water", "viewing the mountain", "exploring the abyss", "Lingyun", each vein has a vein of rules, and also has its own territory, "dividing the water" will never go to "view the mountain", the same way, "exploring the abyss" will never go to the trouble of "Lingyun", these are the rules handed down by the ancestors, the rat and the ugly cow have a saying, of course, the descendants can not mess around.
This "river, mountain, abyss, cloud" sounds very godly, to put it bluntly, it is the territory divided by the gold customers, some are specifically looking for water gold, some are looking for mountain gold, some are looking for cave gold, and some are looking for heavenly gold.
The other three veins are very easy to understand, but this day the golden vein is particularly mysterious, I have never been able to understand, it is said that it is easy to understand the gold in the water and the mountains, where to find gold in this day.
However, although the gold industry is rich and noble, the so-called wealth is not exposed, and it is a ninth-rate industry like witches, prostitutes, gods, shavers, and actors, so it has always been low-key, and many outsiders don't know it.
Speaking of which, everyone should understand the strange rules of our Bai family ancestors, why every generation must have a descendant to do river work.
That's because our Bai family is a vein of gold customers "dividing water", eating the river gold in the Yellow River, and of course someone must have someone to protect the Yellow River in each generation, which is called theft and Taoism, and there are gains and losses, so that future generations will not encounter natural disasters and man-made disasters when mining gold on the ancient Yellow River Road, so that this "water" vein is completely broken.
When it came to my father's generation, the people were not prosperous, and he was a man inside and out, so he naturally became an old river worker and joined the Yellow Committee at that time.
The Yellow Committee was established in 1933, and in 1946, the Hebei, Shandong, Henan, and Yellow River Ancient Road Association was established in the liberated area, and the director was Xu Daben. It was only after 1949 that the liberated areas were renamed the Yellow Committee.
In 1954, Henan moved the provincial capital from Kaifeng to Zhengzhou, and the Yellow Committee also moved to Zhengzhou.
In the late sixties, my father retired early due to health reasons, and I took my father's class as a matter of course and entered the Yellow Committee.
Pinch my fingers and count, from the time I joined the Yellow Committee to the present, it has been almost forty or fifty years.
In the past forty or fifty years, I have seen too many strange things about the Yellow River, ghosts on the Yellow River, and endless strange things in the ancient road of the Yellow River!
If you want to ask me if these stories are true or false, I can't say, anyway, some of them are what I have personally experienced, and some are jokes told by friends after drinking, half-truths, true or false, no one can tell.
When I went to the Yellow Committee, the Yellow Committee had already moved from Kaifeng to Zhengzhou.
The current Yellow Committee is next to the province, and it is in the center of the city, and it is very advantageous and romantic, but the place was very biased back then.
At that time, there was almost a mass grave, and there were circles of old locust trees growing in the mass graves, and those old locust trees were ancient locust trees, I don't know how many years they had grown, and it took several people to hug them. There are always black crows on the old locust tree, and when they see people coming, they croak on the tree, which is even more desolate and strange.
The ancient acacia covers the sky and the sun, blocking the sun to death, and walking under the tree on dog days, I feel that the cold wind is blowing, and I have to hurry up, otherwise I can get goosebumps on my body.
When I go to work, I often see someone wrapping a red cloth around the tree in the middle of the night, the red cloth is tied with the child's red shoes, and the incense case is enshrined under the tree, which is to summon the soul of the child who has lost his soul.
Many ancient acacia have almost died, but no one dares to cut them. First of all, the ghost thing about Guhuai is said to be miraculous, and secondly, the place where Guhuai is in is the site of the old city of the Shang Dynasty, which is said to have a history of more than 3,000 years, and it is in the first batch of key cultural relics protection units announced in 1961.
Later, in 1958, the Bauhinia Mountain Park was built on the site of the Shang Dynasty, and I remember that when the Bauhinia Mountain Park was built, a farmer used a hoe to dig out a lot of copper coins and porcelain tiles that were seriously worn, and later sold them to foreigners who came to travel, and made a fortune!
At that time, the park said that it would protect the ancient acacia well, and also went to our Yellow Committee to ask for opinions, so many years have passed, and I don't know if those ancient acacia are still there, and when there is a chance, I have to go and see it.
It's not just the ancient acacia, but a few dozen meters away from the unit, there is also a sinkhole.
We all suspect that it is a crater, anyway, there is no grass within a few tens of meters near the crater, and the soil is brick-colored, as if it has been calcined by a fierce fire.
That day the pit was not very big, almost the size of a pond, but it was very deep, there was a spring in the pit, and the spring water was bubbling outward, and it was still a cold spring, and the spring water was cold and biting, and I felt the cold air rushing when I walked nearby.
It is said that the feng shui near the Yellow Committee was destroyed by these old acacia and sinkholes, so people die every year.
Speaking of which, the Yellow Committee did make a lot of trouble in those years.
Not long after moving here, someone got up in the middle of the night to urinate, and the next day he found the person drowned in the sinkhole, and when he fished it out, the body was the size of a cowhide raft.
Then there is a Northeast leader, he is fatter, the fat man is afraid of heat, greedy for coolness in the dog days, and at night he rolled up the mat to sleep under the ancient locust tree, and the next day everyone saw that this leader was indeed cool, and the whole person was cold, and he had been dead for several hours.
At first, everyone thought it was an accident, but then several people died one after another, some died in car accidents, some died of sudden illness, and they all died sideways anyway.
The news spread, and everyone sighed sadly, no one dared to stay here in the place where there were two dead people in the past three days!
Some say that the feng shui here is not good, and some say that we are guilty of chong, there is Tai Sui hidden in the ground, Tai Sui's head is ground, and there is Ansheng. Others say that in the middle of the night, they often hear the cry of a woman coming from the sinkhole, and others say that they see bloody faces in the sinkhole.
Later, there was really no way, ** was not allowed to be superstitious, but it was not possible to resist the ghosts and ghosts, so I secretly entrusted a lot of relationships, and secretly picked up an old man who was defeated as a cow ghost and snake god from the ** farm in the south, and asked him to help change the feng shui.
The old man ate the carp of the Yellow River, paced in all directions, recited words in his mouth, used a compass to determine the direction, threw cinnabar into the sinkhole, measured the feng shui heaven, and finally guided us with his beard, saying that this place is next to the mouth of the Yellow River, and the river is broken, let us find a Shandong person to sit here, in order to suppress the river monster.
He said: The dragon veins in the world begin in Kunlun and end in Mount Tai, so Shandong is full of blood and energy, and there are good men and rogues, and it is a matter of time before Liangshanbo rebels. As long as there is a Shandong person sitting here, and then invite a piece of Taishan stone to suppress the river demon, then all the cows, ghosts, snakes and gods will not dare to intrude.
The old man was so well-founded that we were deeply impressed, and we were busy organizing people to fill the sinkhole with twenty truckloads of quicklime, and when the heat had dissipated, they laid a two-meter-thick layer of Yellow River silt, planted a small peach tree on the silt, made a cement pond under the peach tree, and raised two golden-winged and golden-scaled Yellow River red carp.
Then the Yellow Committee urgently seconded a leader from Shandong and asked him to invite a big stone from Mount Tai, and five big characters were written on the top of the stone: "Mount Tai Stone dares to be."
The stone was placed in front of the fish pond, and the five elements were facing the ancient road of the Yellow River, firmly pressing the ancient road with the momentum of Mount Tai.
This is called "Tibetan Wind and Water Shelter Double Fish Open Road", such a feng shui bureau with trees, stones, water, and fish, as long as it can block the first seven of the evil spirit, it will be safe and sound in the future.
After a few days of worry, we found that this feng shui bureau really worked, the woman's crying voice was gone, the dead were gone, and even walking under the ancient acacia was not so cold, and the two red carp were swimming leisurely in the water, leisurely and comfortable.
Just when we all thought that the matter would pass like this, no one expected that another extremely strange thing would appear.
It was a few days later, in the middle of the night, there was a sudden click of a few lightning bolts, and it rained heavily.
At that time, it was a female comrade on duty, the leader was afraid that she was afraid, so he called a few of our young people to accompany her, I was idle, with a strong light, the shadow in the heavy rain was scorching, the thick branches of the ancient locust tree waved like a giant snake in the rain, the white raindrops were as big as corn kernels, and then the raindrops were connected into a finger-thick rain column, so dense that the light could not pass through.
It is said that there are few such heavy rains in autumn, and several of us were worried that something would go wrong with the Yellow River, so we didn't dare to sleep all night. The female comrade was Mongolian, very quiet, and cooked us a big pot of Mongolian brick tea. Mongolian tea bricks are first boiled in a pot of water, then the thumb-sized tea leaves are thrown in, and after boiling, the tea soup on top is scooped out and poured in milk to drink.
A few young people drank brick tea like this, and talked about national affairs and the fate of the nation on a rainy night, and now that I think about it, it is also quite warm.
Later, I went to **, went to Mohe to pan for gold, all the way to eat and sleep, often ate the last meal without the next meal, the most in the bag is also brick tea, the brick tea in Tibet is brick tea + pepper + green salt + milk ghee, a very large piece, knock down a piece with an axe, put it in the pot and boil it to drink, warm and long-lasting.
It's just that after drinking brick tea from so many places, I still can't drink the taste of the Yellow Committee back then.
What does that taste like?
I've been thinking about it for years, but I can't figure out what it tastes like.
Perhaps, it is the taste of an indelible youth.
It's been so many years, and as I write about it now, I still remember the girl sitting there quietly, listening to a few of us blowing and gently renewing our brick tea.
The next morning, we got up and saw that the water outside was up to our knees, and we went out to check on it, and the Yellow River was fine, but our Yellow Committee had an accident again.
Dead again, to be exact.
This time it was a woman who died.
It is said that we have seen a lot of dead people in those years, and we have seen a lot of people who have died horizontally, drowning, hanging, crashing, and poisoning, but we have never seen such a strange way of dying.
That kind of death doesn't look like suicide, but it looks like being cursed by **.
The woman threw herself into the river and died.
The river we cast is the sinkhole that we originally sealed with quicklime and cement.
Maybe it was because the heavy rain washed away the cement layer, or maybe someone deliberately damaged the sinkhole, anyway, all the sinkholes that were originally blocked were washed away, and a long river was formed with the help of the rain, and there was a touch of aquatic grass floating on the long river.
When I got closer, it wasn't water weeds, it was a woman's loose hair.
Everyone was immediately panicked, ** first found a long hook to hook the hair, but it couldn't be pulled, so it was really impossible to hang a reward of five yuan, let a beggar passing by go into the water, and dragged the woman up.
As soon as the woman came up, we all gasped.
She wore a bright red robe like a singing opera, a big red cloth bag on her head, and a large stone tablet tied to her body, and jumped into the sinkhole.
The Shandong leader straightened his glasses and looked at it, and couldn't help but scream - the big stone tied to the woman's body was the Taishan stone he invited from Shandong.
Speaking of this now, I still have a little numb scalp, let's not care about the ghost or not, think about it, such a tragic death, how much of a grievance this must be!
Later, when we were fine, a few of us talked about it, and some of us counted carefully with their fingers, from the time we blocked the sinkhole with quicklime to the woman's death, no more, no less, for seven days.
Think about what the old man said at that time, as long as Taishan Stone can block the evil qi of the seven days, it will be fine, and it seems that it was not blocked in the end. Looking at it this way, that little old man is not exactly a magic stick, at least he knows some Taoism.
Later, one year in the middle of summer, a one-eyed lama who went to worship in the Lama Temple passed through here, hungry and thirsty, fainted under the ancient locust tree, I helped him to the Yellow Committee, asked him for some dry food porridge to eat, he rested for a while, struggled to get up and went to the sinkhole, threw his prayer beads that he had held for many years into the sinkhole, and gave me my hands together to pray for blessings, and then dragged my tired body away.
Strange to say, since then, the cold spring in the sinkhole has been broken, and there is no more gurgling water, and we have filled it up as a garbage pit.