Yugou Teahouse**
The squire is beautiful and confucian
Text: Wu Yinguang
After the disappearance of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, it was replaced by the disappearance of the Manchu Qing Dynasty and the new beginning, although the times have changed, but the living customs and concepts in the countryside still follow the trajectory of the old times. Private ownership of land, patriarchal inheritance, these imprints of the feudal era are still clearly visible in the land of Huaiyin.
Huaiyin is a thousand-year-old county, Yugou is the most representative ancient town in the ancient county, and there is a famous "Yugou Teahouse" in this ancient township.
It is said that there are five or six teahouses on the old Yugou Street, north and south, and east and west main streets. The teahouse is a place to drink tea and chat casually, and it is generally a place where country gentlemen with status, scholars, and influential people often go to the market, meet relatives and friends, and talk about the world. In order to prevent future troubles, the land purchase and sale are all witnessed by people with status or authority. When there are conflicts and disputes in the countryside and neighborhoods, they cannot all go to the government or county government to deal with them. Often reasonable people come to the teahouse to let people judge and mediate. Generally, it is much more convenient and economical for losers to spend some tea money than to go to the government to fight a lawsuit, so each teahouse is very lively on the day of the market, which can solve many rural contradictions and disputes.
There was such an incident in Yugou Dongguan Taozhuang: there was a head of household surnamed Tao Wuhou, who did good deeds all his life, and arranged to explain to his descendants before his death that he would use dozens of acres of land to make a cemetery for the poor who were buried without land, and the vacant land could also be cultivated and named after the place"Pottery pit . Therefore, when the poor people died and had no place to bury, they were buried in this land. Decades later, many of the dead poor, refugees and homeless people were buried on the land. It has become a famous pottery pit in the local area.
Hu Yuzhai, the neighbor to the south of the pottery pit, is a scholar's family, with sixty or seventy acres of fertile land, and the family is well-off. Seeing that the owner of this neighboring land was extinct, leaving these twenty or thirty acres of fertile land into a mass graveyard, he started to take possession of it, and he took advantage of the convenience of his family's neighbor to begin to cultivate, and at the same time did not allow the landless poor to die to be buried, and publicly declared that it was already there, and belonged to the ancestral cemetery of the Hu family.
The people surnamed Tao of the original Tao Zhuang saw that the cemetery donated by the clansmen for good deeds was occupied by the surname Hu, so they collectively came out to resist, and there was a person named Tao Qingbang who took the lead in the struggle and fought with Hu Yuzhai. and went to Huaiyin County to start a land lawsuit. Hu Yuzhai is a local black pen lawyer, proficient in the know-how of litigation, and is very handy in litigation. He also bribed witnesses to say that this place was called a random pit, and pointed to the two larger tombs and said that they were the ancestral tombs of his family's five generations of ancestors. At the same time, he bribed the county government with some silver taels, arrested Tao Qingbang in prison, and led the people to fight for Hu Yuzhai's ancestral cemetery**, so that the Tao family lost the lawsuit.
The Tao family's land was occupied, Tao Qingbang was arrested and put in prison, and the lawsuit was defeated. An old man in the Tao family walked into the teahouse opened by the Wu family on Yugou East Street when he had no way to file a lawsuit, and asked everyone to uphold justice and tell the government yamen to arbitrarily decide the case. He asked the squires present to bring justice to the local poor people and the Tao people. At that time, there were a few late Qing Xiucai present in the teahouse, Wu Qiqiao, Wu Yinggong and other Wu clansmen and Jiang Fansheng, Lu Ganqing and other Xiucai plus many squires knew the ins and outs of this land, for many years it has been called Tao Rankeng, a charitable place for the burial of the poor, and now it is occupied by the Hu family, Huaiyin County Ya arbitrarily decided the case, everyone on the spot was emotional, the tea drinkers present pooled money, and Wu Qiqiao wrote down the letter in public, and asked someone to pass the word to Hu Yuzhai, and everyone wanted to write a joint letter to help the Tao clan fight this lawsuit with him. What is his attitude? Hu Yuzhai received a message, he is also a cultured and sensible person. In the end, I still couldn't provoke the anger and reprimand of the squires in Yugou, and I won the lawsuit and lost the hearts of the people, and the lawsuit won by the public anger will not end well. hurriedly rushed to the Yugou East Teahouse and told everyone that they would withdraw the lawsuit that they had won and return the land that had been encroached upon. Apologize to everyone surnamed Tao. When the teahouse was written in front of everyone, he admitted that he was wrong, and paid everyone for the tea that day.
This incident made Yugou Teahouse famous, and it not only became a court for civil judgment, but also presided over fairness and justice for the local people. Here, justice and justice are revealed, and the teahouse has become a sacred place in people's hearts. It witnesses the rights and wrongs of the countryside, and also witnesses the wisdom and responsibility of the squires and Confucian scholars. In the hearts of the local people at that time, Yugou Teahouse was not only a place to drink tea, but also a place full of wisdom and justice, which was unanimously praised and praised by the local people at that time.
Wu Yinguang, born in 1953, Jiangsu. Huai'an. People from Huaiyin District like to read and advocate justice. In recent years, I like to write some nostalgic and story-based essays.