Song Poet and Pan’an County

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Lu You (1125-1210), a great poet of the song Dynasty (960-1279), composed thousands of poems in his lifetime. One of his best known poems discusses philosophy with a word picture of a Shangri-la scene. Two lines of the poem read to the effect: the path through mountains and across streams seems to lose itself and lead nowhere before another village unexpectedly comes into view with willows in shade and furious blossoms in sunlight.

Where is the village depicted in this picturesque description? In a book on masterpieces of the Tang and Song dynasties, my poetry professor Wu Xionghe at Hangzhou University explains that the village was somewhere in a rural neighborhood of Shaoxing. On a fine spring day about half a year after his disgraceful demotion, the poet went out to visit a neighboring village called Shanxi Village, or literarily, a village in the west of the mountain.

Well, the people in pan’an county, a rural paradise serenely tugged away in the central Zhejiang Province’s mountains, dispute the professor’s view. They seem to have very strong evidence to back up their claim. Lu You visited Pan’an twice and there was a Xishan Village that was closely associated with the great poet.

That is why I visited the county the other day to take a close view of Pan’an. I was not to solve the dispute. I wish to see Pan’an and Lu You’s footprints there.

I took a bus to travel from Dongyang City to Pan’an. After a long trip and a short tunnel at the end of the long trip, the bus approached the county seat hugged by mountains. What I saw was a modernized version of “peach blossom stream”: a postcard picture of farmland, ponds, bamboo groves and mulberry woods. But the crisscrossing paths among farmlands were nowhere to be seen. They were replaced by the modern highway. At the county capital is a new park situated at a previously wild slope. The brand new park has a time-old pavilion with the famous couplet from the famous poem.

Lu You visited Pan’an twice. The first occurred in 1129 when he was still young. A war broke out in the central part of the central kingdom and the military forces moved southward, threatening to destroy the peace and prosperity of the south.

Lu You’s father Lu Zhai wanted to flee but had nowhere to go. A friend told him that Chen Yansheng in Pan’an, Zhejiang Province was a man of honor and generosity. Lu Zhai wrote him a letter explaining that they needed a refuge to shelter themselves against the rebellion and asked if his family could move there. Chen soon wrote back saying that the Lu family was celebrated for its loyal service to the state and that he would guarantee the safety of the family with his life.

Lu Zhai and two other high-ranking officials decided to move south together. More than 1,000 people of the three families migrated to Anwen Town, the capital seat of Pan’an. Chen Yansheng traveled 50 kilometers from the county seat to meet the migrants. With the arrangements of the generous host, the refugees settled down and found safety and peace there.

Safety and peace seem built-in tributes of Pan’an. The name of Anwen Town suggests safety itself: the name came from the fact that in a rebellion of the late years of the Tang Dynasty, the government of Dongyang hastily moved all its documents and records and classics to Pan’an and thus kept these important files safe in the town protected by mountains. The town therefore changed itself name to Anwen, meaning literature stays safe here, to mark the occasion.

And Pan’an offered the war refugees more than safety and peace. Again with the arrangements of the generous host, the three families were able to use a room in a nearby Buddhist temple as a library where their books, documents, personal collections of ancient paintings and calligraphies could be stored. A pavilion was erected on the top of a hill and a path was built to the pavilion so that the visitors could take a panoramic view of the breathtaking views of mountains. Lu You was able to attend a private school housed at the clan memorial of the Chen, which usually catered exclusively to children of the clan.

Pan’an, a county in the heartland of Zhejiang, is proud of its geographic position. Some majestic mountain ranges in Zhejiang start here and four long and important rivers also find part of their headwaters here. The history of Pan’an has created quite a few places of historical and cultural interests. A Confucius temple was built in 1254. It stands today, surrounded by rural houses. Somewhere in a valley in Dapan Mountain is a deep stone pond that looks like a tea kettle. It is said that a prince of Liang Kingdom once stayed here. Pan’an is also said to have witnessed China’s very first dragon dance. Anfu Temple where the Lu family stayed was originally built in 867. The present temple was rebuilt in 1993.

During his three-year stay in Pan’an, Lu You was able to see the gorgeous beauty of the mountain and the Shangri-La scenes of rural Pan’an. The ancestral temple of the Chen family was situated at Xishan, far away from Anfu Temple. Lu You and his classmates, all the Chen family descendents, traveled to Xishan on Qingming Festival every year to visit the ancestral tombs and attend a ritual there. The annual trek opened his eyes to the beauty of mountains and villages.

In 1159, Lu You visited Pan’an again. He was on the road from Fuzhou in the south to Lin’an for a new post in the government. He first traveled by sea from Fuzhou and landed in Wenzhou and then he traveled northward through Kuocang Mountain which led him to Pan’an again.

What he did in Pan’an on his second visit is not clear. His second visit was brief. He left only a short poem that describes his dawdling travel from Fuzhou and what he saw in Pan’an. It took him months to travel from Fuzhou to his destination in Zhejiang.

I am not sure that Lu You’s famous poem about a way out from a seemingly impasse in the mountains was written in Pan’an or about Pan’an, but the visit to Pan’an allowed me a peep into the place where the poet spent three years going to school and roaming in mountains with his playmates.