Country Driving [73]
“He won’t let anybody see it,” Wei Ziqi said. “We don’t even know where he keeps it. He has it hidden somewhere.”
I asked what the man planned to do with the genealogy.
“Nothing,” Wei Ziqi said. “It doesn’t do him any good. He just wants to keep other people from seeing it.”
Wei Ziqi’s personal family history is limited to a half dozen tattered land contracts that are signed by his ancestors. But none of these documents is still legally binding, and to him they’re just curiosities. He rarely talks about his ancestors or his parents, and like other villagers he doesn’t care much about history. He told me that when he was a boy, nobody in Sancha showed the least interest in the Ming-dynasty ruins. Locals didn’t even call it the Great Wall—back then, they referred to it as bianqiang, or “border walls,” a term that was commonly used during the Ming. Along with other children, Wei Ziqi played in the remnants of kilns that had been used to fire bricks for the wall. Sometimes children found intact bricks or other relics, but eventually the village expanded and people built their homes atop the kilns. In the 1970s, Sancha residents demolished a massive fortified gate that stood along the main road to the village. They used the huge blocks of stone for house foundations and road construction. Nowadays, there are some regrets about the destruction, because villagers believe the gate might have attracted tourists.
Like everybody in urban China, they now call it Changcheng, the Great Wall, and occasionally they hike up and wander around the ruins. If they find anything interesting they take it back home, and over the years Wei Ziqi has collected two Ming-dynasty signal cannons. They are simple tubes of carved stone, open at one end; each is about the size of a large flowerpot. There’s a notched hole in the bottom for lighting a fuse. In the old days soldiers packed them with gunpowder, ignited the fuse, and conveyed messages with the sound. When I moved to the village, Wei Ziqi never seemed particularly interested in the four-hundred-year-old artifacts, which he kept on a dusty shelf. Once he asked me casually if I’d like to bring a cannon back to America. As far as he was concerned, there was no reason to explore history for its own sake—his instinct was always to look ahead. He liked the study of law because it’s practical, and that was also true of his Information. He drew maps of the Great Wall because he figured there must be some way to make money from tourism.
The only time the village commemorates the past is during the annual grave-sweeping holiday of Qing Ming. The festival’s name means the Day of Clear Brightness, and it’s celebrated across China during the first week of April. In the southwestern province of Sichuan, where I lived for two years, Qing Ming is a family celebration—entire clans hike up to their ancestral tombs, where they burn offerings and enjoy long, rowdy picnics. In Sancha, though, only the men participate. They leave before dawn, carrying shovels on their shoulders, and they trudge up the steep hillside behind the village. The land levels out to a strip of cornfields, and behind the crops is the Sancha cemetery. It consists of simple dirt mounds, three feet tall and unmarked. They are arranged in neat rows, and each row represents a different generation. There are four lines—a hundred years of Weis buried on this mountainside.
The first year I went to Sancha for Qing Ming, the apricot trees were in full bloom, sweeping