Gu Family Courtyard

Choose a sunny day and walk into Ankang Xiaobei Street, you will see mottled tree shades, quiet and quiet. As we walked, we saw an old house with a tall roof standing in front of us. The plaque on the front door reads: Gu's residence.

The old house has blue bricks, gray tiles, stone piers and wooden columns. Although there are no carved beams or painted pillars, it is still antique. Entering the gate and passing through the vestibule, you can see the high patio, which is high around the perimeter and low in the middle. There is an annular water channel around the perimeter that goes down the chute and leads directly to the sewer. On rainy days, rainwater falls from the sky, collects inside and flows down. This is the meaning of "four waters coming to the hall". This architectural format is very different from other places. Most houses have external drainage, but this house has internal drainage. The intention is that "fertile water will not flow into outsiders' fields", which shows the unique ingenuity of the original design. Go through the patio and climb the creaking wooden stairs to reach the corner building. Walking around the corridor is like being in a dream. From the vermilion wooden pillars and vermilion railings, you can see the blue sky and white clouds from afar.

The couplets in the old house are also quite interesting. "The front yard was founded in the early years of the Republic of China and the Han Dynasty was founded, and the back yard was the Manchu and Qing Tongzhi dynasties that were not yet concluded." "The ancient city of Xing'an was enriched by the Qin and Bazhu villages and towns, and the Han River was connected to the river and the sea." These two couplets seem to tell the spectators about the former prosperity of the old house and its owner.

According to the tribesmen of the Gu family in Ankang, they are descendants of Gu Yanwu.

Gu Yanwu, one of the three great thinkers in the late Ming Dynasty, was far away in the south of the Yangtze River. How did his descendants come to Ankang and build the Gu family compound that attracted the attention of Ankang people at that time?

After the Qing soldiers crossed the Yangtze River south in 1645, Gu Yanwu, like many literati, did not cooperate with the Qing government. In 1662, he left his hometown of Jiangsu and traveled to Shanxi and Shaanxi. From then on, I never set foot on the land of Jiangnan again for the rest of my life. In his later years, Gu Yanwu bought fifty acres of land in Huayin, Shaanxi Province, where he cultivated wasteland and lived.

Around 1870, it was a turbulent era. China was plunged into war, coupled with successive years of famine, and there was no harvest in Weinan, Shaanxi. A young man from the Gu family came to Ankang among the refugees. By chance, he worked as an apprentice at the Xujia Hang Inn "Guangxi Long" on Dabei Street at that time. At that time, Dabei Street was called Tongjin Street. It was adjacent to the Flood and Drought Pier in the north, and merchant ships shuttled on the water. Tongjin Street has prosperous commerce, prosperous shops, and active catering services. "Youji Teahouse", "Majia Mutton Restaurant", "Yixing", "Xiaoyuan", "Xinmin Village", "Yuyi Village" restaurants are combined with "Hexinglong" Hotel, "Yinguizi" and "Zhao Yunfeng" The reputation of the wine shop spread far and wide among all classes of society. (According to Zhou Bangji's "A Walk in the Old Town of Ankang")

There were many people doing mountain goods business at that time, and "Guangxi Long" was ranked among the eight most impressive trading houses. In addition to the mountain goods business, Quang Ngai Long also provides accommodation and catering services for businessmen. The young man is smart, kind-hearted, and quite talented in business. He is very helpful to the Xu family's business. A few years later, the head of the Xu family betrothed the eldest girl to the young boy. With the birth of four sons and the young man reaching his adulthood, he was no longer satisfied to continue living under the wings of the Xu family. After many twists and turns, he founded his own business - Chunhoutang, which deals in lacquer, hemp, ear and shellfish. In the vestibule of the old house, we can still see a plaque: Gu Chunhou Hall.

The young man’s eldest son Gu Yuanbo was a well-known person in Ankang at that time. According to the "Ankang County Chronicle", Gu Yuanbo studied at the Army Primary School of Shaanxi Province in 1906. After being introduced by Ling Datong, he joined the Tongmenghui and later went to Chen Shupan Military Office as the Chief of the Military Supplies Section. In 1921, he left the army, rented Jixing Apartment in Hankou, and engaged in business. In 1924, he met Liao Ganwu, an early member of the Communist Party of China, and helped him with money. In 1930, he returned to Ankang to continue doing business. He successively served as the president of Ankang Charity Association, president of commerce and member of the Provincial Provisional Senate. He took over Ankang's "People's Knowledge Times" and served as chairman. The People's Knowledge Times exposed and satirized local officials who used the smoking ban to enrich themselves, which was not tolerated by Wang Yujiu, the county party secretary of the Kuomintang. As a result, editor Niu Xiyuan was arrested on suspicion of being a communist and escorted to Xi'an. Gu Yuanbo worked with local people to mediate and rescued Niu Xiyuan from prison. Hang Yi, the Commissioner of the Ankang Administration at that time, once asked Gu to "cooperate between officials and gentry". Gu said: "This would not be in line with the trend!". Gu Yuanbo opposed the local collection of "prostitution donations", thinking: "If this is the case, stolen donations can be collected." He presided over the design and construction of Xing'an Library (now Wen'an Building of Ankang District Art Museum), and raised funds to build a new Shuren Building and Expo Room for Ankang Middle School (now the site of Hanbin High School).

During the Anti-Japanese War, as the president of the Anti-Enemy Support Association and the Ankang Business Association, he raised funds to help refugees, and participated in the organization of river embankment reinforcement projects.

The son Gu Shisheng has inherited his father's legacy and started business since he was a child. Gu Shisheng was born around 1886 and grew up in his grandmother's house. The gentlemen often taught him about mountain specialties such as fungus and Codonopsis pilosula, and also taught him calligraphy. When Shisheng was 9 years old, he learned to resell local specialties on a small scale. At the age of 20, he set up his own business "Dayuande" to do mountain goods business. By the time he was thirty years old, he had already accumulated a considerable family fortune. In 1919, Gu Shisheng bought land on Xiaobei Street (then Baofeng Street). After nearly 10 years of construction, Gu's residence was completed in 1928, and the four characters "Wuling Yiyin" were engraved above the corner door of the backyard to commemorate it. It shows future generations not to forget their ancestral homeland and inherits the meaning of people. This year, Gu Shisheng also welcomed the birth of his first child, Gu Mingyu. This is the most prosperous period for the Gu family. The Gu family merchant ship shuttled back and forth between Wuhan and Ankang. When it went out, it was loaded with a boatload of Codonopsis pilosula, tung oil, lacquer, hemp, ear, shellfish and other local specialties. When it came back, it was loaded with a boatload of sugar, cloth, silk, nylon and other foreign goods. Since the Gu family values ??integrity in doing business, there is already an endless stream of people coming to place orders every time before the merchant ship sets off from Ankang.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, the world was at peace and the price of health products plummeted. Gu Shisheng, like other major shops, sold a large amount of stockpiled goods at low prices. Unexpectedly, the civil war broke out soon and prices soared. In order to purchase goods, Gu Shisheng sold five front-end houses one after another, but he could not reverse the decline of the business. Years later, Gu Shisheng passed away in depression, leaving behind three wives and six children.

Touching the rough bricks and tiles from a century ago with your fingers, listening to Gu Shisheng’s eldest daughter Gu Mingyu telling the past events, and staring at the words inscribed by Gu Shisheng’s son Gu Minglian: “The sun and the moon carry the right and wrong of eternity like a shuttle, and time is like a The couplet "Water desalts eternal gratitude and resentment" is engraved on the wall of the old house built by the ancestors, which makes people sigh: the sun and the moon last forever, but life is fleeting.