The Hometown of a Wife

By Qi Tianfa

Meng Jiangnu is a woman in one of the four most popular Chinese ancient folk stories. The prototype of the story is in ancient books more than 2,000 years old. Over centuries, the concise mention grew into a full-body story with many dramatic versions. According to the folk story, Meng travels thousands of miles in search of her husband, a laborer enlisted to build the Great Wall. She wants to bring winter cloths to her husband. She fails to find her husband. She cries heartbreakingly for three days and three nights. The folklore says a section of the Great Wall collapses because of her weeping, exposing the body of her dead husband. This is a very popular story in China.

A few years ago, I visited the Great Wall between Xian and Yumen, stretching from Shaanxi Province to Gansu Province in northwestern China. I was deeply impressed by the great engineering project and by the hard work put in by millions of laborers. It was during the travel that I became curious about Meng Jiangnu. Where was her born?

Ancient literature says that Meng was born in the present-day coastal Shandong Province in eastern China. There are other theories about where she was born. In 1927 Gu Jiegang, a prominent scholar of folklores, investigated and found that people in about fifteen provinces across China knew about the legendary woman, that there were local stories about where she traveled on her way to find her husband, where she was born and where she was buried, and that there were over twenty memorial sites such as her tombs and her memorial temples across China.

Then I read another story about where the woman was born. Two collections of folk stories in Haining, a county under the jurisdiction of Ningbo in eastern Zhejiang mentions that Meng Jiangnu was born in todays Sangzhou Town, Ninghai County. A footnote says that Mengjia Village and Jiangjia Village were near Haiyun Temple in Sangzhou Town and that the Meng Jiangnus memorial temple still exists today.

I became excited. If Meng Jiangnu was indeed born in Ninghai County, the home village of the famous woman could become another calling card of Ningbo. I invited a few reporters and we drove to Sangzhou for a visit.

We found the temple. We felt excited to see the statues of Meng Jiangnu and her husband Fang Qiliang. We walked around, studying texts of plaques, photographing architectural details and building materials, searching the stele of the temple. We were very careful in order not to overlook any details. We visited elderly people in the neighborhood and asked about what they knew about Meng Jiangnu. We even recorded a villager singing the popular tune about Meng Jiangnu. Then we learned that descendents of the Meng, Jiang and Fang families still come from near and far on June 3rd on the lunar calendar every year to visit the temple and hold a memorial ceremony. It is now a local celebration.

I later consulted the towns annals. Though it was a small, remote, rural town in eastern Zhejiang, it produced twelve outstanding national scholars altogether during the spell of three dynasties. I was deeply impressed. I felt sure that someone here would do what the woman did: traveling all the way and bringing winter cloths to her husband. Then I realized that Meng Jiangnu was more than an accusation against the atrocity of the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-206BC). She stands for love, and her love has all the social and cultural implications that ordinary Chinese people can well understand and cherish.

My understanding of the everlasting significance of the legend and of the woman became the basis of my scripts for both the dance drama and the television drama entitled Meng Jiangnu. I am glad that each won a provincial award.

Where Meng Jiangnu was born exactly is probably not important, but I firmly believe that she was born in Ninghai and that the town will become a tourism attraction of Ningbo.□