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The Tangxi City God
(Author: Li Zhongxian)
In the past there were many stories about the city-gods of every place, that they were men who after death had become gods. For example, the city god of Beijing was the loyal minister at the end of Song dynasty, Wen Tianxiang who after his capture was put to death in Beijing, while the Hangzhou city-god was the former surveillance commissioner of Zhejiang, Zhou Xin, who became famous for his integrity and was wrongfully put to death. While the city gods mentioned in these tales were still alive, some made meritorious contributions to their dynasties, some showed kindness to the people, some were loyal and upright, some were capable and honest. They were revered as gods in order to commemorate them.
The Tangxi city god is Song Yue, and his story is recorded in the Tangxi County Gazetteer. Inside the temple, at the side of the stage, engraved on a stone pillar as part of a couplet, there is also the phrase: “The god born in Zuocheng.”Song Yue, courtesy name Wenbo, was from Zuocheng city in Weihui prefecture (in what is now Henan), and once served as magistrate of Tang county. In the sixth year of the Chenghua reign period during the Ming dynasty (1470) when it was decided to establish Tangxi county, they appointed Song Yue as county magistrate, and he assumed the post in the sixth month of the following year. He was Tangxi’s first county magistrate.
When Song Yue took up his post, because this was a recently created county, it originally lacked everything, he selected an area among motley trees and, in the forested Guan Mountain where tigers and wolves prowled, created the a county seat, the county yamen, the magistrate’s residence, the Confucian temple and county school, the temple to Guan Di and the city god temple and so on – all the facilities that a county should have, and in addition he laid out the streets and lanes and the marketplace. All this he completed in his three year term, and the building of the county seat made fast progress . Moreover, “Of things there was no rash expenditure/Of men there was no exhaustion of labor”, and so the merit he achieved was very great, and he was praised by the times. Thus, the chancellor at the time, Shang Lu, wrote a “Record of building the county seat of Tangxi”, commemorating these matters.
Song Yue, because the county had been built for the first time and the county population was exhausted and he thought that “The people are the basis of the state, if the people are exhausted, then the basis is injured, so he memorialized requesting a reduction in taxes and corvée service for five years.” This reduction of money and grain tax and corvée service for five years, let the people of the county lighten their burdens and was a real benefit. This one measure, which undoubtedly augmented the group spirit of the people who originally belonged to the four counties and added to the new county cohesion with the people, was productive of a very good effect.
Soon after the establishment of Tangxi, the area produced a metropolitan graduate (jinshi) (under the examination system of those days, once every three years approximately three hundred men in the entire country were selected as metropolitan graduates), so this was an excellent event. Moreover, “Auspicious millet was produced in Qinyang (modern Xilizhou), one stem two ears, even eight or nine ears – one hundred such stems! The next year the garden behind the city offices also produced several tens of stems.” This sort of phenomenon where a single stalk produces two or several ears, was always seen as a good omen in our country’s olden days, and was a seldom occurring strange phenomenon.
These events all occurred during Song Yue’s administration, in which the harmonious atmosphere produced auspicious portents, which the people thought were brought forth by his virtuous administration as it had increased the marvelous atmosphere. Moreover, as an administrator he was honest and diligent , and when they were building the county seat “He wore a tattered robe and ate vegetarian food, he rose before dawn to oversee matters” and “he also decided cases intelligently, the court had no pending cases and there were no people wrongly incarcerated ”, and thus he gained the reverence and affection of the county’s people. Even during his lifetime they built a shrine to him and set up a tablet commemorating his “virtuous administration”. After his death, they also honored him as the city god, and further they set his birthday, the 16th of the fourth month as the day the city god makes his progress, and they hold the temple festival, which has carried through to the present - this is the origin of [what is today called] the “meeting for exchange” [the annual great market] on that day.
To die and then become a god is of course a sort of legend. But it can be compared to today’s way of setting up bronze statues or memorial hall to great and famous men in remembrance of them, which is of course a contemporary means of showing appreciation and commemorating excellence.
(The quotations used in this work derive from “Record of building the Tangxi county seat” and the Minister of the Board of Punishment Lu Yu’s “Record of the Tablet commemorating the virtuous administration of Lord Song”)
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