Travel Aroud LiYe

Liye is an ancient town in the southwest of Hunan province and nearby Chongqing. It is famous for culture relic from Qin dynasty. The culture relic is called "Qin Jian". If you are familiar with the Chinese history and traditional culture, maybe you know Qin dynasty was a powerful country in 221 B.C. when the first emperor of Qin unified China. "Jian" means letter or article or diary, it was written by knife on the bamboo paper. That's an earlier implement for writing in China. "Qin Jian" recorded the great amount of historic materials to help us research the Qin dynasty history.

In Apr 11, my wife and I visited Liye with my colleagues. At first we went to the Xiushan which is a small city in ChongQing by train, then arrived at Liye by bus in the evening. It was not dark. After supper dinner, we couldn't wait to visit the ancient relics of "Qin Jian". However, it had became the ruins. Nothing was left because all "Qin Jian" were collected by government and were moved into the museum to protect properly. To attract more visitors, the local government was going to build the museum. But now it was only plan.

We were all depress. Fortunately, the town's buildings were decorated in the traditional style and showed the beautiful scenery. We walked through the streets in the night, experienced the feeling of stranger suddenly. In fact the scenery here was nearly similar as my hometown.

Next day, we went to a small town called "Xichehe", the English meaning is the river where some guys washed the wagons. As tourist guide said, the origin of the name was from a legend. It said that one man was back to hometown through by Xichehe driving a wagon. When he arrived here, the horse lose the man's control suddenly and rushed into the river so that the wagon was fell into the river. After the horse drank the water of the river, it was back to normal and pulled the wagon following its master's order again.

Maybe the legend painted some mysterious colors for us, but this small town is really old, broken and dirty. We were all disappointment especially me, because the scenery here was same as my home country several decades ago.

It is the area where the minorities located around Liye such as Miao, Tujia. So the custom of their life and the style of their building are different from ours. In that afternoon, we went to the village which is belong to the indigenous citizen of Tujia minority. They were all warm and hospitable. They took their wine produced by themselves and invited us to their home. They are all good at dancing and singing. After lunch dinner, they performed many exciting dance for us. It was great.

The travel time was too short, we had to be back. Although the scenery there is not beautiful, but a lot of thing during this travel gave me deep impression still.