Travelogue of Xiangyang

On the last day of September, I drove more than 400 kilometers and arrived in Xiangyang after nearly five hours. I checked in the ancient city in the afternoon. Xiangyang Ancient City is located on the north bank of the Han River, surrounded by a moat on three sides. The opposite bank of the Han River is Fancheng. Because Xiangyang is adjacent to Nanyang, the local accent is similar to Henan dialect. This is where Guan Yu launched the Xiangfan campaign and flooded seven armies, shaking China. It is also where Guo Jing and Huang Rong in Jin Yong's novels died heroically. Since ancient times, it has been a hub of 'southbound boats and northbound horses, connecting seven provinces'. In the late Eastern Han Dynasty, Liu Biao, the governor of Jingzhou, moved the capital of Jingzhou to Xiangyang, and the ancient Jingzhou ticket gate still exists in the ancient city. Liu Biao ruled Jingzhou for nearly 20 years, with both grace and power, attracting people from all over the world. The next morning, after a bowl of Xiangyang beef noodles, I set off for Gulongzhong. Gulongzhong is located 15 kilometers west of Xiangyang City. It is where Zhuge Liang lived before he entered officialdom. You can still see the half-acre field under Wolonggang. Liu Bei visited the thatched cottage three times here, and Zhuge Liang put forward the famous 'Longzhong Plan'. In fact, Xiangyang and Nanyang have been competing for the 'land where Zhuge Liang ploughed' for a hundred years. Gu Jiaheng of the Qing Dynasty was from Xiangyang and was the prefect of Nanyang. The people of Nanyang asked him to prove that Wolonggang in Nanyang was Zhuge Liang's hiding place. Gu Jiaheng was quite embarrassed and wrote a couplet: 'The heart is in the Han Dynasty, there is no distinction between the former and the latter; the name is famous all over the world, why distinguish between Xiangyang and Nanyang'. In the Wuhou Temple, I saw the couplet written by Zhao Fan of the Qing Dynasty: 'If you can attack the heart, the rebellion will disappear by itself, knowing from the ancient times that soldiers are not fond of war; if you do not judge the situation, both leniency and strictness will be wrong, and the later management of Shu needs deep thought'. In the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Jianshu, the king of Xiang, saw that Longzhong was a geomantic treasure, so he destroyed Zhuge's thatched cottage, moved Longzhong Academy, and built his own mausoleum on the original site. The original wooden buildings and inscriptions were greatly damaged. Ironically, the tomb of King Xiang was later excavated by Li Zicheng at the end of the Ming Dynasty. Zhuge Liang came out of the mountain at the age of 27 and died of illness at the age of 54. In the first 27 years, he studied and made friends, accumulating and releasing; in the last 27 years, he worked hard until he died. Finally, let's use a couplet to commemorate Wuhou's life achievements: 'Collecting two Sichuan, arranging eight formations, six outings and seven captures, in front of Wuzhangyuan, lighting forty-nine lamps, all for the sake of three visits; taking West Shu, pacifying the southern barbarians, reconciling the east and resisting the north, in the middle of the army tent, changing the golden wood and earth lines, the water surface can use fire attack.'