My girlfriend is a Miao demon.

"Hello, Mr. Jia. I am Xiang Nanfeng, a reporter from Wangshan Radio and Television Station. Our news channel is preparing to produce a documentary series recording the history of Wangshan City, so we need to gather some materials."

"I know that Loujia Village is an ancient village with a history of hundreds of years, and you are a highly respected elder of the Jia clan in Loujia Village. Xiao Dang, a courier from Jida Express, is a kind viewer of ours. He recommended you to us, so I would like to ask you a few questions about the history of Loujia Village. Is that convenient for you?"

"The history of Loujia Village? Convenient...convenient..."

"Hey... reporter, can my dad's interview be broadcast on TV?"

"Well... I'm just gathering information right now, so I can only say it's possible."

"Oh, okay, go ahead and ask. By the way, reporter, please speak louder! My dad is perfectly fine, he's just a little hard of hearing."

"Okay, no problem. I'll ask you then. Old Jia! I want to ask you about the history of Loujia Village. Just tell me whatever comes to mind. Don't be nervous, we won't record you. Just speak into this; it's a recording pen."

"Dad, you can speak to this one!"

"well."

"Old Jia, the main family of Loujia Village is Jia, so why isn't Loujia Village called Jiajia Village?"

"This is a long story. Our Jia family originally lived in Linli County in a neighboring province. During the Shunzhi era of the Qing Dynasty, the Lijiang River flooded, and our Jia family suffered disaster. We fled south and eventually arrived here. Since then, the Jia family has lived in Loujia Village."

"Loujia Village is a great place. You young people today can't see it because nobody farms anymore. Twenty or thirty years ago, among the villages within a ten-mile radius north of Nanshan Mountain, Loujia Village was the richest. Why was that?"

"Although our Loujia Village is located in a mountain valley in the south of the mountains, it faces a plain to the north, which is full of fertile fields. Now, the farmland is long gone, replaced by residential communities and suburban parks. But it wasn't like this before. During the busy farming season, we could farm, and during the off-season, we could go into the mountains to hunt."

"Putting aside other things, during the natural disasters of the 1950s and 60s, eight or nine out of ten people in the Wangshan area went hungry. But no one in our Loujia Village went hungry because we are backed by Shounan Mountain. Even if there was a crop failure, we could still have enough to eat by hunting in the mountains."

"Yes, Loujia Village is indeed a place blessed with good feng shui."

"Yes, that's right, reporter. You're absolutely right, that's the word, a place of great natural beauty! But that's where the problem lies. Isn't it strange? More than 300 years ago, when our Jia family's ancestors fled to this place during a famine, they found that such a good place was uninhabited. The fields and land were all barren and uncultivated."

"Is this area sparsely populated? Our Wangshan City only developed into a metropolis in the 1980s and 1990s. Even the central business district area was still farmland 20 years ago."

"Yes, you're right. This area is indeed mostly farmland, but it's not sparsely populated. There are people and fields in the surrounding villages, but those fields are clearly not as good as the fields in our Loujia Village. However, the people in the surrounding villages leave the good fields in Loujia Village unclaimed and let them lie fallow. Do you know why?"

"Then I don't know, Mr. Jia, why do you think so?"

"This is because of a local legend. It is said that several decades ago..."

"A few decades before the Shunzhi era, which was during the Ming Dynasty? The late Ming Dynasty."

"Yes, back then there was a manor in Shounan Mountain, and a wealthy family, the Lou family, lived in that manor."

"The Lou family? The Lou family from Loujia Village?"

"Yes. Legend has it that the Lou family's village was originally very wealthy, but for some reason, the villagers offended a thousand-year-old female demon in the Shounan Mountains. Later, the female demon used her magic to bring down a great plague. One after another, people in Lou family village fell ill with strange diseases, and soon all of them died."

"The Lou family had no way to cure them or stop the disease, but they couldn't just wait to die in the village, so they wanted to flee. But where could they flee to?"

"The only option is to escape out of the mountains."

"But this female demon's magic was extremely powerful. The Lou family fled, dying one after another. The last group finally escaped from Shounan Mountain, but they all died as soon as they reached the mountain pass; not a single one was left. Later, a wandering monk came. It was this monk who said that the Lou family, who had been wiped out, had angered the female demon in the mountain. The monk said that a way had to be found to subdue the female demon, otherwise she would surely come out of the mountain and harm the area, killing even more people. So, the devout men and women from the surrounding villages donated money to build a temple for their own safety."

"Besides, the Lou family all died at the foot of the mountain, so their bodies couldn't be left unattended, especially since they died of plague. So the government later sent people to dig a large pit and build a large tomb for them. The place where they were buried became known as the Lou Family Tomb by the surrounding people."

"So, in other words, there was never any Loujia Village to begin with, only Loujia Tomb?"

"Yes, that's the gist of it. This place originally had no village, just ravines and farmland, and nobody lived in the ravines. Only the Lou family members who escaped the mountain pass died in the ravines, and the government buried their bodies on the spot—that's the Lou family cemetery. And the farmland of Lou family village originally belonged to four surrounding villages—Donglikan, Shuijiawan, Shitanji, and one…and another called…"

"Dad, there's also Fupo Village."

"Yes, yes. Fupo, Fupo Village. Apart from Donglikan, the other three are gone now. Fupo Village still existed when I was a child, but it was burned down by the Japanese invaders in 1938. All the land that our Jia family owned originally belonged to these four villages, especially Shuijiawan, where we owned the most land."

"Then how did this land become the Jia family's?"

"It's all because of the Lou family."

"All the people from the Lou family who escaped died in this ravine. At that time, not only the Lou family members died, but people from the four surrounding villages also died."

"Later, the whole of Xiyang County knew about the female demon killing people and the plague in Nanshan. The villagers in the surrounding four villages were so afraid that they didn't dare to go this way. They were either afraid of being mistaken for members of the Lou family by the female demon and having their lives taken, or they were afraid of contracting the plague and dying. So no one dared to cultivate the fields near the ravines. Over time, the fields were abandoned and became unclaimed wasteland. Later, our Jia family's ancestor fled to this place to escape the famine."

"People fleeing famine were going to die anyway, so who cared about legends from decades ago? So they took over these abandoned wastelands and built houses in the ravines."

"So, the village in Loujiafen Valley has always belonged to the Jia family? And it should be called Jiajia Village?"

"Yes. That's how we in the Jia family believe it. But no matter who gives a name, it's only useful when someone else calls it by it."

"Of course, we Jia family wanted to call it Jiajia Village, but the four surrounding villages didn't want that. When we first fled here, the ditches we occupied were burial grounds, and the land we cultivated was land where people had died. Although that land used to belong to those four villages, it had become wasteland after decades of no one cultivating it. It was our old Jia family that reclaimed the land and restored it."

"But once we had cultivated the land, built the houses, and planted the crops, the four surrounding villages saw that no one had died in our village. They took advantage of us being outsiders and started causing trouble."

"This disturbance lasted for decades. Every few days, they would bring people to cause trouble, and every few days they would gather dozens or even hundreds of people to beat us up. Of course, they also filed complaints, all the way from the Xiyang County government to the provincial governor's office. But when they fought, although I was outnumbered and suffered losses, they didn't gain anything either. Sometimes we could even fight back. As for the complaints, they had no grounds to appeal, and they never won any cases."

"Later, a scholar who passed the imperial examination came from our village. He was my great-grandfather."

"Great-grandfather?"

"Yes. My great-grandfather, Jia Lingfeng, served as magistrate of Huzhou and Hubei provinces three times during the Qianlong era, and rose to the rank of fifth-grade official in the Ministry of Rites during the Jiaqing era."

"Now that our Jia family has connections in the imperial court, the four surrounding villages dare not cause any more trouble, and we can finally establish ourselves in Loujiafen. However, although the surrounding villages and towns dare not cause any more trouble, they are still resentful. So they never call our village Jiajia Village; they just call it Loujiafen or Loujiafen Village."

"Later, during the reigns of Emperors Qianlong and Jiaqing, when my great-grandfather Jia Lingfeng was in charge, our old Jia family always referred to ourselves as people from Jiajia Village. But then a visiting Taoist priest came and said that the place called Loujia Tomb was too yin, and that the dead Lou family had shielded us from the evil spirits. We absolutely could not turn the tables. Not only could we not change the name to Jiajia Village, but we should also repair and guard the tombs of the Lou family who died more than a hundred years ago. In this way, the Lou family could continue to shield us from the evil spirits and protect our Jia family descendants for generations to come."

"Do you see the land at No. 27 Lounan and No. 27 Lounanjia in Loujia Village now? When you go to Loujia Village again, you can walk around and look for it. Just stand in that ravine in Loujia Village and look for it. No matter where you are, as long as there are no houses blocking your view, you will definitely be able to see that flat land, because that flat land is naturally higher, obviously five or six meters higher than the surrounding area. When our Jia family arrived, that place was a dilapidated temple. According to legend, it was the temple that was built to suppress the female demon."

"By the time of the Qianlong Emperor, the temple had long since collapsed and become a ruin. Our ancestor, Jia Lingfeng, believed the Taoist priest's words and cleared the ruins, building three small courtyards, each with three rooms facing north."

"Two of the courtyards were ancestral halls. One courtyard housed the memorial tablets of the Lou family members who died more than a hundred years ago, and the other courtyard was a small temple that enshrined the legendary thousand-year-old female demon. The other courtyard was used as the ancestral hall of our Jia family. There were these three courtyards when I was a child, and I visited them all."

"The three courtyards are all the same in structure. They all have a southeast entrance, a Kan house with a Xun gate, and the middle room is used to place the memorial tablet. The two rooms on the sides are actually empty rooms used to store some miscellaneous items."

"Those three courtyards are gone now, right?"

"Yes, those three courtyards are long gone. In the autumn of 1948, a big fire broke out in the village. It just so happened that the wind was very strong in the valley that day, and half of the village was burned down, including those three courtyards."

"After the fire, by the autumn of 1949, the houses that had been burned down were gradually rebuilt. But then in 1950, our area was liberated. Although the ancestral hall and the like were rebuilt, the memorial tablets and the like hadn't been made yet. Several of my uncles and cousins ​​had joined the revolution and the Party before liberation. When they returned to the village, they said they wanted to set up a Party branch and needed a place, so they occupied those rooms first."

"Later, the brigade headquarters was established in that place. Then in the 1980s, the brigade headquarters was changed to the village committee. The area there was too small and not enough, so I swapped it with my cousin's second son. His family had a larger plot of land, but the brigade headquarters was located on high ground, which was the best location in Loujia Village, so we swapped it."

"If you look at Lou Nan No. 27 and Lou Nan Jia No. 27 now, they belong to their two sons. They separated their family and split it into two addresses."

"Old Jia, that's amazing! Amazing! How do you remember such detailed village and family histories so clearly? Besides the ones you personally experienced later, were all the stories from the Qing Dynasty passed down orally within the Jia family?"

"No. It's my great-grandfather, the old patriarch Jia Lingfeng. He wrote a notebook, and these are all in the notebook."

"That notebook? Was it published?"

"No, no. There is only one manuscript, which he wrote himself. I remember it was written in the fifth year of Jiaqing's reign."

"This notebook was originally kept in the Jia Clan Ancestral Hall at No. 27 Lounan. It was thread-bound, written in small regular script, and very neatly. I remember there were twenty or thirty pages in total. The text was on white cotton paper, the cover was made of leather paper, and there was a Song brocade cloth cover. It was very beautiful."

"When I was little, every year on the sixth day of the sixth lunar month, my father would take out his books and put them in the sun to dry. Unfortunately, they were all burned to the ground in the fire of 1939."

"I see, that's such a pity."

"Yes, reporter, my father has always hoped that the descendants of the Jia family could understand this history. Before his generation, many elderly people had heard these legends and stories, but there were very few people who knew as much as my father."

"After all, the overall cultural level of the Jia family was relatively low at that time, and most people listened and then forgot about it."

"After my father, our generation lived through the 1960s and 70s, when people generally looked down on traditional things. After that, nobody even knew about them anymore. So if possible, I especially hope that this interview with the reporter can be used."

"Okay, I'll do my best to make it. But when I get back today, I'll definitely cut out the content of our conversation and send it to you. You can also keep an audio file."

"Okay, that's great."

"Well, Mr. Jia, I have two last questions. You've been saying there's no Loujia Village, only Loujia Tomb. Is Loujia Tomb located inside the walled city between Loujia Village South Road and Loujia Village North Road? That is, No. 93 Loubei?"

"How...how did you know?"

"I...hehe, I was just guessing."

"This...yes, that's the place. It's inside that wall."

"Um...Mr. Jia, if I may ask, have you ever been inside the Lou Family Cemetery? Oh, I mean, have you ever been inside the walled city?"

"Of course not. Who would deliberately go into a cemetery and step on someone's grave? It's bad luck!"

"You mean, inside the walled city of Loujia Village is a burial mound?"

"I think so. What else could it be but a grave mound?"

"Have you seen that grave mound? Or has anyone seen it with their own eyes?"

"Saw it with your own eyes? You must have seen it, let me think... 1953, oh no, 1952... many people must have seen it when the wall was repaired for the last time in 1952. Yan Ping, you must have seen it too, right?"

"Yes, I was twelve years old that year. I climbed up to play when my fourth uncle and the others were building the wall."

"To the reporter, there's nothing special about it. It's just a grave mound covered in grass. The Lou family grave was first repaired during the Jiaqing era, around the time my father mentioned our ancestor Jia Lingfeng, and then it was repaired for the last time in 1952. It was probably repaired three or four times in between?"

"The inner wall remains unchanged. Instead, rammed earth is built from the outside, and then another layer is added. This new layer is always higher than the inner one, that's how it is."

"Did you see the grave mound directly? Or was it covered by weeds or something? I mean, were there any fallen leaves inside the walled area?"

"Fallen leaves...fallen leaves...oh, yes! There really are fallen leaves. To be honest, I haven't directly seen the grave mound. Dad, have you seen it?"

"I may not have seen it; I probably wasn't in Loujia Village during the renovation in 1952."

"Reporter, there are fallen leaves, is there a problem?"

"No, no problem. Mr. Jia, do you recall any changes to the residential land near Loujia Tomb since the renovation in 1952? For example, have any particularly tall trees been planted around Loujia Tomb? Or were there trees there before, but they were later cut down?"

"A particularly tall tree?"

"Yes, it's even higher than the besieged city."

"Impossible, impossible, that's absolutely impossible."

"There are rules about planting trees in front of graves. What kind of trees can be planted, what kind of trees cannot be planted, what kind of places can be planted, and what kind of places cannot be planted. But no matter what kind of tree you plant or where you plant it, the tree must not be too big. If the tree is big, the roots will be big, and big roots will easily grow into the grave. This is called 'grave piercing heart evil,' which is a major taboo."

"You might say that people nowadays don't care much about these things, but the older generation knew that. In the past, it was absolutely impossible to plant big trees around the area. Even if you did plant them, you would have to cut them down before they grew tall."

"Oh, that makes sense, that makes sense. Elder Jia, I have one last question. Did the old patriarch's notes mention how the thousand-year-old female demon in Shounan Mountain killed the Lou family? Why do the legends say it was the female demon who killed them, and also that it was the plague? So how did the Lou family actually die? Were they killed by the female demon or by the plague?"

"This... let me think... let me think... Oh, I'm sorry, reporter, I really can't remember. Maybe it wasn't written in the old patriarch's notes, or maybe I just forgot. But... but I remember there's an old folk song around Shounan Mountain. I don't know if it's related to this."

"Folk songs? Mr. Jia, what kind of folk songs?"

"Yes, this folk song is so old. I remember my grandma singing it to me when I was little. I only remember one line: 'A tree without roots cannot be broken, for if it is broken, it will not die; water without a source cannot be drunk, for if it is drunk, one will not live.'"

"A tree without roots cannot be broken, for if broken, it will not die; water without a source cannot be drunk, for if drunk, it will not make one live. What does this mean? What is a tree without roots, and what is water without a source?"

"I can't really explain the specific meaning, and I don't know what a tree without roots is, but I know there's a widely circulated saying in the Shounan Mountain area that's related to this 'water without a source'."

"Oh? What kind of custom is that?"

"You see, the water in Nanshan is of exceptionally good quality. But we only drink stream water and spring water; we don't drink other water because it's said that other water is poisonous and will cause plague if you drink it. Not only do people not drink it, but the older generation also doesn't allow their sheep to drink the mountain water when they go into the mountains to graze. This is not only a custom in our Loujia Village, but also in the neighboring Yongjia Village, Lile Village, and Donglikan."

"I don't know if this custom is related to the thousand-year-old female demon and the plague mentioned in the old patriarch's notes, but when you mentioned the plague just now, I thought of this folk song."

"You're absolutely right, Mr. Jia. I'm sure there's a connection! But you just said that we can drink stream water and spring water, but other water is poisonous and carries disease. So, besides stream water and spring water, what other types of water are there?"

"And...and there's a pool of water!"