West of Jia village, about two kilometres from the Hongtong county seat, a park is laid out around a tree. The tree in the story is a tall locust of the Han period that stood beside the Guangji Temple, with the post road running north to south under its branches; at the temple, the account says, officials arranged the departing households in order, issued their papers and gave them money for the road. That is the scene the park keeps. The county seat itself is in Dahuaishu town, the town named after the great locust tree, so the name on the map is the name of the story. The site is a national 5A scenic area and a protected site of Shanxi province.
From the journal
The Pagoda Tree at Hongtong and the Migration Story
The tree, the park and the Ming migration: what the old records list, what the folk rhyme says, and how a county seat came to be named after a locust tree.
In the same city · Linfen ↗The tree and the courtyard
What the records say about the migration
The migration itself is documented. Drawing on the History of Ming, the Veritable Records and other texts, the record counts eighteen movements of people out of Shanxi between 1373, the sixth year of Hongwu, and 1417, the fifteenth of Yongle: ten under Hongwu and eight under Yongle, inside fifty years. The destinations are listed widely - Zhili, Henan, Shandong, the southern capital region, Hubei, Shaanxi, Gansu, Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang - and are said to touch more than five hundred prefectures and counties. The English account of Hongtong County also ties the tree to the resettlement campaigns of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors, and records that many migrants assembled at the great locust tree here.
A place people still travel to
What the park holds now is a ritual rather than a record. People come to leave messages for their ancestors, and the Qingming festival brings large gatherings; the record speaks of more than a million visitors a year. A rhyme travels with them: 'Ask me where my old home is - Shanxi, Hongtong, the great locust tree. And what was the ancestral house called? The old crow's nest in the locust tree.' It is a couplet learned by heart in many families across the north, and it does work the documents cannot, carrying a place name into households that have not seen the place for centuries. The tree, the temple and the park are its fixed points.