An academy on a rock in the river

Shigu Academy stands on Shigu Hill, a small stone height in the north of Hengyang where the Zheng, Xiang and Lei rivers meet, ringed by water on three sides. The hill takes its name from its drum-like shape, one account, from the water classic of Li Daoyuan, says the rock is round and pure stone with no soil, and another says the waves beating on the stone sound like a drum. The compound is arranged around its halls: the Yubei stele pavilion with its tadpole-script tablet, the shrine to Zhuge Liang, the shrine to the loyal Li Fu, the Great View Tower with its library, the Hejiang Pavilion where the rivers join, and the Zhuling rear cave. The Hejiang Pavilion, raised in the late eighth century by a prefect, carries the view over the meeting of the waters, the place the poet Han Yu described when he stopped here on his way into exile, and where Du Fu twice moored his boat. The academy, in other words, grew up on a piece of rock that the rivers had already made famous.

The academy began in 810, when a man named Li Kuan built a study beside the Hejiang Pavilion and called it the Xunzhen Guan, a private reading room that became the kernel of the school. In the Song the court twice conferred a name-plaque on it, in 977 and 1035, and it rose to stand with the Yuelu, Bailudong and Suiyang academies as one of the four great schools, actually the earliest of them by the record, older than Bailudong by over a century and Yuelu by a century and a half. Zhu Xi and Zhang Shi lectured here, and Zhou Dunyi and Su Shi are counted among those who taught or visited, so the rock became a stage for the Neo-Confucian learning of the south. The school had its mountain chiefs, men like Dai Xi and Cheng Xun, who taught the Analects and the learning of Zhu Xi. It taught for more than a thousand years, until in 1902 it was turned into a modern school, and the academy that had trained so many scholars of Hunan passed into the new system.

In 1939 Japanese aircraft bombed Hengyang, and Shigu Academy was reduced to rubble, with only some fifty inscribed steles left standing. During the defence of Hengyang in 1944 the nationalist army used the hill as a position and sank the remaining steles into the Xiang to save them, and they were recovered in 1960 and set under a shelter, only to be destroyed later in the Cultural Revolution. In 1964 a provincial official ordered the academy restored, but the times allowed only a small park on the ruins. The full rebuilding came later: in 2006 the city decided to reconstruct the academy on its Qing-dynasty layout, and in 2007 the finished compound opened to visitors. Today the rebuilt halls again face the river, and the academy hosts events such as the old brush-opening ceremony for schoolchildren, held for two hundred children in Han dress, and gatherings of local scholars, a place of learning restored after the war took it away. The rebuilt compound follows the Qing layout, and the academy's seven worthies, from its founder Li Kuan through Han Yu, Zhou Dunyi, Zhu Xi and Zhang Shi, are again honoured in its hall.