Hong'an and the town behind Border Town

Hong'an lies 47 kilometres from the Xiushan county seat, at the point where Chongqing, Hunan and Guizhou meet, and the point has a building on it: the Pavilion Where the Rooster Crows in Three Provinces. The town has changed hands in the ordinary way of border country. It was a Guizhou village called Guizhou Tang, transferred to Xiushan in 1946, in the years when the two provinces were swapping hamlets along this line, and the river in front of it is the reason the border runs where it does. Xiushan sits on the edge of the Miao country, in the middle Wuling, and Hong'an keeps the street, the ferry landing and the stone steps that a river town needs.

Border Town is a novella by Shen Congwen, serialised in the Tianjin weekly Guowen Zhoubao from 1 January 1934. It ran for four instalments, stopped, resumed on 12 March and ended on 23 April, eleven parts in all. The story is set in Chadong, a river town on the Hunan-Sichuan border, and follows Cuicui, the granddaughter of an old ferryman, who lives with him and a yellow dog. Two brothers, Tianbao and Nuosong, both love her; Tianbao drowns, Nuosong leaves for Taoyuan, the grandfather dies in a thunderstorm, and Cuicui waits. Shen said the book was to express a form of life that is beautiful, healthy and natural and does not go against human nature.

The literary question is straightforward and cannot be closed. The novel names Chadong, which is on the Hunan bank; Xiushan says Hong'an, on the Chongqing bank, is the model, and says so with the qualifier that it is reported rather than proved. Both towns sit on the same reach of the same river, and the ferry, the street and the pavilion are shared geography. What the novel fixed was not a map reference but a set of sounds: water against a boat, a dog on the bank, a girl calling across. A town that borrows that atmosphere is borrowing something it already had. The border is the only thing in the story that is exactly where the book says it is.