Xinghua Village: a place kept alive by a poem

The Chizhou Municipal Culture and Tourism Bureau presents Xinghua Village as the place made famous by Du Mu’s Qingming poem, written when he served as governor of Chizhou. This association has become part of the village’s local identity: the poem gives the place a name familiar far beyond the city, while later histories trace how residents and institutions kept that literary memory alive.

Local scholar Lang Sui compiled the twelve-volume Xinghua Village Gazetteer. The General Catalogue of the Siku Quanshu records it in volume 77, in the geography section's cunmu list of works noted but not included in the collection. The catalogue's compilers questioned treating the poem as proof of one particular village. They also described Lang Sui's record of local sites, buildings, people and literature. A poem lets a name travel in a few lines; a gazetteer gives that place a longer, and sometimes contested, account.

The tourism bureau lists Huai Du Pavilion, Qinglian Hall, a Buddhist art hall, a poetry terrace, Huang Gong wine workshop and a corridor associated with the Six Dynasties. These are contemporary spaces for encountering the village’s literary identity. Their names arrange the local story into a sequence of references, giving visitors several points from which to approach the poem and the place attached to it.

In 2026, Chizhou's municipal news report described pupils from Xinghua Village Primary School reciting Du Mu's poem at Huai Du Pavilion during a reading event. This is a documented present-day action: schoolchildren, a pavilion and a familiar text brought together in public. The poem is not only a historical claim about where Du Mu stood; it is also something a new generation learns aloud. In that sense, the village's strongest link to literature is renewed whenever the lines are read and the place is named with them.