Tang Xianzu, Du Liniang, and the Four Dreams of Linchuan
Du Liniang dreams of the scholar Liu Mengmei, dies of longing, and returns to life. Tang Xianzu’s other three “dreams” turn love, power, and ambition into different stories.
Fuzhou.
Fuzhou stands on the Fu River, which runs north from the city and joins the Litan, Yihuang and Chongren rivers before entering Poyang Lake. It was Linchuan commandery in the Three Kingdoms and Linchuan prefecture under the Ming, and its name changed to Fuzhou in the fourteenth century. Two things pull readers here: the playwright Tang Xianzu, who went home to write, and Liukeng, a village of more than a thousand households with a market street and two hundred and fifty Qing buildings still standing.
Fuzhou
A market of a thousand households
Liukeng was a working market town, not a museum, and the streets still work as streets.
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Red rock above Zixi
Dajueshan is a Danxia mountain in the far east of Jiangxi, where a monastery sits among red cliffs.
ReadPlaces
Tang Xianzu
The playwright of 1550 to 1616 whose four plays are all about dreams, and the town he retired to.
Liukeng Village
A market village of 1,280 households on the Niutian River, with two hundred and fifty Qing buildings still standing.
Dajueshan
A 1,396-metre red-rock mountain on the western foot of the Wuyi range in Zixi county.
Photo credits and rights
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Gray-brick houses in Liukeng, Le’an County, line the water below low wooded hills.Symane — 流坑.jpg / CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported · CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ Converted proportionally to WebP for display and thumbnail; no cropping, retouching or upscaling. The image retains the source license.
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The monorail crosses a forested slope at the Dajueshan project in Zixi.Hong Zhang, Pengjiao Wang, Qin Li, Junhui Jin, Shiqi Wei, Fengqi Guo, Cheng Feng, and Qun Deng — Buildings 2024, 14, 3111, Figure 2(a) / CC BY 4.0 · CC BY 4.0 Photo source ↗ Rights information ↗ The eight native image strips of Figure 2(a) in the source PDF were reassembled in order. Converted proportionally to WebP for display and thumbnail; no cropping, retouching or upscaling. The image retains the source license.
