It was the winter of 1984, because of the heavy snowstorm, I queued up for half a night after arriving at Nanjing Station, and I didn't buy a train ticket for the day, and the earliest train was three days later. There were seven or eight other passengers on hold with me at that time. One of them is a perennial practice stall in Chaotian Palace, this person's surname is Zhao, when he was a child, his father and mother did not take good care of it, and he gnawed on the toads in the field, and he had an abscess on his head. Now the pus is gone, and the sores are still there, so it has a vivid nickname: Zhao Toad.

I sat in the same carriage with him, and after chatting casually, I found out that each other was half a peer, and I gradually got acquainted with each other a lot. Zhao Toad, a typical Nanjing radish, is simple and easy to understand. When he saw that I didn't have a ticket, he invited me to stay in Nanjing for a few days. I didn't have too specific a goal, and since I couldn't buy a ticket, it would be a good idea to hang around in Jinling City for a few days, so I immediately took my backpack and went with him to the Chaotian Palace antique market.

The Chaotian Palace of that year was not like today's place that specialized in pouring antiques, that year Baixia District still belonged to the junction of urban and rural areas, and the Chaotian Palace was not much different from the temple fair, in addition to the antique stalls, there were more small traders selling clothes, shoes and hats, chickens, ducks, fruits and vegetables, and the fish and dragons were mixed. Zhao Toad's shop is on the street outside the market, and it rents a small single room in a private house.

His shop is ten square meters square, and there are many Western things in it, such as glass lamps, hookahs, Persian carpets, and marble statues. I said, "Are you doing antiques or decorating?" Zhao Toad laughed, and a cake face was about to catch up with the porcelain basin.

"You don't understand this, people nowadays are good at these foreign things, just change two pieces and put them at home, and put them when you look at them." Zhao Toad threw down his luggage, pointed to the big market outside and said, "Don't look at Chaotian Palace's excitement today, brother, I found a more unique place." I will take you to see and see at night, and I will applaud the safekeeping. ”

The place he said was the Confucius Temple, which was burned to the ground during the war of aggression against China. In the summer of 1983, the state decided to rebuild the Confucius Temple, which has achieved initial results, and many stores have been supported one after another. Zhao Toad touched his head and said that this place has unlimited business opportunities in the future, he went to the back door, asked his relatives to reserve a small shop, ready to occupy the right time and place, and when the Confucius Temple was on fire, that person naturally followed, and did not worry about no business to send to the door.

As for why I chose to go shopping at night, it was naturally for the moving night of Ten Miles of Qinhuai. Speaking of the Qinhuai River, it is also a famous joke case in feng shui. The Qinhuai River was originally a tributary of the Yangtze River, and the Huaishui River in ancient times was originally known as "Longzangpu". But what do you think, in ancient times, there was only one emperor who had anything to do with dragons. Legend has it that when Qin Shi Huang toured the east, he looked at the purple gas rising above Jinling, and he was very unhappy, he felt that the world was his, and the spirit of the king was also his. I heard that there is a river called "Longzangpu" here, and his beard was cocked at that time: your Jinling is not the imperial capital, and the second is not where the dragon veins are, why is it called "Longzangpu"! Isn't this a clear rebellion? I also met this kind of unreasonable lord of "book burning and pit Confucianism", who dared to argue with the mountains and rivers, and did not know where to find a team of people engaged in civil engineering, wreaked havoc near Jinling City, built illegal buildings indiscriminately, and smashed the Fangshan outside Jinling City into a dam, cutting off the source of Huai Shui. He also poured gold into the land in an attempt to seal the royal spirit of Jinling. Later generations mistakenly believed that this water was opened in the Qin period, so it was called "Qinhuai River".

However, history proves that "all reactionaries are paper tigers", and Qin Shi Huang's childish actions were only self-deception, and the Qin Dynasty was overthrown by a peasant uprising in the second dynasty. Jinling City became the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties later, and it was a treasure of feng shui that could not be stopped.