Dear friends: Good evening!

I didn't expect to face such a grand and crowded scene tonight. I thank you for your kindness, but I know very well that you are here primarily because of the question: What is the person who takes up so much of our reading time? When this kind of doubt becomes a face-to-face intuition, it is a great threat to any author. For this reason, the witty Mr. Qian Zhongshu simply refused: "You just eat the eggs and think it's good, why do you have to look at the chicken that lays this egg?" "I obviously couldn't hide this time, and I inevitably felt a fear in my heart that the impressions that people had accumulated in reading would be ruined, just like one of my students told me about an emotional experience: a year of correspondence was in full swing before we met, and it disappeared within an hour of meeting.

The partition above our heads has already written the title of tonight's talk – travel and literature. This topic is a broad scope that the generous organizers have set for me, and if it is really used as an actual speech topic, it will seem a little bigger. Within this boundary, I pondered the specific questions that people might ask me, such as, "As a scholar, what motivates you to become a perpetual traveler?" ”

My answer is: look for cultural scenes.

Okay, so let's take this answer as the specific topic of today's talk.

What is a cultural scene

Any cultural phenomenon worthy of our attention will always have an amplitude of diffusion. At first glance, it is always a good thing to spread, and if it spreads more widely and for a longer time, it can enhance the value of a culture, so that it can be tested in a larger range of time and space, and constantly adjust and improve itself, so what's wrong with that?

There is a downside. After a long distance and a long period of transmission, a culture is often deformed and distorted, from concrete to abstract, from living to specimen, from polyhedron to monohedron, and sometimes even beyond recognition, making it impossible to imagine what it is. At this point, it may still bear its original name, which creates confusion about the concept of culture. It is true that all cultural phenomena will change, but no matter how much a conscious cultural phenomenon changes, it will not completely lose its memory of its own initial state, because the initial state is the basic reason for the emergence of this culture in the world. In addition to the initial state, any culture will also have some central places and central periods where it has developed most maturely and thoroughly, where the essence of this culture is vividly displayed. However, it is a great tragedy that the initial state, central place and central time of many cultural phenomena have been obliviable due to the widespread diffusion, and people seem to be enjoying various cultures without knowing their true flavor.

In life, we must have this experience: there are many things that we are immersed in, and after listening to others relay it several times, we feel that it has changed its taste, and some of the things that have changed can be pointed out and corrected, and some can only be understood but not spoken, and it is very difficult to point it out clearly. This is the serious gap between the text of communication and the actual experience.

Unfortunately, most of our cultural thinking is carried out in communication texts, where information is absorbed, where judgment and comparison, and finally, if there is a decent result, this result is put into the communication system. How many mistakes, how many fallacies, how many conjectures, how many self-righteousness, how many falsehoods, only God knows. This problem is especially true of Chinese culture. The imperial examination system for more than 1,000 years has greatly increased the ranks of Chinese cultural people, and this team has forever walked a long distance of seeking official positions by memorizing ancient books, which has become the most common mode of operation and consumption of Chinese culture. A small number of cultural people were fortunate enough to ascend to official positions from this long distance, and later they were up and down in the ups and downs of the Huan Sea, although it is possible that they may travel thousands of miles due to political degradement, but they have basically nothing to do with cultural investigation. Only a very small number of scholars have experienced all this, or have seen through all this, and have devoted themselves to academics, but most of them can only go from ancient books to ancient books, from text to text, that is, they are only doing the work of "halfway relay", and it is difficult to get to the bottom of the problem and get to the source.

The cultural scene I am talking about is in response to this situation. I believe that in this world, all kinds of living cultures must find one or two spaces that correspond most closely to themselves, and in these spaces, no matter what is still happening or has happened, people will experience the charm and meaning of those cultures as a whole with a large number of perceptual factors, and complement and correct each other with the written records, which is the cultural scene. As a cultural person, when you still have enough leg strength, you should try to visit as many places as possible.

That's the basic motivation for me to travel the world. That is, it is mainly for the purpose of changing a way of thinking about culture, not for the sake of travelogue writing, which is just a by-product. Later, due to the popularity of readers, the by-product was upgraded, and I became serious, which is a later matter.

Direct on-site

There are simple and complex cultural scenes. A simple site can be called a direct site, and a complex site can be called an indirect site.

The direct scene is the direct place where a culture takes place, and it is still happening, as long as you are immersed in the scene and really feel it, you can grasp the pulse of this culture. It seems that this is the starting point for cultural investigation, but even at this point it is often problematic.

Let's start with an example of extremism. Two years ago, I was shocked to see an introduction to Singaporean theatre in an official publication. The works and characters mentioned in the introduction are very unfamiliar to me, which can't help but make me a little flustered, because I have been to Singapore many times, lived for a long time, and every time I give lectures to the theater industry there, participate in their various activities and discussions, and the Singapore theater industry is not big, I think I have long been familiar with every group and every individual in it, not to mention that a Singaporean graduate student once studied for a doctorate under my supervision, and his dissertation is precisely "On the History of Singapore Theatre". And I didn't know the basics of what was written in that Singapore Drama Fact Sheet! It eventually became clear that the author of that publication had made a mistake. He had never been to Singapore, but had just pieced together the introduction from the occasional magazine article that had been an exaggerated compliment by a few Singaporean friends to two amateur theater lovers in their circle. This is a mistake that anyone who has even the slightest contact with the Singapore theatre scene can point out. This shows that the scene gives people a kind of overall sequence, and the text, even if it is really "black and white", is often an accidental fragment, and it is difficult to explain anything without the overall sequence. We used to think that only words have the generality and logic to grasp the overall situation, but in fact, this is not necessarily the case. Although this is an extreme example, it can illustrate a lot.

Under normal circumstances, if we calmly look around, we will always find a large number of ambiguous judgments made because we have not been able to go deep into the cultural scene surround us, and over time, ambiguous judgments will rise to definitive judgments and spread to others. As a matter of fact, when I came to the scene in Taiwan, I learned that a very good part of Taiwan's entrepreneurs may not have visited the mainland, and the substantive ties between Taiwan's cultural circles and the mainland may be even more fragmented, so the Taiwan people in their minds are basically inaccurate, although it is true in a small part. In the same way, I have found that many of our friends in Taiwan have a lot of assumptions of reasoning in their judgments on many aspects of social life on the mainland, and even if there is some temporary and partial basis, there is still a big distance from the correct cultural judgment. A large number of petals can't be spliced into a living flower, and a lot of accurate long-distance information is also close to the end of the world with the living truth. The big things are put aside for the time being, the smallest example is actually the same, and a small example that comes easily is myself, Hong Kong and Taiwan newspapers have published some rumors about me, my past, my today, and my future, all of which are very interesting. Many Taiwanese friends were skeptical when they saw it and frequently asked me, but friends in the mainland basically did not believe it, and this is the difference in life.

It can be seen that the direct scene is also a clear and unmistakable spatial orientation, and only this spatial orientation can provide a series of comprehensive information full of vitality to confirm or deny the possibility, rationality and trajectory of various facts, which is difficult to be replaced by the outside. Doesn't it mean that the petals can't be spliced together to create a living flower, the life of a living flower lies in its rooting point on the earth.

From the small to the big, the estrangement and communication between different cultural communities in the world is also an opportunity to go deep into the cultural scene with each other. Xuanzang's visit to India to learn scriptures seems to focus on Buddhist scriptures, but in fact, it is more important to go deep into such an important cultural scene as the place where Buddhism took place, which makes all Buddhist texts have sufficient maternal basis. In the eighteenth century, when the Chinese civilization and the European civilization finally met on a large scale, they did not understand each other, but in contrast, Europe was more active and more advanced in the in-depth development of the Chinese cultural scene, which can be understood by reading the correspondence left by the French Jesuit missionaries and the diary left by the British Magalny, so they were much more advantageous in the collision of the two civilizations later, while the Chinese side, the understanding of Europe has long been in the state of "seafarers talking about Yingzhou". Just relying on ridiculous conjectures and inferences to negotiate with the other party, it is natural to be passive everywhere, and there are many jokes.

Even within the same country, many historical struggles have been caused by the distribution of power, but many have also been caused by differences in cultural and psychological orientations. In order to get a clear understanding of cultural and psychological positions, we can rely on the eloquence of the columnists and the enlightenment of conscience by the sexualists, but in my opinion, it is more important to observe each other's ecological positions and go deep into each other's cultural and psychological scenes. It seems that this point has not been taken so seriously, which is a pity. The common situation is that after only learning some sporadic information about the other party, and hearing a bunch of rumors that cannot be confirmed, they are already furious, and they start to fight each other, and then they punch and kick each other, and as for what the other party thinks, and what is the environmental basis for these ideas, they have never put themselves in their shoes. This kind of scene is like the old drama "Three Forks", on the night when you can't see your fingers, you haven't seen each other's faces clearly at all, and you have figured out each other's routines, and they are already in full swing and out of breath. How much a light is needed at this time to illuminate all aspects.

To find the cultural scene is to look for the lamp that can illuminate each other, illuminate the environment, and thus illuminate one's own attitude. A little more of this kind of search will lead to less blindness of history and less useless consumption.

Indirect on-site

Indirect scene refers to a sub-scene where the incident has passed and the location is relatively generalized. For a country with a long history, many important cultural phenomena still remain, but their key outbreak period has come to an end, and the scene of the past outbreak is full of smoke and traces. Of course, we can't catch up with the explosion of all cultures, so why not settle for the next best thing and visit the site of the ruins. Sometimes, this kind of site is also uncertain in terms of location, maybe it is just a historical scenario of similarity and possibility, and distant time obscures everything, but even so, it is necessary to visit.

It is precisely this kind of scene that I have walked the most over the years. Some people may say that there are already so many direct sites worth visiting, so why do you want to go to the ethereal indirect sites in the open air? Some even believe that visiting the indirect scene is an avoidance of real troubles, and perhaps a safe survival strategy. It's all a misconception. In my opinion, while the direct site is important, the indirect site also has a series of places that go beyond the direct site.

First, the indirect site does not emphasize the direct occurrence of the here and now, so it can provide historical and cultural resources from different eras. These historical and cultural resources are essential for the creation of a magnificent and profound cultural personality. Therefore, it may be said that to look for such a cultural scene is to find a school of personality that spans thousands of years. History is not just a subject in middle school and university, but a background that cannot be escaped, a kind of heredity that cannot be resisted, and the mission of cultural people is to consciously help themselves and others to sort out this background and heredity, and strive to make them optimize their choices to achieve a healthy combination. All this, it is not enough to look for resources in the cultural facts that are happening today, we must turn back and visit the millennium. Where is the millennium? In the vast land, you can use space to make up for time. This space, which can be exchanged for time, is what we call an indirect scene, that is, a complex scene. A person's historical and cultural literacy depends to a large extent on the fact that he has been dissolved by such a cultural scene.

Second, most of the indirect sites are already in a state of "people going to empty buildings", which not only gives us a lot of information, but also gives us a lot of blanks and questions, which can stimulate our cultural curiosity to explore and research, and make us change from a tourist and interviewer to a thinker and seeker. Therefore, all indirect scenes are also scenes of questioning and thinking. The questions and reflections on the scene will drive us to read a lot of books and ask a lot of questions, which will lead to a profound academic process. In contrast, the direct site is often the end point of an academic process, while the indirect field is often the beginning of an academic process. A sensual temptation that opens up a rational process is a very attractive thing to do.

I can illustrate this based on some personal experience.

Three years ago, I went to Shanxi for an investigation. Before I went, I already knew from some literature that Shanxi merchants had created a world-renowned financial miracle in the Qing Dynasty, but I was not impressed. When I arrived in Pingyao County, Shanxi, I looked east and west, and there were three objects that left my memory, one is that there are no natural geographical conditions for getting rich quickly in Pingyao; the second is the high gate tower and the magnificent century-old street that are very incompatible with the natural geographical conditions; The third is the deep rut marks on the stone slabs of the streets. Especially the rut marks, I stared at it over and over again, and I couldn't help but be excited. How many chariots and horses should have left such a deep imprint back then, and what kind of ability did people in such a poor and small county rely on to lead so many chariots and horses to their side? I kept these ruts in my mind, and began to systematically study the relevant written materials, and slowly finally figured out the history of the development and decline of Shanxi merchants in those years, and thus developed a kind of sincere shame, for my own ignorance, and even more for the dereliction of duty of Chinese culture. A rudimentary financial network encompassing most of China was created in the hands of a group of desperate Shanxi peasants, through which a huge stream of money rivaled the royal treasury flowed across the land of China and flourished in a variety of other industries, but Chinese culture largely ignored it. There are few records and few explanations, let alone promotion, guidance and assistance. Chinese culture emphasizes the responsibility of the world, but it lacks the minimum interest and research ability to pay attention to the substantive changes that have taken place in the world, and this substantive change is precisely related to the people's lives, the wealth of the nation, and the advancement of history, but the culture is indifferent to it. So, what are the issues that culture cares about in the world? This question opened a new stage in my study of Chinese culture, and the starting point of the question was the deep rut on the stone slab of the century-old street in Pingyao County, Shanxi Province.

Yes, the starting point is small, and even finding it a bit accidental, but since it has appeared and is remembered by me, there must be all kinds of backgrounds of positive, negative, and sideways, and there must be infinite temptations, light or dark, enough to control my entire research process. Sometimes the research process is almost interrupted by the backlog of other things, but when I think of the houses, streets, and ruts in Pingyao, a kind of on-site and situational joint force is reconstituted, and the research continues.

Tell us about my experience traveling in Tohoku.

As you know, there is a famous scenic spot in the Northeast called Gyeongpo Lake, which was formed by the water accumulation of the crater of the volcanic eruption 10,000 years ago, and I went there purely for tourism, and I had no idea of cultural investigation at all. But unexpectedly, the first thing on the way to Jingpo Lake was Ning'an County, the Ninggu Pagoda where prisoners were exiled in the Qing Dynasty. Standing on that land, the bloodstained history of the literal prison hundreds of years ago immediately came to mind. In my hometown, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Anhui, where batches of people of noble character and profound knowledge are literate, are actually making the last struggle of their lives here? I couldn't find any remnants of their lives, but I knew in my heart that the sky and clouds, the black earth hills, and the weeds and flowers here should be no different from those of that time, so I kept wandering and watching. Walking further along the Ninggu Pagoda, I came across the ruins of the capital of the Bohai Kingdom in the Tang Dynasty without any mental preparation. The things of the Bohai Kingdom have also been seen in the historical materials, the impression is ethereal and magical, the capital under our feet, in the Tang Dynasty should be one of the few metropolises in Asia except Chang'an, but for some reason disappeared almost without a trace, the ruins we can see are the intermittent momentum of the earthen city wall base, and a miraculously left eight treasure glazed wells. I walked further forward in amazement, and finally arrived at Jingpo Lake.

Jingpo Lake is more than 10,000 years old, Bohai Country is more than 1,000 years old, and Ningguta is hundreds of years old, all of which are displayed on the roadside, which can not but shock passers-by. More than 10,000 years of peace, more than 1,000 years of glory, hundreds of years of blood, and finally only those more than 10,000 years of peace remain, and it is bound to continue to be calm. This combination seems to be a deliberate demonstration of the mysteries of history and life. I've been wondering if the scholars exiled in Ningguta have taken a few extra steps to discover the ruins of the Bohai Kingdom and researched them in their minds. Have you walked a few more steps to discover the beauty of Jingpo Lake and felt a lot of emotion?

For a long time, I was sensitive to the history of the Qing Dynasty, the history of the "Liuren" in Northeast China, the founding process of Northeast civilization, the rise and fall of the Bohai State in the Tang Dynasty, the relationship between the Tang Dynasty regime and the surrounding vassal states, the position of urban civilization in Chinese history, and the fragility of urban civilization surrounded by agricultural civilization and the logic of war. Fragile City", I will continue to think about it. Last year, I did that again.

That path, for my finite individual life, has undoubtedly become a permanent dynamic image, adjusting my research path and expanding my cultural judgment. What's even more interesting is that no matter which of the three directions I am studying on the side of the road, the other two directions will unexpectedly loom in between, greatly increasing the macro level of thinking. I think that other scholars can have different research methods, and I will try to ask the earth for topics in my lifetime.

This self-identification has made my cultural travels more conscious. There are more and more places to go, and in some places, after leaving, it is like indebtedness, and I am always worried. One of the big debts I owe to the Northeast is Heilongjiang, which I spent a long time rafting a few years ago, accompanied by a dozen writers from Heilongjiang Province. Centuries of grievances between China and Russia have frozen into a long stretch of ice and snow in winter, and in summer they have dissolved into perhaps the quietest and loneliest stream of water in the world. We saw a small village called "Yushi Dafu Village" by the river, and Mr. Liu Banghou, a local historian who traveled with me, told me that during the Xianfeng period, an old card official in this village was in a hurry to report to the imperial court because he found a group of Russian warships passing by, and the Xianfeng Emperor, who was being troubled by the border troubles in the south, was taken aback by the fear of being attacked on his back, and the Russians easily explained that this was just a "excuse" to prevent the British army from going north. The emperor breathed a sigh of relief, but the old card official of Yushi Dafu Village was beaten to death for the crime of "shocking driving". However, it soon proved that the "shock" of the small village and the old card officer was right, and the passage of this group of Russian warships was indeed a military operation against China, and a few years later, a large area of land in Jiangbei and Jiangdong became Russian. We have also seen that at the beginning of this century, where the Russians drove out and killed thousands of overseas Chinese, a Chinese entrepreneur built a huge castle, which was a large winery called "Zhenbian Winery", where all the entrepreneur's family lived. Today, the castle still exists in the grassy grass of the wasteland, and the winery and its owner have long since fallen under Russian and Japanese fire. Please imagine how melancholy it would be for us to drive silently on the quiet Heilongjiang River, looking around the lonely and uninhabited banks, and suddenly see that small village and that old castle. A lot of melancholy has not been written out, so I always feel that I owe Heilongjiang a debt.

As soon as I talk about my trip, I can't hold it, I'm really sorry, so let's stop there. All in all, I found endless nourishment and countless questions in the vast land of my parents' country, almost to the point of intoxication. The field of culture is very large, of course, there should be some philosophical and profound wise people quietly carrying out grander and more thorough thinking and judgment in the high-rise buildings and deep courtyards, and there should also be some cultural people with relatively strong legs and feet who take field investigation as the main responsibility of life. Since I myself had walked so much in high spirits, I decided to continue walking, and told everyone what I had seen and thought until I could no longer walk.

Someone asked me, why don't I go to other parts of the planet? There should be a lot of cultural scenes there that interest you. A TV reporter asked me this question a few years ago, and I replied like this:

Don't explain my intoxication with domestic travel for some special significance, I'm most tired of that narrow nationalism. I have already explained in "Where is the Township" that the so-called hometown and homeland of cultural people are first and foremost in the spiritual sense rather than in the geographical sense. Otherwise, I should have gone back to my birthplace, Yuyao, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and it would have been wrong to walk around the country. Cultural people are looking for a spiritual home for themselves and others, and their geographical foothold is caused by a variety of complex reasons, and they are stubborn. For example, when I inquire about the spiritual home of the Chinese nation, I always try to find the works of Yu Yingshi, Huang Renyu, Li Zehou, Xu Zhuoyun, Tang Degang, etc., and almost all of them themselves are adrift overseas. This is evidenced by their profound learning, broad knowledge and lively spirit in portraying the historical mysteries of Chinese culture more wonderfully than we can do in the midst of them.

But after all, there should also be a division of labor to allow some cultural people to get more specific on-site experiences. For this scene in Chinese mainland, I volunteered. I think that a nation that accounts for the largest population of mankind and has struggled for so many years in poverty and war, suddenly has the possibility of changing its destiny, and there is a national effort to strive for prosperity, democracy and civilization, and if such a thing were to appear in South America and Africa, I will also travel thousands of miles to see it, and even try to participate in something, and it is a golden opportunity for such a thing to happen in the place where I was born and raised. Of course, everything in front of me will not be too smooth, but because every major event is linked to the ecology of hundreds of millions of people, and all of them involve thousands of years of nerves, even the troubles and anxieties are cultural experiences.

My sorrow, my counsel

Speaking of this, a faint sadness inevitably rises in my heart, even in China, there are too many places to go, and the more I walk, the more I will find more new places and new routes worth going, which is really endless; For the old places, they often experience new meanings due to the growth of knowledge, and the action of revisiting is always germinated. However, the earth is boundless and I have an end to life, the prosperity is undiminished and the sideburns are autumn, how many years do I have to go? Every time I say goodbye to a place of great significance, I always have to secretly hope that I will do it again, but reason quietly reminds me that there are too few opportunities to revisit a place, so many farewells are actually goodbyes.

I was reminded of a TV special about Mérimée filmed in France.

Mérimée, the great writer and scholar who had traveled almost all of Europe, had at last reached his twilight years, but he was still traveling, and a thin horse carrying his tired body approached a village that evening, in which he had to lodge, but when he entered the village, every house was decayed and had a large rusty lock. This is a village abandoned by humans, and it is unknown why and when it was abandoned. Mérimée rode down the alley feeling a little terror, when suddenly a bouquet of bright roses fell in front of the horse's head, as he had often encountered in his youth, and he looked up sharply to find the windows for the flowers, but each window was closed and covered with cobwebs. Perhaps the God of the Underworld wants to comfort the old ascetic, in a way he was familiar with? Mérimée pondered for a moment, knowing that this should not be the place where he was staying tonight, so he did not stop and continued on his way, passing through the village and dissolving into the twilight wilderness. The last figure left in people's eyes is full of the indomitable and desolation of a lifelong cultural traveler.

In the search for a cultural scene, the initial obstacle may be a lack of cultural sensitivity, and the ultimate obstacle is always age. Walking around for decades, you can always get to the state of thinking and footsteps, and when you reach this situation, you are already inconvenient to travel far because of your age, what a cruel thing.

For this reason, I would like to advise my younger friends who are like-minded with me to travel early. Integrating life, earth and culture is a kind of admiration and enjoyment. Only on the earth can we find the footprints of our ancestors, and to look for our ancestors is to find the genes of our lives, to find ourselves. Isn't culture just about extending finite life to a larger realm of space and time? Then walk more and walk towards the original meaning of culture with your footsteps.

Traveling far away is very tiring, but fatigue itself is a torture of life. Connecting cultural exploration with life torture is the most authentic and honest cultural person.

As a result, the Chinese literati of all generations who were full of wind and frost and described the withered trees all repeated a sentence: "Read ten thousand books, travel ten thousand miles", and if they couldn't do it themselves, they passed on this sentence to their children and grandchildren.

Thank you.

(Excerpt from "Yu Qiuyu's Taiwan Speech")