The dividing line written by water

 

All memories of the Central Plains begin with a liquid wound. When the snow water of Tongbai Mountain and the rain water of Funiushan embraced at the Huai River, this great river, which was called one of the "Four Rivers" in "Yu Gong", was destined to become the dividing line drawn by the heaven and earth with a level. The willows on both sides of the Huai River know that their branches leaning to the south and their trunks bending to the north are the river bowing to the geography of China.

Chapter 1: 

The dialectics of water The ferry crossing at Zhengyangguan understands the temperament of the Huai River best. When the peach blossom flood comes in March, the river water will submerge the iron bulls that guard the river in the Ming Dynasty to the horns, but it will reveal the mottled inscriptions on the sluice built by the Soviet Union in 1954. The oars of the ferryman Lao Zhao always draw question marks in the vortex - his father used this boat to transport the People's Liberation Army's explosive packs during the Huaihai Campaign in 1948, and the oil stains left by those wooden boxes are still spinning in a vortex. The sand-dredging boats on the other side of the river rumbled, and the mud and sand they spewed out were mixed with the rusty belt buckles of the Dabie Mountain guerrillas.

Chapter 2: 

The riverbed in the wheat field The river beach under the Bengbu sluice is an open-air archive. On the exposed riverbed during the dry season, the wave-breaking willows planted by Pan Jixun, the minister of river management in the Ming Dynasty, have long woven their roots into a geological time table. The old shepherd can point to the cracked mud and tell you: this piece of oracle bone crack is the tear mark when the Banqiao Reservoir burst in 1975; the one with white alkali is the last words of the small paper mill in 1994. The most touching thing is the wheat harvest season in May, when the combine harvester sails in the golden waves, it always startles the locust wings buried when the Huayuankou burst in 1938.

Chapter 3: 

Liquid boundary marker The Huaihe River in Xuyi is the most philosophical. The stone statues of the Ming Dynasty's ancestral mausoleum are half-immersed in water, and the tombs of Zhu Yuanzhang's parents share the same water level with crayfish. The young technicians at the hydrological station found that whenever the detector showed that the water quality reached the third-class standard, the reflection of the streets of Sizhou City in the Northern Song Dynasty would appear on the instrument screen. And on the Hongze Lake embankment, 30 kilometers away, the iron cows used to control the water are quietly leaving their hoof prints on the flood prevention plan of the new era.

Chapter 4: 

The polyphony of the river The dusk at the mouth of the top china rivers hides all the codes of the Huaihe River. When the Sanhe Sluice released water, the farmers in Liuhe could hear their cries against drought in 1982 mixed in the waves. On a foggy evening, in the reeds of the flood detention area, the handprints pressed by the household contract responsibility system in 1978 were sprouting again on the tips of the newly grown asparagus. When the last ray of sunset passed over the concrete slope of Wanfu Gate, the entire Huaihe River turned into flowing amber - it contained 700 years of water control history and the fate of 90 million people.