In my student days, geography was always an alley that I couldn't find my way out of.  Born with a lack of sense of direction, I almost always got off the trains at the wrong stop, and placed western cities on the east coast.

As I got closer to middle age, I not only spent long years living in a foreign land, but also grew fond of the freedom of self-help traveling.  Without a tour guide, a road idiot like me had to resort to maps.  Amazingly, when I closed my eyes, I remembered exactly where a city was, where a certain aroma flowed from, and at what point a mountain path came to a sudden stop.

The memories of a city really came from one's feelings.

The entrance to the ancient village of Long Men opened up to a cobblestone road which meandered through the whole village to every corner.  Long Men was like a maze, thick with layers and layers of buildings and courtyards.  The streets were of similar width and the houses looked more or less the same.  Everything looked similar wherever we were, and one could easily get lost in that labyrinth.  Luckily, there was a Long Men Stream going north to south through the village.  Whenever I couldn’t find my way out, people invariably said, “Just follow the stream and you'll find your way.”  I couldn't help but think of the Peach Flower Village, which the poet Tao Yuan Ming stumbled upon but could never find again.  My worry was not about whether I could find Long Men Village again, but about how many historical landmarks in China could survive the destruction of civilization.

The ancient village of Long Men was a cluster of residential structures built along the mountain stream, with materials derived primarily from the stream.  The old architecture was very well preserved to this day.  Perhaps it was due to its remote location, in that hot summer afternoon, we were the only tourists around.  The villagers told us the history and stories of the village with such enthusiasm that I fell in love with these long, winding & lingering alleys untainted by tourists.

The villagers called Long Men the “ancestral home of Sun Quan”, even though Sun Quan was not really born here based on historical records.  However, Long Men was the birthplace of Sun Quan's father and grandfather, and therefore it wasn't wrong to call this his ancestral home.  Over ninety percent of Long Men's residents were descendants of the Sun family, and most of them were part of a cottage industry of making tennis rackets, of which Long Men is the largest supplier in China.

There were many Sun Family shrines in town displaying tablets and couplets praising the Sun family's accomplishment, as well as models of early ship-making and various weapons like swords and spears.  This reminded me of the classic, “Three Kingdoms”, in which Liu Bei had to defeat East Wu's Sun Shangxiang in a match on their wedding night before he was allowed to consummate the marriage, demonstrating that the women of the Sun family were heroines who preferred weapons to cosmetics.

The hours I spent strolling in the ancestral home of Sun Quan infused me with an admiration for Long Men which far exceeded my fondness of Hangzhou's West Lake, whose beauty was too boisterous and artificial.  As reminded by the villagers, the “Peach Flower Village” of this world “must not be spoken of” in order not to disappear.