Clan Pedigree Memorializes Vanished Village

By Mi Ao

Clan Pedigree Memorializes Vanished Village

By Mi Ao

No one in Hupu would have thought that the millennium-old village would one day vanish. Hupu used to be a village nestled against the foot of Seven Star Peak in Xinchang County in eastern Zhejiang Province. The residents of the village have relocated， making room for a reservoir which is part of the water distribution project. Before the relocation， villagers did everything possible to save what could be salvaged.

Hu Jing （887-965） retired to the Seven Star Peak after working as the minister of public works for Wuyue Kingdom. The clan pedigree considers him as the frst ancestor of the Hu clan scattered along Meixi Riverin Xinchang.

In order to retain the glory and ancestry of the village， Hu Bangcheng has done a great deal. Born in 1942， he is a 39th-generation descendent of Hu Jing. The current youngest male descendent of the clan is of the 42th generation. At the age of 12， he left the village to attend middle school in the county capital about 15 kilometers away. From then on， he spent much more time away from the home village.

梅花又开：曾经的胡卜村记忆Hupu Village in a photo taken years ago is now a fond memory only.

巷道：人文历史走过来又走过去Underwater are these village roads where history and culture once flourished.

In the 1990s， a reservoir project that would eventually submerge the village was about to start. About 700 households in Hupu Village were to relocate. After learning about the reservoir project， Hu Bangcheng was worried. He was aware that the people of the clan would scatter and there would never be a day when they and their descendents could come back to the place where their common ancestor first settled down. He decided it was high time to compile a revised edition of the clan pedigree.

It was a daring idea and would be a tremendous challenge. From 1240 to 1948，the descendents of Hu Jing revised the clan books twelve times. These updated editions act as who's who dictionaries and keep the track of every male descendent of the clan. The edition of 1948 had 6 volumes. In 1996， Hu Bangcheng managed to get four of them. He tried to put his hands on the remaining two. But he didn't know whether they still existed or where they were if they existed. He traveled across Xincheng County in search of the lost two. For about ten years， he visited villages where people surnamed Hu live. He went from door to door in villages. In 2007， he found the other two volumes from a family only three kilometers away from Hupu.

Toward the end of 2007， he proposed to have the clan pedigree updated. It would be a painstaking dedication. The clan agreed and a committee formed. He and colleagues began to trace information about every male descendent not recorded in the 1948 edition. The information would detail important events and key people and where individuals and families had evolved and moved over the past decades. The committee members visited villages and talked with people surnamed Hu. They found a lot of relatives and caught up on the lost years.

The update edition project ran against time. Since the construction of the reservoir started on February 28， 2009， the village did not have much time to exist where it had been for a thousand years.

In 2011， the latest update was completed. On the 23rd day of the 11th month on the lunar calendar， which happened to be the 1124th anniversary of the birthday of Hu Jing， about 10，000 descendents and relatives came from all over the world to meet at Hupu. The printed copies of the 11-volumed latest edition were handed out to the descendents from around the world. After the celebration ceremony， Zhejiang Shaoju Opera Troupe staged a three-night gala show to celebrate the reunion and the completion of the latest clan record book.

The reservoir was scheduled to start reserving water as the dam was set to close in October 2014. On the Qingming Festival in early April that year， about 600 descendents of the clan from 28 villages along Meixi River gathered in Hupu and held the last sacrifcial ceremony in their home village. With government funds， the Hu Clan Memorial Temple， the Feihuang Memorial Archway， and Xinchang Township God Temple had been all relocated to Dapingtou，a village in neighborhood.

After the relocation of the village， bulldozers came in. The village was dismantled and is now no man's land， waiting for water to come up and submerge the village forever. Life goes on with the clan while Hupu is no more.