Twenty descendants drew lots to decide whether to stay or not.
On the afternoon of March 3 1, the reporter came to Xinyuling Village through the Yuji Square archway, and happened to meet the Yi clan who was busy "moving". Xinyuling Village will open on April 2, and 20 Yi people will live in their new homes on behalf of their families. These days, in order to prepare for the public sacrifice of Dayu, Sun Ziyan, secretary of the Party branch of Yuling Village, Yuecheng District, Shaoxing, and grandson of Dayu 143, has been very busy. According to him, the opening of Xinyuling Village is a very important link in the public sacrifice to Dayu. New Yuling Village was originally named Shouling Village, but some people think this name is not pleasant to listen to, so it is called New Yuling Village.
At the end of 2003, Yuling New Village began to be rebuilt and newly built, retaining the precious buildings of the original Yuling Village, covering an area of 50,000 square meters, with a construction area of about10.5 million square meters, with a total investment of 25 million yuan. From the outside, Yuling Village looks very old, but it is full of modern facilities. The purpose of building Shouling Village is to better preserve the tomb of Dayu's water control relics and show Shaoxing's village culture for more than 4,000 years.
According to Yan, more than 800 people in the village have moved to Yuling apartment opposite Dayu's tomb, which was replaced by the government for the villagers and has 34 buildings. According to reports, 5 1 household wants to stay in Shouling village this time. Finally, 20 households were selected by lot to represent the whole family. The Yi people who live in these houses only rent and pay little rent. They also have a house in Yuling apartment, but they need to live here regularly to guard the mausoleum for their ancestors.
What will the future life be like in Xinyuling Village? Yan said that Yan's descendants have been farming for generations, and few people have done business. With the construction of Xinyuling Village, topics about buying and selling, market and management have also appeared in the mouths of Yi people. At the entrance of Shouling Village, the reporter also heard such a discussion: "Is it good to open a tourist souvenir shop here?" "Open a food stall and let foreign tourists taste Shaoxing's special stinky tofu. Business should not be bad. " However, the reporter found that although there was a lot of discussion, there were not many people who really wanted to open a shop.
Sacrifice is the mission of clan people.
Although it has changed from a villager to a resident, offering sacrifices to the Yi people is still an unforgettable mission. Yan, 54, runs a gas station near Jishan Bridge. As a descendant of Yan 143, he said: "I was born in 1952, and I didn't see the scene of sacrifice before liberation. I have long wanted to be a family sacrifice as a descendant of Emperor Yan. "
He told his ideas to the older generation and immediately got everyone's support, so everyone contributed. According to the traditional clan rules, a cow's head, a whole sheep and a pig's head are needed as sacrifices, but no cow's head has been found in Shaoxing. Later, a cow head was found in a slaughterhouse in Jinhua through a friend's introduction, but there were still four days before the sacrifice. In order to prevent the cow's head from deteriorating, it had to be put in the freezer of a canteen. Who knows that on New Year's Eve, I took out the cow's head and saw that it had frozen into a big ice cube. Several people spent hours thawing the cow's head in the river, and finally I had a plastic surgery.
On the first day of this year, more than 65,438,000 soldiers formed a huge sacrificial procession next to the misty tomb of Dayu, and held the largest folk sacrifice to Dayu in the 50 years since liberation.
Incense fills the air, firecrackers are ringing, and the descendants of Dayu worship their ancestors by generation with the most pious attitude. According to the regulations of the Yi people, worshipping Dayu is different from worshipping bodhisattva. Instead of lighting candles, he clenched his fists with both hands, which shows that in the eyes of the Yi people, Dayu is not a bodhisattva, but an ancestor.
According to clan rules, everyone who participates in the sacrifice can get a piece of bamboo, and afterwards they can exchange hundreds of copper coins with the organizer, which is called "centenary money", which is equivalent to offering a piece of meat. The new daughter-in-law who participated in the sacrifice for the first time, as a new population in the clan, can get a large sum of money in exchange for double the centenary money. On the morning of the same day, each room will also be dedicated to the portraits of modern ancestors, which are called "worshipping the image".
Yan said that the custom of paying homage to Yu was only interrupted during the war years, and it continued after the founding of New China. As soon as people arrived, they spontaneously went to worship. 1995 Shaoxing municipal government paid a public sacrifice to Dayu's tomb, and then paid a public sacrifice every five or ten years, usually for civilians.
Thousands of years old surnames and addresses are not easy to find.
According to relevant historical records, more than 4,000 years ago, Sun Shaokang, the sixth generation of Dayu, sent his son Wu Yu to Huiji to pay homage to Dayu's mausoleum, and built a shrine to settle down as "Yuling Village", so it was also called "Shouling Village". Most of the villagers living here are surnamed Yu. They are descendants of Dayu and have been guarding the mausoleum here for generations, so the village is called "the first village in the world".
By 2000, there were more than 700 Yi people in 18 provinces, municipalities, autonomous regions and overseas. The Yi people in Yuling Village have become an extremely rare ancient family in China, and their surnames have remained unchanged for thousands of years, which has attracted the attention of anthropologists and been taken as the research object of human origin and development in China by the research group of Chinese Academy of Sciences.