Hero’s Home Village

When someone from my home village phoned me saying they were going to revamp the village’s ancestral temple and turn it into a memorial in honor of Ge Yunfei (1789-1841), a general who died in the battle against invading British army in 1841, I was too excited to sleep for a few nights, thinking about the hero and my home village. In my mind’s eye my memories came back like a film.

I was born in Yunfei Village, named after the national hero. The village is part of present-day Jinhua Town, which in the ancient times was called Tianle Town. Two villages on Jinhua River are where the Ge clan has inhabited since very ancient times.

Ge Yunfei studied at the clan school at the Ge Clan Ancestral Temple in Yunfei Village. I went to the same school, though Ge Yunfei and I are hundreds years apart. Through what our teacher told us about the general, we students got to learn about his student years at the school and about where in the village he practiced kongfu.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) operated a special imperial examination system to recruit military talents and appoint them to key military positions. This system resembled the more famous imperial examination system for selecting and appointing civilian officials. Ge Yunfei came up through this national military system over years. He was a Military Xiucai first before he qualified as a Military Juren and a Military Jinshi. He served as a commander in the coastal defense force for seventeen years.

After the first Opium War (1840-1842) broke out, Dinghai, a strategic fortress in today’s Zhoushan Archipelago in Zhejiang Province, was under siege for six nights and days in August, 1841. Ge and his soldiers fought bravely. But they were outnumbered and outgunned. The fortress was finally overwhelmed by the British army on August 17, 1841. Ge Yunfei fought to the last ditch. In the battle, half of his face was chopped off. He sustained dozens of bullet wounds and knife wounds. His chest was pierced by a cannon ball. He died standing leaning against a cliff.

Since my childhood years I have been proud of this ancestor of mine, of Jinhua Town for having this national hero as a native, and of our Ge clan for having this hero as one of us.

I remember how we school boys and girls at Qingming Festival would visit a monument in honor of our village as Ge Yunfei’s home village at Stone Fortress Hill near the village, and would place blooming azaleas at the monument.

When I was a kid, I heard people of my father’s generation talk about their childhood years in the 1920s. They said that at that time the Ge Clan Ancestral Temple still had Ge Yunfei’s belongings as memorial objects. On the day Ge Yunfei died for the motherland every year, all the Ge descendents in Jinhua Town would gather at the Ge Clan Ancestral Temple in Jinhua Village and held a memorial service.

However, the memorial objects were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The Ge Clan Genealogy was thrown into the fire. Someone snatched one volume and kept it. Today, the salvaged volume is in the collection of a professor at Beijing Normal University. Wang Weichang, a senior genealogist in Xiaoshan District and an expert on Ge Yunfei, went to Beijing and had this volume copied. Today, the copy is in the Xiaoshan District Archives.

Ge Yunfei’s former residence in the village is now a key historical relic under the protection of the Zhejiang Provincial Government. Ge Yunfei Pavilion, which used to stand at the entrance to the village, has been restored. The Ge Clan Ancestral Temple is now refurbished and renamed Ge Yunfei Memorial Temple. A copy of the remaining volume of the Ge Clan Genealogy is a key memorial object at the temple.

I visited the memorial temple on the day it was unveiled. A ceremony was held. Today, the memorial is a landmark in the village and a patriotism education site.