Along the Lian River, we push open the many gates of three old towns.
In Gurao, we see how geography grows a market town. It is where countless "intimate" things are made: the sewing machines of its underwear workshops patter like fine rain, the town's most modern rhythm. We stop at the tomb of the Song marshal, a relatively still anchor, where people busy with their livelihoods still tuck their reverence for the ancestors and their attachment to where they come from into stones and legends.
In Guiyu, waterways and streets carry the load together. The town went through the smoke of the e-waste dismantling era and is now seeing an ecological rebirth. As the former "electronic inferno" runs clear again, we see that what carried this land through the pain was the unbroken order of its ancestral halls.
In Heping, the bridge continues the road and is also an art of helping others along. As a home of printing and packaging, its people know best how to hold and to pass on. Crossing the Heping Bridge built by the monk Dafeng, the river breeze is cool, as if telling of an old understanding. The road builders are long gone, but their kindness echoes in the footsteps on the bridge.
Finally, in Shangyan Village, Chengtian, we join a Yingge banquet in the water country. In the last light before the Lian River meets the sea, hundreds of villagers share the Yingge meal. A steaming bowl of grains, a noisy coexistence: life shows its surging undertone.
Everything met on the way is life; all its flavours are found among the rivers and lakes. (Local guide: Lin Gang)
