(Ecns.cn)--Dilapidated roofs, rusty locks, and weeds everywhere on walls and streets, the nearly one-thousand-year-old Maixi Village in Zhenjiang, a city in Jiangsu Province, is waning as modernization and urbanization have impacted the village.
People are racing to move into new houses in order to live a modern life, leaving the historical, traditional residences wrecked and isolated.
On the one hand, economic development brings people who from here freshness. On the other hand, it is hard to avoid the fact that the once beautiful villages are dying, taking thousands of memories of the country with them.
A prosperous village only in mind
Established during the Southern Song Dynasty (from 1127 to 1279), Maixi Village used to be seen as an embodiment of idyllic village life in ancient China.
"Since the Tang Dynasty, there was a road connecting this village to bustling markets in Zhenjiang, and other paths used by officials at that time," explained Zhang Rongfa, a 77-year-old senior citizen whose family has been living here for over 750 years.
Living here almost his whole life, Zhang is like a living encyclopedia of this village. He knows almost every detail of the village and sometimes even the details of a stranger from the outside.
After retiring, Zhang began searching for information about his family and the village. He found his family tree, a restored version during the Qing Dynasty, in libraries in Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province.
Through studying the family tree, he learned that the village gained its name through a bridge which was built during the Southern Song Dynasty and that during the Yuan Dynasty, a man named Zhang Qianning settled here and began developing the place.
As Zhang's family became prosperous, more and more people moved here, which finally made it a village. In the Qing Dynasty, the Zhang family had 38,000 family members, which helped to make Maixi Village the largest in Danyang County.
In some sense, the history of the family represents the development of the village. In over 750 years of history, the family has witnessed talented people going out of the village to gain fame and make a contribution to the nation.
