Shashiyu Village

Shashiyu Village

Shashiyu Village is located 20 kilometers southeast of Zunhua City. Before liberation, Shashiyu was a notoriously poor mountain valley, often described as having “soil as precious as pearls, water as scarce as oil, and rocks sprawling across the hills.” After liberation, under the leadership of the former village head Zhang Guishun, the hardworking and simple villagers of Shashiyu managed to create arable land by digging soil from between rocks and tilling stone slabs. They successively turned 400 acres of barren hills into fertile farmland, creating the miracle of “a mu of fertile land from a thousand dan of soil carried over ten thousand li, and high yields on stone slabs.” In the 1960s, Premier Zhou Enlai flew to Shashiyu several times and called the villagers the modern-day “Living Foolish Old Man.” The two cypress trees planted personally by Premier Zhou and Albanian Prime Minister Mehmet Shehu back then are now lush and thriving. Today, Shashiyu has become a well-known grape-growing village and a moderately prosperous community.

Once renowned both at home and abroad for the feat of “a mu of fertile land from a thousand dan of soil carried over ten thousand li, and high yields on stone slabs,” Shashiyu Village in Zunhua City is now also famous for its unique “aquatic stratified rock” oddities. In recent years, the village has sold large quantities of these peculiar stones to cities and provinces such as Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei.

At the northern hill of Shashiyu, Li Tonggao, a bonsai expert, held up a stone with clear textures and an elegant shape and said, “This type of stone is aquatic stratified rock. These lines were formed over many years by prolonged erosion from seawater, and they feature sharp lines, clear textures, and beautiful colors — characteristics that are unique across the country.” This bonsai artist has created works such as the “Gulangyu” bonsai using Shashiyu’s peculiar stones, which have won gold awards in national competitions multiple times. Nowadays, the village exports one to two hundred tons of these peculiar stones each year. Zhou, the director of the village committee, said, “Many bonsai works are also exported to Japan and the United States. But the development of Shashiyu’s peculiar stones is still in a rudimentary stage. For these stones to truly reach markets at home and abroad, there needs to be full cooperation and joint effort from all parties.”

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