Chapter 25 3. Two inscriptions

March 5, 1998 is the 100th anniversary of Comrade Zhou Enlai's birth. Comrade Zhou Enlai is a great Marxist, one of the main leaders of the party and the country, one of the main founders of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and an outstanding Proletarian revolutionary, statesman, military strategist and diplomat. In order to commemorate his great achievements, learn from his noble character, and promote his calligraphy art, with the approval of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, a gallery of Zhou Enlai's ink monuments was established in the backyard of Zhou Enlai's former residence.

The content of the inscription involves words, encouragement, and advocacy; time passes through youth, middle age, and old age; This is a model for future generations to learn and a model for imitation, so it is recorded in stone. Zhou Enlai's grandfather, Zhou Panlong, worked in Jiangsu in the middle of the 19th century. He served successively as a master, inspector, and alternate Shanyang magistrate, and settled in Huai'an. Later, half an mu of tomb land was purchased in the eastern suburbs of the county. By the middle of the 20th century, seven tombs of the Zhou family had been built successively, in which thirteen relatives including Zhou Enlai's grandparents, biological mother, heir parents, and eighth uncle's parents were buried.

It is an ancient custom to bury ancestors and Zeyin descendants generously, but Zhou Enlai, a great man of a generation, opened a new generation by burying the graves of his ancestors for hundreds of years. As early as the spring of 1953, Zhou Enlai proposed to the Huai'an County Party Committee the idea of ​​"clearing up the ancestral graves and handing over the cemeteries to collective farming". In the summer of 1958, he personally wrote a letter to the Huai'an County Party Committee, requesting that the coffin of his ancestral grave be "deeply buried". In the autumn of 1964, he specially called relatives in Beijing to talk, emphasizing: "The problem of the cemetery must be resolved."

In the winter of that year, he ordered his nephew Zhou Ercui to make a special trip back to his hometown to deal with the matter, and made it clear that "the coffin must be sunk below one meter below the ground, so as not to affect the mechanical farming." On the morning of New Year's Eve, Ercui, accompanied by a member of the Standing Committee of the Huai'an County Party Committee, invited dozens of village neighbors to bring tools to the cemetery to bury the coffin in a flat grave. Due to the cold weather, the work was not completed until that night. At that time, there were a lot of onlookers, some dissuaded, some helped, and the voices of praise were endless.

After the Spring Festival, Zhou Enlai remitted money to the production team where the ancestral tomb was located to compensate for the loss of labor and young crops. Zhou Enlai's grave was returned to plowing, breaking with traditional concepts, being loyal and filial to his career, and his emotions were related to the people, which can be regarded as a model for all generations. This monument is specially erected to show future generations and set an example for the future!