Chapter 65 Channel Closing Banquet

The channel is the Dong Autonomous County in Huaihua, Hunan Province, where most of the Dong compatriots live, and nearly half of the Dong compatriots live here.The Dong people are famous for their hospitality. When strangers from outside the village walk into the Dong village, they will invite you to eat and drink, and sometimes they will put out their most honorable banquet. The whole tribe or the whole village will welcome you together. , entertain you with the most solemn etiquette. Huaihua, Hunan borders Guizhou and Guangxi, and there are many ethnic minorities, including Miao, Tujia, and Dong.The Dong people in Tongdao are an ancient, simple, mellow and hospitable nation, and the custom of "grabbing guests" for happy gatherings has been circulating for a long time.When the guests enter the gate of the village, the villagers flock to them and try their best to loot the guests. The scene is extremely lively and spectacular, which makes strangers feel panic and novelty.The Dong family who couldn’t grab the guests had to go to the family that had grabbed the guests to discuss how to divide the guests and welcome them home. Families with many guests generally would not agree to divide the guests, and proposed that the families with no guests or few guests could move their food to one Get up to eat, if the dining table is not enough, put the door panels together, line up in a long line, and have a group dinner to meet guests.

The Dong people often have a saying that "you don't care about the food when you eat wine" to show that they don't have enough food, but they are sincere, so please don't care about it.Guests can only compliment and express their gratitude. There are many drinking customs in the Dong family, from birth, old age, sickness and death to wedding greetings, from building pavilions to door plaques and temples, from friendship between group villages to visiting relatives and friends, from production and farming management to seasonal fashion, etc. Wine for guests.Dong people's wine customs include toasting, changing glasses of wine, exchanging glasses of wine, supporting cups of wine, Zhuanlong wine, reunion wine, closing wine, etc. Dong people like their homemade bitter wine. In the long river, they gradually formed their own unique wine culture and banquet.Different occasions, different banquets have different forms, but they are inseparable from the closing banquet.There is a saying in the Dong family, "It is not the Han of the Dong family who can't eat wine. If there are guests but no wine, there will be no good food on the table." There are six procedures for toasting in the Dong family.

There are three legends about the ancient closing banquet.The first one is that Wu Mian, a hero of the Dong nationality, passed by a certain village. The girls wanted to pick him up for dinner at home. He was in a dilemma. A girl suggested that each family move a long table and place it in an empty field to serve their best dishes. , The whole village ate with him.The second is that a pair of brothers went to the Dong village to listen to an opera. The river swelled and the pontoon bridge was washed away, and the old man carried them across the river on a sampan.When the Jiangxin boat capsized, the old man rescued the two brothers.Several years later, the old man came to their village, but he could only stay for one meal.After discussion, the two brothers took the meals together to entertain the elderly, and invited all the people in the village to accompany them.The third is that there was a plague in Dong Township, and many people died. A young doctor went to the mountains to collect herbs in the daytime and went door-to-door to see doctors at night, saving many people.In order to repay the benefactor who saved their lives, the family made a dish to express their gratitude, and put them together to form a table.

The closing banquet is the highest standard banquet for Dong villages to receive distinguished guests, and there are two types of banquets for the whole village and the whole clan.The closing banquet of the whole village is held in the Drum Tower, and the closing banquet of the family is held in the corridor or attic of the farmer's house.The Dong people hold banquets called stretching tables. Ten or eight tables of the Eight Immortals are assembled into long strips. If there is no table, the two tables are connected by door panels, connected end to end, forming a long dragon, which can also be extended infinitely.The scale of the closing banquet is determined according to the number of guests. Generally, the number of guests and hosts is one to one, and they sit at intervals or opposite to each other. The host arranges girls to stand aside, responsible for pouring wine, toasting, and singing toast songs for the guests, so as to be active The atmosphere allows guests to eat and drink well.

Villagers or clansmen hold joint banquets, and each household brings their best dishes on the table, including fish, meat, chicken, duck and other delicacies that have been marinated for many years, as well as bitter wine and glutinous rice, forming a veritable hundred families. Wine, hundreds of rice, hundreds of dishes.People who are not neighbors pick food from bamboo baskets or baskets and entertain guests together.There are as many as ten bowls or dozens of bowls of various dishes in a banquet, including chicken and fish egg vegetables. There is a saying among the Dong people that "no vegetables are not pickled, and no vegetables are not sour".Because they live in a remote cottage, salt was expensive in the old days, so they used sauerkraut instead to reduce the amount of salt used, forming a tradition of eating sour.The closing banquet is mainly based on sour food, including traditional sour meat, sour fish, sour chicken, sour duck, sour cabbage, sour bamboo shoots, sour ginger, sour pepper and other dishes, as well as oil tea, sticky rice, glutinous rice, japonica rice, glutinous rice cakes, etc. , millet cake, etc., are rich in varieties, and the lips and teeth are fragrant after eating.Dong people pickle their food raw, which lasts for one year. After being pickled, they can be eaten directly without further processing.The pickled food is fragrant, salty and sour, and Han people can’t adapt to it, especially sour meat and sour fish, which are too sour for toothache. I like to eat vegetarian food such as sauerkraut, sour bamboo shoots, sour ginger, sour pepper, and sour beans. , sour, crisp and delicious, with a mellow aftertaste.

I have been to Dongzhai, the imperial capital of Tongdao many times. The trees are lush, the smoke is curling up, and the Pingtan River is winding around it.Huangdu is located in Huangtu Township in the southwest of Tongdao, and consists of Touzhai, Weizhai, Panzhai and Xinzhai.According to legend, the ancient King Yelang passed by here, and he was intoxicated by the simple and unique exotic customs when he saw the well-arranged stilted buildings and the rainbow-like Wind and Rain Bridge in Wolong.He planned to build a capital here, so he called it the imperial capital. Before the closing feast, the host greets the guests outside the gate of the village. The first thing is to set off salutes and play Sheng songs. Lusheng is the most important musical instrument of the Dong family. It can play the most simple, rough and primitive songs of life. As the saying goes, "Lusheng is blown into Zhongnanhai, and Dong songs are blown across the Huangpu River", which shows its appealing power; the second is to set up barricades at the gate of the village or in front of the house to welcome guests and meet with the most solemn etiquette. The third is to offer Dong family Camellia oleifera, which is a special etiquette for ethnic minorities in Southwest China. Made of raw materials, it has a very strong flavor and endless aftertaste.After these three etiquettes, the guests began to enter the Dong village and experience the life of the Dong people.The host welcomes the guests to the Drum Tower or the banquet place, where the guests and the host sit down.Dishes, meals, and bitter wine are served, and the banquet is ready. When the host gives an order, everyone stands up, arms around the long table, sings and turns, turns back after half a circle, stops in front of their seats, and sits down. After that, the banquet was officially opened.The head of the host or patriarch held up the wine glass, gave a welcome speech, and then shouted "Drink all", the host and guest echoed "Drink", and everyone drank it all in one gulp.

There is a saying in the Dong family: You can’t live away from the mountains, you can’t walk away from the plate, you can’t wear your belts, and you can’t eat without acid.It has made a good commentary on the diet of the Dong people.The Dong people love to eat fish. There are fish in the streams of the Dong village, and fish are raised in the rice fields. The meat of the local fish is tender and plump, and the rice is fragrant.The closing banquet pays attention to drinking Zhuanzhuan wine and eating Zhuanzhuan vegetables to increase mutual affection.Turn around and drink the wine next to you to show your intimacy, and drink three glasses in a row.Zhuanzhuancai is a family's vegetable bowl passed on one by one, and everyone can eat it.

The girls from the Dong family were the most active in the banquet. They came to the guests in groups of three or four, toasted them, and sang a song about wine. The lyrics and smooth voice that blended the scene made me ecstatic, and I was very excited about the wine. , Drank more than enough.Guests who fail to come up or sing to the song will be punished with alcohol.If the guests don't want to drink, they will find a way to drink; if the guests want to slip away, they surround them and sing songs to persuade them to drink again.This kind of youthful experience makes people infinitely reverie.

After dinner, there will be a bonfire party of the Dong nationality. The programs include toast songs, love song duets, love songs on benches, window climbing, talking and touching, etc.After the show, the host lined up at the gate of the Drum Tower to see off the guests with firecrackers, screened the distinguished guests, and sent seven or eight young men and women to lift up the distinguished guests, toss them in the air a few times or some catch their hands and some feet, and swing in the air. , and then see off.