Meipi Lake is located on the west bank of Laohe River in Huyi District, Xi'an City. "Pi" means pond. The lake is formed by the water of Mei River, so it is called "Meipi". This is the ruins of Shanglinyuan in the Qin and Han Dynasties and a tourist attraction in the Tang Dynasty. Du Fu, Cen Shen, Su Shi, Cheng Hao and other literati and poets all went boating and wrote poems here. It has the reputation of "the best place in Guanzhong's mountains and rivers"——
< p> On June 25, 2014, I came to Meipi Lake for the first time. It was surrounded by a large number of villages, like a small park. The lake was small and there were not many tourists. At that time, I followed the dilapidated bridge and landed on the small island in the center of the lake. The Kongcuitang there was one of the second batch of Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Protection Units.In the blink of an eye, five years have passed. The former Hu County has been renamed "Huyi District", and Meipi Lake has also undergone earth-shaking changes. On November 3, 2019, I came to Meipi Lake again. The village had disappeared and was surrounded by ruins. The former small square was still intact.
In the center of the small square, there is a statue of Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva. I operate my DJI Phantom 4 drones take off from here. When the drone rises high into the sky and the sight flies over the branches, the broad Meipi Lake appears in front of you instantly. It is no longer the small and dilapidated appearance it once was!
Then, the drone flew towards the lake, first flew half a circle around the island in the lake, and then turned around Flying towards the pagoda in the distance, you can have an unobstructed view of all kinds of landscapes around Meipi Lake. The rippling blue waves, lakes and mountains are as beautiful as those in the south of the Yangtze River.
The Meipi Lake Water System Ecological Restoration Project is a key project in the construction of the Laohe River flood storage and detention area. It is also an important node of the "Eight Waters to Moisturize Xi'an" project. It is implemented by Xi'an Qujiang New District and will restore the water area to approximately 5300 acres. Among them, the west bank lake area is 4,690 acres, the east bank lake area is 330 acres, and the river water surface is 280 acres.
It is recorded in "Yuanhe County Chronicles": After Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty expanded Shanglin Garden, all eight waters in Guanzhong entered In Shanglin Garden, the "fourteen miles around" Meipi became part of Shanglin Garden. At that time, Meipei was called "Xipei" and it was one of the ten ponds in Shanglin Garden.
Sima Xiangru wrote in "Ode to Shanglin": "The sun rises from the East Marsh and enters the West Pei." It can be seen from this that the West Pei is vast. In the Tang Dynasty, Meipi was still a large lake. Du Fu once traveled to Meipi Lake with Cen Shen. His "Xing Meipi" described the different scenes here as the weather changed.
The Kongcui Hall on the island in the center of the lake was built in memory of Du Fu and is also known as " "Du Gongbu Temple", its name is taken from the sentence "Silk tubes chirp and the sky is green" in "Meipi Xing". On August 31, 1957, Kongcuitang was announced as the second batch of provincial cultural relics protection units by the Shaanxi Provincial People's Committee. On April 20, 1992, after this place was revoked, it was no longer a "provincial security" unit.
Viewed from the air, Kongcui Hall has been renovated, but it has not yet been opened to the public. In the past, there were only two halls left here, the West Hall built in the Qing Dynasty and the East Hall built in the Republic of China. Nowadays, not only the building has been repaired, but also a new courtyard has been added, and a small zigzag bridge connects the island to the lake shore.
Zhang Ji from the Song Dynasty wrote in "Kong Cuitang Ji": "There are many beautiful mountains and rivers in Guanzhong; Meipei Lake is located at the foot of Zhongnan Mountain, and the weather is absolutely clear, which is the best place. "During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the lake dried up, and the Meipei Lake described by Feng He of the Qing Dynasty was already "a desert of rice and wild fields"!
Now, after several years of hard work, the beautiful scenery of Zhongnan that "the water flows like the sky to Chang'an and is reflected in Du Fu's poems and paintings during his travels" has been reproduced here. In the future, a demonstration area integrating cultural tourism, leisure vacation, health care, entertainment and performing arts and other emerging industries will be built here.
Let us look forward to it together!