Patent association

Xue Tao was originally from Chang 'an, and Xue Tao's father, Xue Yun, was a very upright man, so he offended powerful people and was exiled to Chengdu. Xue Tao followed him to Chengdu and never left Chengdu. So I said, no one wants to go to Chengdu, only you can't take Chengdu.

Wangjianglou was Xue Tao's favorite place to stay at that time. According to legend, she took water from a well and made a Xue Tao Notebook. "Xue Taojian" is a patent of Xue Tao. This is a very suitable paper for writing poems. This kind of paper was later used by officials in the Tang Dynasty and has been passed down to this day. There is a "Xue Tao Well" near Wangjianglou. Later, Xue Tao died and was buried here, with Xue Tao's tomb.

This Wangjiang Building is even more legendary today, because there is a strange couplet upstairs. Why is it strange? Because this couplet has only the upper couplet, not the lower couplet. There is no bottom line, not because the author deliberately pretends to be forced, but because the author can't get the bottom line himself, because his top line is too difficult to get right. His first part is:

Wangjianglou, Wangjiangxi, Wangjiangxi on Wangjianglou. The river flows through the ages, and the bottom of the river lasts forever.

This couplet has profound artistic conception and lasting charm, and the antithesis in the sentence is neat and both dynamic and static. There is another wonderful thing about this couplet. In medieval Chinese and dialects in many places now, "Lou" and "Liu" are homophones. For example, in Cantonese, these two words are pronounced exactly the same, which is probably pronounced as "Lao" in Minnan.

On the Wangjiang Building, the left pillar is engraved with the upper couplet, and the right pillar is empty, because no one can make a perfect lower couplet so far.