This building is called Wangjianglou, next to the ancient Sichuan University and the quiet Fuhe River. A few steps along the road next to Wangjianglou is the famous Jiuyanqiao Bar Street in Chengdu.
Wangjianglou's fame in ancient times came from Xue Tao, a poetess in the Tang Dynasty. At school, we all recited her famous poem "Send a Friend":
The water town is frosty at night, the moonlight is cold and the mountains are gray.
Who says a thousand miles from today, just one dream?
This poem by Xue Tao has always been rated as no less than any male poet in the Tang Dynasty.
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.
Because of Xue Tao, Wangjiang Tower is famous in ancient times, and there are an endless stream of tourists. The real name of Wangjianglou is "Chongli Building", which comes from the sentence "Beauty and admiration, its real name is Chengdu" in the Fu of Shu Du written by Zuo Si, a writer in the Western Jin Dynasty. The worship tower is commonly known as "Wangjiang Tower".
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.
If we follow this requirement, it will be even more difficult. The author's native language is probably "homophonic architecture", so it is difficult to correct it. According to legend, after the author wrote the first couplet himself, he racked his brains for several years and failed to get the second couplet, so he died of depression.
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.