Three Thousand Miles of Context: the Journey of 300 Scholars to the West

When the war in 1938 swept across Changsha in smoke, and when the campuses of Peking and Tianjin could no longer accommodate a single quiet desk, more than 300 scholars from three prestigious schools traveled through banditry in western Hunan, Guizhou's miasma mountains, and the cliffs of northeastern Yunnan to continue their cultural heritage in Kunming. This is not a simple migration, but a "scholar's long march." The unarmed students, carrying only books, paper and pen, faced the dangerous passes occupied by bandits, the deserted villages full of starving people, and the desperate situation of hunger and cold; in the officialdom, the chairman of the provincial government put down his official power and appealed to the conscience of the grassland with an open letter; in the grassland, the ruthless bandits gave up robbery and upheld the righteousness, and used secret protection to complete the westward journey of the reading seeds. Some people say that if a scholar is weak, how can he stand up to the troubled times? But open the pages of the book, and you will see: Wen Yiduo is still sketching despite his feet in the mud, Zeng Zhao is still in character despite his ragged clothes, Huang Yu is working hard to protect the team on his birthday and night; young students are reciting the Book of Songs by the campfire, supporting each other on the dangerous road, remembering the people's sentiments beside the starvation, and gritting their teeth in the miasma. For sixty-eight days, we slept in the open, suffered from hunger and cold, but no one was robbed by bandits, no one retreated halfway, and no one died in the troubled times. This is not a dusty historical archive, but a hot spiritual epic. It describes the brilliance of human nature in troubled times: officials and bandits are in conflict but give in to each other for the sake of righteousness, scholars are in poverty but have ambitions to save the country, and people are poor but still have good intentions. It allows us to understand: In the darkest moments, the Chinese people have never lost their conscience and responsibility - the loyalty of tough bandits is the Chinese character engraved in the blood; the scholar's journey to the west is the cultural obsession engraved in the bones; the official's love is the responsibility of the family and the country engraved in the soul.