The Legend of Jintang
2 min readThe fourth largest island in the Zhoushan archipelago, Jintang is the fi rst islandin the Dinghai territory to realize food self-suffi ciency. It may be groundless to say it was one of the fi rst places to be populated in Zhoushan, but the island’s long-time affl uence is a perfect illustration of the fact that the confl uence of rivers always promises to be a land of cornucopia.
Before the archipelago’s ‘ sea-spanning’ era, Zhoushan and the inland had been separated by the sea for only God knows how long; and the island of Jintang has long been the’ gateway’ to the Zhenhai district (in the coastal city of Ningbo)-the fi rst stop of an inland expedition in the Yangtze River Delta. The ‘ gate on the sea’ is also a witness of how a declining dynasty held fast to its territorial sea till its last breath. Despite its shameful governmental impotence, the Southern Song emperors at least had one thing to take pride in -the far-sightedness in sea defense that eclipsed all other dynasties in the feudal history of China.
The last ruler of the Southern Song empire was not the only one to be cornered into this ‘ gate on the sea’ amidst social and political upheaval. It was also in this isolated space between the straits and capes that the Southern Ming(1644-1662 a loyalist movement that was active in southern China following the Ming dynasty’s collapse in 1644) walked into an impasse and met its doom. In his last eight years, commander Zhang Mingzhen exerted his faith and blood in the death struggle of Minloyalism, leaving a tragic chapter in the history book of Jintang. The yearnings of his unfulfi 1led soul can still be heard by today’s people from the furious billows.
Today，the’gate on the sea’is the bridgehead of one of the world’s architectural wonders and the frontline of China’s new millennium of marine economy.
