"Before dawn the Kitchen God is received; firecrackers roar and clamor, urging the doors to open early. The newly painted Zhong Kui is hung first, the bright-red spring couplets gleam with gold. Atractylodes piles in the brazier, fragrance curling round; yellow-paper spirit tablets bear the Celestial Venerable's name. After the paper burns to ash, no one sweeps it away; when the sun slants west, people collapse drunk in their clothes~~"
January of the Solar Calendar was nearly over, while January of the lunar calendar was about to begin. One hundred and one able-bodied boat-household men carried their tools on shoulders and in hand, making very slow progress. The Ming cavalry escorting them also seemed to be dragging things out on purpose, taking their time, and they arrived at the Tieling military city exactly on New Year's Eve.
"The Tieling Guard city is the old city of Yin Prefecture from the Liao and Jin eras. Its walls measure four li and sixty paces around, two zhang high, with a moat one zhang and five chi deep, and three zhang wide."
The Liaodong Gazetteer began compilation in the eighth year of Zhengtong (1443) and was completed in the first year of Hongzhi (1488), and what it recorded was precisely the Tieling of this era. The walls of Tieling's military city were more than one li long and over six meters high, standing on a small rise of higher ground. Outside the city lay a moat nearly ten meters across, making it a proper small but sturdy "fortress." The military-household population inside the city and around it was about ten thousand, making it an important town in northern Liaodong second only to Kaiyuan. At this moment, the end-of-year crackle of firecrackers rose and fell inside and outside the military city, along with the