Mengzi Wen Yiduo Memorial Pavilion

In the spring of 1938, the poet and scholar Wen Yiduo arrived in the border town of Mengzi. For nearly five months, he lived in a fourteen-square-meter room inside the Geros Firm, a European-style building near the water. He spent his nights studying classical Chinese literature under a dim lamp that bleached the walls. His colleague, Zheng Tianting, teased him for his isolation, calling him the 'Master of Why Not Go Downstairs.' When Wen Yiduo did leave his room, he walked along the cool, quiet shores of Nanhu and crossed to Song Island, an artificial islet where trees have grown for four hundred years. On this island, he discussed literature and the fate of a nation under threat.

Following his assassination in Kunming in 1946, the people of Mengzi preserved his memory. In the 1980s, a retired local activist named Mo Hanwen, alongside Southwest Associated University alumni and the local government, raised funds to build a permanent memorial on the island. In 1993, they unveiled the Mengzi Wen Yiduo Memorial Pavilion.

The classical Chinese pavilion stands next to a giant natural boulder, a rough stone representing Wen Yiduo's unyielding character. Beside it, a cold stone monument bears his words: 'The main gift of a poet is love, love for his motherland, love for his people.' The calligrapher Zhao Puchu brushed a couplet for the pavilion, comparing Wen Yiduo's life to a wax torch shedding tears for the human world. Today, the rustle of the island's leaves blends with the voices of visitors during the annual Nanhu Poetry Festival, where people gather to read poems aloud, keeping the scholar's voice alive.