The Xian hills are associated in the novel’s closing historical material with Yang Hu’s attachment to the landscape and with the public mourning that followed his death. His memory is anchored there in a temple and a stele: a local place of recreation becomes a site where the living commemorate a respected man and continue to express their loss.

Setting and Association

The account identifies the Xian hills as a place Yang Hu loved to visit on horseback. It does not describe the hills’ geography in detail; their significance comes instead from this personal association and from what the people of Xiangyang did after Yang Hu died. The landscape thus serves as the setting for his remembrance rather than as a stage for a narrated campaign or battle.

Memorial and Public Memory

After Yang Hu’s death, the people of Xiangyang built a temple and carved a stele in his honor. Visitors came to pray there each season. The monument’s name, the Stele of Tears, arose from the response of those who read it: they wept. The memorial joins place, ritual, and repeated public grief, making Yang Hu’s absence perceptible across successive visits.

Literary Remembrance

A short poem evokes the approach to Yang’s temple at dawn and the spring landscape on the Xian hills, where only fragments of stone remain. Its closing image connects dew falling from the pines with the tears of those who still miss him. In the novel’s broader practice, poetry supplies a reflective aftervoice to historical events; here, the landscape and memorial carry the emotion of mourning beyond the account of Yang Hu’s death. The hills matter not for a change in political control but as the setting where local remembrance gives private attachment a lasting public form.