Reporter | Pan Wenjie
Edit | Yellow Moon
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"Some people say that the Forbidden City is the Forbidden City, some people say that the Forbidden City is a museum, and some people say that the Forbidden City is an ancient building, but I think that the museum, ancient buildings, cultural relics and documents and archives of the Forbidden City are not separated from each other, and the Forbidden City is a cultural whole." Zheng Xinmiao, author of "Taihe Full of People: Zheng Xinmiao Says the Forbidden City" and former director of the Palace Museum, said. At the launch of the new book with the theme of "The Forbidden City and Cultural Heritage", Zheng Xinmiao and Shan Jixiang, the two directors of the Palace Museum, had a dialogue.
As the director of the Palace Museum for ten years, Zheng Xinmiao told the history and culture carried by the Forbidden City in "Taihe Full". During his tenure, Zheng Xinmiao once opened the overhaul of the Forbidden City, and carried out a 7-year-long cultural relics cleanup, for the first time to find out the "home foundation" of more than 1.8 million national treasures in the Forbidden City. In the activity, he talked about how his overall understanding of "there is no cultural relics in the Qing Palace" played a role in the process of finding out the family background, and also mentioned how the Forbidden City as a cultural whole has been constantly changing in history, and how this change reflects the characteristics of the times.
The Forbidden City has witnessed historical change rather than set in stone
"The Forbidden City of the Ming and Qing Dynasties is the most complete palace built in Chinese history in accordance with the provisions of the traditional "Kao Gong Ji" for the palace, and it can be said that it is the palace that best meets the hopes and imaginations of the ancients." Zheng Xinmiao said that the regulations include the front and back sleeping, the left ancestor and the right society, that is, the first half of the palace is the place where the Tianzi goes up to the court and holds the grand ceremony, and behind the former dynasty is the place where the Tianzi and the concubines live; the left side of the palace is the ancestral temple, which is the place where the Tianzi worships the ancestors; the right side of the palace is the shezhen, where the prince sacrifices the god of land and the god of food. But the palace is not static, Zheng Xinmiao told the audience, the Qing Dynasty retained the basic rules of the Ming Palace, but also made many changes, such as more gardens and stages.
The Forbidden City is a world of gods and Buddhas, and the different buildings built in the Forbidden City during the Ming and Qing dynasties reflect the changes in the concept of gods and Buddhas. Zheng Xinmiao also said that the construction of the Forbidden City not only involves Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, and even folk religion. During the Yongzheng period, the City God Temple was established in the northwest corner, and the minotaur noodles in it existed until the Cultural Revolution. Since the traffic at that time mainly relied on horses, the Qianlong Emperor also built a horse temple. The Ming Dynasty attached great importance to Taoism, and the existing two major roads in the palace, the Qin'an Hall and the Xuanqiong Treasure Hall, are the remains of the Ming Dynasty; after the Qing Dynasty, there were quite a few Buddhist halls in Tibetan Buddhism. There are now 30 Tibetan Buddhist buddhist halls that are intact, and because of this, the study of Tibetan Buddhism in the Forbidden City has characteristics and status both at home and abroad.
The Forbidden City not only witnessed the changes of the Ming and Qing dynasties, but also witnessed the very special era in the history of cultural exchanges between China and the West at the end of the Ming and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty. There is a clock hall in the Forbidden City, which contains some very exquisite Western clocks, which are the physical evidence of communication. Zheng Xinmiao said that since the end of the Ming Dynasty, missionaries have used these clocks to open the gates of the Forbidden City. But cultural exchanges did not stop there, and many of the missionaries to China had a wealth of knowledge and were quite accomplished, and they played an important role in calendar, painting, music, mathematics, architecture, diplomacy, etc. Even in terms of instruments, clocks and watches were only one aspect, and the missionaries brought other scientific instruments. For example, the Kangxi Emperor reused Western missionaries to train surveyors and mappers, and purchased geodesy and mapping instruments from Western countries to make longitude and latitude surveys of all of China, producing a nationwide accurate map of the Imperial Public Opinion. But in Zheng Xinmiao's view, it is a pity that the Kangxi Emperor liked science and technology only as a personal hobby, although several sets of books were published at that time to sort out the scientific and technological knowledge of Chinese and Western mathematics and science, and included them in the "Four Libraries", but he did not promote these technologies.
Zheng Xinmiao
China Encyclopedia Publishing House 2022 spent seven years counting the cultural relics of the Forbidden City
The 7-year-long cleaning of cultural relics was a work that had a great influence on Zheng Xinmiao when he was in office. At the event site, he said that the Forbidden City has experienced a total of six cultural relics inventory. The first began at the end of 1924, because there was no concept of cultural relics at that time, so it was called the Qing Palace Objects Inspection, this inventory laid the foundation for the establishment of the Palace Museum; the second time began in May 1933, because of the outbreak of the "September 18" incident in 1931, the northeast fell, and Yi Peiji, the first president of the Palace Museum, proposed to move the cultural relics south to Shanghai. Zheng Xinmiao said that at that time, some people believed that Yi Peiji had stolen the treasure, which led to his later resignation. Ma Heng, the new president, believes that cultural relics should be cleared one by one, so he led the Forbidden City office in Shanghai to conduct an inventory of more than 13,000 boxes of cultural relics in Shanghai. "It was done in great detail, and some of the artifacts were depicted in weight and appearance," some of which were also identified as true or false. Zheng Xinmiao believes that Ma Heng's great feature is that after the Lugou Bridge incident, he let the cultural relics that were moved south were moved west in three ways, taking different routes to Reach Sichuan, Chongqing, and Shaanxi. ”
The third inventory of cultural relics in the Forbidden City was carried out in the late cultural revolution; the fourth was carried out after the construction of the basement of the Forbidden City was completed in the late 1990s; and the fifth inventory of cultural relics was carried out after Zheng Xinmiao served as the director and lasted for seven years. In Zheng Xinmiao's view, the most critical problem he solved in this inventory is the definition of cultural relics. He believes that "there is nothing in the Qing Palace that is not a cultural relic." For example, the Forbidden City has more than 10,000 scripts of singing operas, various costumes and props. In the past, costumes were considered cultural relics, but what was worn on the head and on the feet was not considered cultural relics, but in his definition, these were important for the study of drama, so they were all cultural relics. In the past, the words written by Qianlong were not even cultural relics materials, which made him sigh: "Many things are first-class in other museums, but at that time they were not considered cultural relics here." ”
For Zheng Xinmiao, even if it is not valuable in the Forbidden City, it is a treasure. At the event site, he also gave a few examples: on both sides of the square in front of the Taihe Hall, there are several white lines, which look ordinary, but in fact, it is the location map of the sequence of civil and military officials when the Forbidden City held the grand ceremony. For example, the table in the famous military aircraft office is made of elm wood, which does not look valuable, but there is a deep cultural meaning behind it - the hierarchical concept of the feudal era means that courtiers cannot use the same material as the emperor, "The seemingly ordinary objects in the Forbidden City may be associated with some concepts and rules and regulations." ”
This inventory of cultural relics during Zheng Xinmiao's tenure can be said to have "truly found out the family's bottom". At different stages of his tenure, someone always asked him, how many cultural relics are there in the Forbidden City? Zheng Xinmiao's answer to this is sometimes "more than nine hundred thousand", and sometimes "nearly one million", precisely because it has not yet been clarified.
Zheng Xinmiao
The sixth inventory of cultural relics was carried out during Shan Jixiang's tenure. Shan Jixiang sighed at the event site: "Dean Zheng Xinmiao did not know how many cultural relics there were when he took office, but in 2012, I knew how many there were on the first day of my appointment. This is all counted by Zheng Xinmiao in seven years. Shan Jixiang said that Zheng Xinmiao's ten years as president were "the best ten years for the development of the Forbidden City." Not only because of the cleaning up of cultural relics, but also because Zheng Xinmiao began the 18-year overall maintenance and protection project of the Forbidden City as soon as she took office, and completed 1200 of them, facing great challenges in terms of talents, materials and systems. On the other hand, "because we did not collect rent and utility bills, many foreign units at that time did not leave in the Forbidden City", which was invited out by President Zheng Xinmiao's family. So Shan Jixiang said: "President Zheng left me a complete Forbidden City. ”