Nine years ago in July, the Zunyi Hailongtun site was included in the list of world cultural heritage. The site is the remains of the administrative and living center settlement of "Tusi", and is the precious material evidence of the "Tusi system", and its historical and cultural value and the details of its archaeological achievements have attracted much attention from the world.
In April 2012, Li Fei, who is currently the director of the Guizhou Provincial Museum and the deputy director of the Guizhou Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, began to preside over the archaeological excavation of the Hailongtun site. He led a group of young archaeological team members to Hailongtun and lived in Hoarding for 10 years.
Restore the layout of the new palace
"When I first went up the mountain, where did I start working on such a big mountain? Quite hopefully sighed. Li Fei recalled. After much consideration, the archaeological team chose the new royal palace as a breakthrough. They have been excavating the area of the New Palace for three consecutive years, and they have also investigated many places in the surrounding area, and have made many important discoveries.
New Royal Palace.
Folklore has it that the construction of the new palace in Hailongtun was due to the lack of water in the old palace, so Tusi moved his office to the new palace. Through archaeological excavations, Li Fei and the archaeological team members found that the new palace should indeed be a Tusi office built during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty. It has a total area of about 20,000 square meters, and the pattern is very clear: through the central axis, there is the gate above, then the instrument gate, the east and west compartments on the left and right, the courtyard in the middle, and then the lobby and the second hall. There is no written record of this part, but through the comparison of the relevant materials of the Ming Dynasty Administration, plus the location and structure of each house in the entire site, combined with the relics unearthed inside, it can still roughly restore its function at that time. On the morning of the sixth day of the sixth lunar month in 1600, Tusi Yang Yinglong hanged himself in the new palace, and the place where he committed suicide was Tusi's bedroom.
Li Fei believes that Yang Yinglong's rebuilding of Hailongtun should be carried out on the basis of the inherent pattern, that is, the overall pattern of the existing Hailongtun may have been laid when it was built in the late Southern Song Dynasty. It has a lot in common with other castles of the same period. The outermost is the surrounding wall, which is called the Great City in ancient texts. The east city wall winds down from the top, outflanks from the northeast to the south of the city, and connects with the cliff in the southeast corner, using the mountain danger to form a closed space similar to the urn city. In addition, there are small buildings, warehouses, water prisons, etc., there are copper pillars, iron pillars, flying dragons, flying phoenixes, Chaotian, Wan'an and other nine passes in front of the hoard, there are parapet walls between each passes, and they stretch for more than ten miles with the mountain. "The structure of Hailongtun is like the word 'Bu' on a radish, obliquely inserted between history and reality."
Chaotian Pass and Feifeng Pass.
Exquisite blue and white porcelain tiles
There are more than 10,000 pieces of blue and white porcelain pieces unearthed from the kitchen of the new palace, and the archaeological team members have mapped and numbered the unearthed locations of most of the porcelain pieces, and after entering the room, they have been put together according to the number, and a total of more than 200 relatively complete pieces of porcelain have been restored. In this way, the scene of the collapse of the house due to the war and the splashing of porcelain pieces are also restored through archaeological means.
The process of restoration of the excavated artifacts was lengthy, and some fragments were no longer found. Most of the porcelain unearthed in this kitchen is blue and white porcelain from Jingdezhen, and some of the porcelain is official-style porcelain, which is very exquisite in workmanship.
One of the most memorable cultural relics for Li Fei is the Gong Dao Cup, which was unearthed with several fragments of inscriptions written on the outer wall, which have been piled up on the cultural relics shelf. One day, Li Fei wanted to prove the siphon principle used by the fair cup, so he found a disposable cup, drilled a hole in the bottom, inserted a U-shaped hose for drinking milk, poured water into the cup, poured it little by little, and put it in the cup, and once the water submerged the upper end of the U-shaped tube, the water instantly ran empty.
Everyone cheered, checked a lot of information, and finally repaired this fair cup. The old man sitting in the middle is a U-shaped tube in his body, with two holes, one at the bottom of the old man and the other on the outer bottom of the cup, forming a height difference. When the water reaches the old man's shoulder, the water slowly drains away.
"This piece of blue and white porcelain from Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province during the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, although there is a little bit of a deficiency due to too much missing, but it does not affect the value of this cultural relic, and it does not affect our appreciation of the life philosophy of 'humble benefit, full of losses'." Li Fei said.
Eat and enjoy life
When Hailongtun was breached, the fire burned out. What is recorded is that most of the "thieves' wealth" seized by the officers and soldiers were bronze drums, armor, saddle sheaths, swords, etc. Because no one paid attention to the porcelain, it left tens of thousands of pieces of blue and white porcelain fragments for today, including pine, plum, bamboo, chrysanthemum, orchid, lotus, peach, dragon, phoenix, crane, lion, tiger, leopard, fox, fish, immortal, coat, distant mountain, house, pavilion and shadow, delicate and exquisite. According to the year at the bottom of the vessel, the blue and white porcelain produced in the new palace was first produced in the Xuande period, and the latest was in the Wanli period.
Mill Bay.
There are a number of artifacts signed with the "Xuande Year of the Ming Dynasty" in the unearthed blue and white porcelain pieces, and the archaeologists will clean and dry the broken porcelain one by one, and then divide them into several categories according to the ornamentation, and the pieces are conjugated. It's an intellectual puzzle that tests patience. Li Fei said: "I spent three days carefully putting together a beautiful goblet with a phoenix motif, and dozens of blue and white pieces the size of a coin belonged to me in only one place, and I had to put it back in its place. There are indeed many dragon and phoenix patterns on the blue and white porcelain shards, which is evidence of the suspicion of transgression in regulation and decoration, or whether it is the proper thing of the toast in a corner of peace, it is still difficult to determine. ”
What does Toast eat in Hailongtun? According to Li Fei, during the cleaning of the new palace, three kitchen ruins were found, and the brick stove was dilapidated, and if it were not for the ashes, charcoal shavings, broken utensils and exquisite stone basins scattered around it, it would not have been thought that this was a kitchen anyway. "In one room, in addition to the above-mentioned objects, fragments of iron pots were found next to the stove, the same shape as today's woks with handles. We also found food residues, rice, millet, soybeans, etc., and more delicious foods can only be known by analyzing and identifying the residues on the utensils or occasionally spilled on the ground. "Archaeologists have taken samples of all the soil in the kitchen in order to reconstruct as much as possible the taste of the toast from more than 400 years ago. From an archaeological point of view, these discoveries can become important topics for "botanical archaeology" and "zooarchaeology".
Embroidery Building.
Toast naturally also wants to drink wine and tea and enjoy life. Adjacent to the kitchen may have been the Tusi Bedchamber, many of which were so exquisite that only the owner of the new palace could use them. "From the tableware, good wine is indispensable on the toast table, and the goblet decorated with dragon patterns and the holding pot with flowing water are prepared for this purpose. Kimchi jars show that pickled foods are also indispensable. There are also many cups that are slightly larger than wine glasses, possibly tea sets. Full of wine and food, drinking tea and playing chess in the attic between the lush forests and bamboos, it couldn't be more comfortable......" Li Fei restored the life picture of Tusi in Hailongtun from the perspective of archaeologists.
Source: Tianyan News