There are many types of terrain in China, but there is only one Hexi Corridor, and there are so many legends in this land.
Located in today's Gansu Province, the Hexi Corridor is also likened to a corridor because it is located west of the Yellow River and is about 1,000 kilometers long from east to west, while the distance between north and south is relatively narrow, and the nearest distance is only a few kilometers.
There is a surging river in the east, and the towering peaks are reflected in the green mountains and forests; There is ice and snow in the south, the ice and snow wonders are amazing on the roof of the plateau, there is a vast pasture in the west, the wind blows the grass and sees the cattle and sheep in the green field, there are thousands of miles of yellow sand in the north, and the sunset is lonely and the smoke hangs in the curtain of the Gobi Yanran.
This is the Hexi Corridor, here is the Yumen Pass where the "spring breeze" can not be passed, and it is also the Yangguan where the "old people" are difficult to leave, and it is also the ancient Liangzhou where "the drunk and lying on the battlefield Jun Mo smiled, and a few people returned to fight in ancient times". This mysterious and legendary corridor, like a splendid ribbon stretching for thousands of miles, connects China with the entire Eurasian continent, and has once performed magnificent poems that resonate with the heart.
Wuwei Tianti Mountain Grottoes Image source: Visual China (the same below)
From the perspective of a large geographical unit, the northern part of the Hexi Corridor is the Mongolia Plateau, separated by the Horsehair Mountain, Heli Mountain and Longshou Mountain, the southern part is the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, bounded by the Qilian Mountains, the western part is bordered by the Tarim Basin, and the eastern part is connected to the Loess Plateau.
It is the window for the Central Plains civilization to explore the mysterious Western Regions, the core passage of the ancient Silk Road, and the entangled and blurred dividing line between the nomadic civilization in the inland plateau and the agricultural civilization in Guanzhong.
Here, there has been the impassioned blood of the battlefield, the thrill of hollowing out the unknown territory, and the communication and spread of Eurasian civilization again and again.
The Hexi Corridor has witnessed so much, and it really became the focus of history when two civilizations clashed.
Lose my Qilian Mountain
The Hexi Corridor was once the happy home of the Yueshi people, under the sound of the Xiongnu Mao Dun Shan Yu, the Yueshi people fled to distant Central Asia, and the vast grassland irrigated by the melting snow water on the Qilian Mountains became the "land of milk and honey" for the Xiongnu nomadic cattle and sheep.
A sea of rape flowers at the foot of Qilian Mountain
The Qilian Mountains run from northwest to southeast, including Daxue Mountain, Tuolai Mountain, Tuolai South Mountain, Yema South Mountain, Shule South Mountain, Danghenan Mountain, Tuergen Daban Mountain, Qaidam Mountain and Zongwulong Mountain. The mountain peaks are mostly 4000~5500 meters above sea level, most of the peaks are covered with snow all year round, and the modern glaciers in the high mountainous areas above 4500-5000 meters above sea level in the Qilian Mountains are developed, and the landform types of modern glaciers and paleoglaciation are rich. The ice and snow formed over thousands of years have brought abundant and clear iceberg meltwater to the Hexi Corridor at the foot of the Qilian Mountains, allowing rivers to rush down the mountain valleys, and alluvial patches of oasis grasslands that can be used for farming and pasture on the semi-arid wasteland that should be barren.
Qilian Mountains, Bansel Peak, Yushiliang Mountain
Liangzhou words meaning
Glacial meltwater and groundwater form three independent inland river systems in the Hexi Corridor, namely Shiyang River, Heihe River and Shule River, and divide the Hexi Corridor into Wuwei-Minqin Basin, Jiuquan-Zhangye Basin and Anxi-Dunhuang Basin, each of which gives birth to its own independent development of oasis irrigation areas.
In the easternmost end of the Hexi Corridor Shiyang River with a total length of more than 250 kilometers, the river basin covers Wuwei, Jinchang, Zhangye and Baiyin in Gansu Province today, the upper reaches of Shiyang River are mountain rivers, each tributary of the mountain area cuts through the mountains when they go out of the mountain, forms a canyon, enters the corridor plain after going out of the mountain, the river channel is radial on the alluvial and alluvial fans, the water leakage is serious, and the river water is cut off. The underground undercurrent flows out of the alluvial fan at the front edge of the alluvial fan into a spring water channel (Nan, Beisha River, Wuniuba River), flows north from Wuwei City, merges into Shiyang River (Shiyang River), enters the Minqin Oasis, continues to the northeast, and finally submerges into the northern part of the Minqin Basin between Badain Jarin and Tengger Desert.
Shiyanghe National Wetland Park, Minqin County, Wuwei, Gansu Province
Shiyang River gave birth to a rich and colorful ancient Liangzhou culture, according to legend, the Huns built a tall "Hutu Wang City" on the side of the Shiyang River, and then pacified the Han people in Hexi to establish Wuwei County, one of the four counties of Hexi, "Han Shu" records: "Wuwei County, so the Huns Hugh Tu Wangdi." Later generations of civilization of Liangzhou Guzang city also came into being, since the Han Dynasty to the five dynasties, here has become the capital of the five Liang countries (Qianliang, Houliang, South Liang, North Liang and Da Liang), in the North and South Dynasties when the Central Plains war, Liangzhou was once the hope of the Central Plains civilization inheritance. Mr. Chen Yinke, a historian of the Republic of China, also gave a very high evaluation of the former Liang of Dingdu Liangzhou:
"In the northwest corner of Qinliang Prefecture, its culture continues the academic style of the Han and Wei dynasties and the Western Jin Dynasty, and opens the systems of the Wei and Qi dynasties and the Sui and Tang dynasties.
It is no exaggeration to say that it is the spark of Chinese civilization retained by Qianliang that has become the cultural gene of the prosperous era of the Tang Dynasty.
Yanzhi Mountain is on the weak waterside
As the corridor continues to the west, climb over the Yanzhi Mountain, which can make the Xiongnu women extremely "beautiful", Yanzhi Mountain produces a kind of safflower, made of dye, and looks good on the woman's face, so the Huns call this flower rouge, and the good-looking woman is called 阏氏 (yān zhī), such as the wife of the Xiongnu tribal leader Shan Yu is called 阏氏. "Yanzhi", "Rouge" and "Yanshi", the ancient Xiongnu language has left an evocative story for this mountain and river.
At the foot of the mountain is the famous Shandan Military Horse Farm, when the Western Han Dynasty's Huo Qubing repelled the Xiongnu, in Zhangye under the Qilian Mountain set up a royal military horse farm - Shandan Military Horse Farm. Since then, the Shandan Military Horse Farm has been the royal horse farm of all dynasties and generations, and has been valued and controlled by the royal family of various dynasties for a long time, until now, it is still the military horse production area of the mainland, after the disintegration of the Don River Horse Farm in the former Soviet Union, the Shandan Military Horse Farm has become the world's largest military horse farm. Since the time of Huo Qu's disease in 121 B.C., the history of horse breeding here has been more than 2,000 years.
What nourishes this magical mountain meadow is the largest river in the Hexi Corridor, the Heihe, which once had a mysterious and touching name: "weak water". "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" has a saying: "There is an abyss of weak water under Kunlun Mountain." "The ancients once called Qilian Mountain also known as Kunlun Mountain, because of this. And where does the name weak water come from? Because the weak water rushes down from the Qilian Mountain, all the way through the mountains and mountains, its east and west are between the Great Yellow Mountain and Jiayuguan, most of the basin area is a gravel desert and a gravel desert, the northern edge is distributed with many sand dunes, the surface light is strong, the evaporation is very large, so the river is hidden from time to time, the water flows on the ground when there is a lot of water, the water is shallow and turbulent, when the water is small, it is drilled to the ground to form a dark river, when the people think that the water power of this river is too weak, there is no buoyancy, and it cannot carry a boat, so it is called weak water.
"Dream of Red Mansions" has a saying: "Let the weak water be 3,000, I will only take one scoop to drink." This is a story from a Buddhist scripture, Jia Baoyu borrows this allusion here to express his love for Lin Daiyu, and the weak water at this time has become a reference to the sinister and distant river. For example, in the twenty-second chapter of "Journey to the West", there is a poem describing the danger of the quicksand river in the twenty-second chapter of "Eight Commandments vs. Quicksand River, Wooden Fork Receives Enlightenment and Purification": "Eight hundred quicksand realms, three thousand weak water depths, goose feathers can't float, and the reeds sink at the bottom." This is the first official statement of "three thousand weak waters", and in the later biography of Journey to the West, there is a saying that only Marshal Zhu Bajie of Tianpeng can pass through weak water in the heavenly realm, and it also cites the original meaning of the ancients about weak water and danger.
The source of the Heihe River in Qilian Mountain National Park
At that time, Huo Quzhi, who collected Hexi for the Han Dynasty, commanded the elite troops, and chose to make a big bend along the mountains in the north of the Hexi Corridor, and finally suddenly appeared from the banks of the Ejina River and Juyan Sea in the northwest of the Hexi Corridor, and then traced the source along the weak water all the way up, and smashed the rear of the Huns.
Thanks to the combined effects of glaciers, snowmelt, rain and forest conservation, the Heihe River is abundant in water and flows continuously throughout the year. Every summer when the upper reaches are rainy and the icebergs melt, the water level of the Heihe River (weak water) rises sharply, the river water that pours in from the Qilian Mountains rushes and rushes towards the Juyanhai area of the Ejina Banner, the whole journey is more than 800 kilometers, and the "Jin Zhangye" between Zhangye, Linze, Gaotai and Jiuquan is an important agricultural area in Hexi along the way. The ancients had a poem that said, "If you don't look at the snow on the top of Qilian Mountain, you mistake Zhangye for Jiangnan."
Ejina poplar forest
A dream in Dunhuang
After crossing the Jiayu Pass, the mysterious and different Hexi Corridor finally showed a hint of the color of the Western Regions, and the continuous Gobi and sand dunes became the background color here.
Mingsha Mountain
Among them, the only water source is the Shule River located at the western end of the Hexi Corridor, which originates between the Tuolai Nanshan and Shule Nanshan in the western section of the Qilian Mountains, and is a lonely river across Qinghai, Gansu and Xinjiang provinces, with a total length of more than 500 kilometers. The Shule River first gushes out of the Changma Gorge in Yumen City, Gansu Province, then turns around and goes westward, passing through Yumen City and Guazhou County to Dunhuang City, where it joins the tributary Dang River and continues westward from Yumen Pass into the vast Tarim Basin in Xinjiang.
Shule River
Although it is the western end of the Hexi Corridor, it was once a fortress of Chinese civilization, and when the rich passage of the Hexi Corridor was cut off, the exiled people gathered here to fight the enemy in a difficult environment and shape their own cultural beliefs. As the leader of the Han people in Hexi, Zhang Yichao of the Guiyi Army was a hero in this land, who turned the tide in a desperate situation and regarded Chang'an as an unchanging faith in his heart. His descendants took Sha and Gua as the core, and established the Guiyi Army in the Shule River Valley for nearly two hundred years, and it was the endless Chinese culture and blood here that supported them. Just like the enduring flying sky in the Mogao Grottoes, it is also like the crescent spring that exists only in the yellow sand, telling the world about the temperament and resilience of Chinese civilization.
The historical and cultural resources carried by the Hexi Corridor are undoubtedly heavy, and this land has witnessed the hegemony of the Han and Tang dynasties, and has also accompanied the Chinese civilization through the trough of the Great Division. Today, under the influence of the western development and the "Belt and Road" initiative, the Hexi Corridor has fully explored its own historical and cultural resources and publicized natural and cultural wonders such as Mogao Grottoes and Danxia landforms, and once again embarked on a new journey of development.
Colorful Danxia
First of all, the construction of transportation lines such as the Lanxin high-speed railway has made Zhangye, Jiuquan and other places become important hubs for commercial and trade between China's east and west and even China and Central Asia.
A high-speed train running in the sea of rape flowers at the foot of Qilian Mountain in Menyuan, Qinghai
Secondly, the murals of the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang show the achievements of the cultural exchanges and integration between the East and the West in ancient times, and the richness of the clay colored sculptures and murals in them is the result of the local elites in Hexi paying attention to culture and education in the Wuliang and even Sui and Tang dynasties, and constantly absorbing foreign cultures such as Buddhism. Finally, the oasis scenery nourished by the snow and water of the Qilian Mountains not only makes people feel like they are in the water towns south of the Yangtze River, but also records the ambition of the Central Plains Dynasty to open up and consolidate the frontier again and again.
History and reality complement each other, the Hexi Corridor was very beautiful yesterday, and the future will be even more brilliant.
(Source: National History of Humanities)