It can be said that the Southern Song Dynasty is a rare history of humiliation among China's feudal dynasties, and it can be called the most tragic dynasty in history. Any dynasty has its rise and fall, but the Southern Song Dynasty did not have a time to raise its eyebrows. There were a total of six orthodox emperors in the Southern Song Dynasty, and three "child emperors" who were exiled and oppressed, and although they had the name of the Son of Heaven, they lived very depressed and never had a moment of vigor.
On the surface, they hold the monarchy and hold the country, but their country is only a corner of the south. In the face of the invasion and oppression of the foreigners, in addition to bowing to them and paying compensation for the land, the Southern Song Dynasty court simply could not come up with any effective strategy. In addition, the imperial Chinese Wu'er deceived himself, and the powerful ministers controlled the government of the dynasty, and even toyed with the emperor between the palms of his hands.
Speaking of this, some friends may feel that The Great Sui is not miserable? Was the Eastern Han Dynasty miserable? Why talk about the Southern Song Dynasty alone?
Although the Sui and Eastern Han Dynasties were sad and close, at least these two dynasties had a prosperous time. The Southern Song Dynasty and the Zhao royal family that ruled the Southern Song Dynasty never saw the appearance of the prosperous world, and finally ended up with the desolate end of the destruction of the country and the death of the family, and survived in decay for a hundred years. It can be said that no dynasty is more miserable than the Southern Song Dynasty.
If the rulers of the small court of the Southern Song Dynasty were like modern people understand, they were in a corner of peace and doing nothing, just like a puppet government during the Republic of China, they did not deserve sympathy. The six orthodox emperors of the Southern Song Dynasty all had the ambition to restore the country, and they also wanted to work hard to restore the prosperity of the great Song Dynasty. Every emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty dreamed of how to recover the lost land and raise the army to shame.
From this point of view, the most affirmative and tragic point of the Southern Song Emperors is that they did not lose their national integrity and national concept, but unfortunately all their efforts were useless. Throughout the history of the Southern Song Dynasty, the Emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty also organized several large-scale revenge battles. However, at that time, the opponents of the Southern Song Dynasty were all militarily powerful, so that the Northern Expedition of the Southern Song Dynasty repeatedly ended in failure. In successive years of defeat, the ambitions of the Southern Song Dynasty were worn away bit by bit, and eventually they collapsed and lost all morale.
At that time, how big was the gap between the military strength of the Southern Song Dynasty and the enemy countries?
We know that the cavalry of the Jin Dynasty and the Mongols were extremely strong in combat, and when the cavalry of the two countries killed from the north with absolute mobility advantage and fired fiercely at the Song army with strong bows, the Southern Song army, which was mainly infantry, could not be overwhelmed at all. Just as the so-called backwardness is to be beaten, the result of being beaten is that humiliation will come suddenly. The six emperors of the Southern Song Dynasty could not be buried in the ancestral tombs of the Zhao clan after their deaths, and could only be buried on the outskirts of Shaoxing. I believe that every Chinese with strong national concepts will involuntarily remember the history of humiliation after seeing the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty.
In 1131, Emperor Gaozong of Song was twenty-four years old and sat on the dragon chair for only four years. Due to the funeral of Empress Longyou, the construction of the imperial tomb became a top priority. Prior to this, the emperors of the Song Dynasty were buried in Gongyi County, Henan Province, which is the ancestral tomb of the Zhao clan of the Song Dynasty. Unfortunately, the former imperial tomb has long been reduced to an enemy-occupied area, and the descendants of the Zhao clan cannot "fall leaves and return to their roots". In order to select a new mausoleum site, Zhao Sent Yang Hua, a servant of the Ceremonial Department, to inspect Jiangnan and survey the treasure land of feng shui.
We know that most of the mountainous areas in Zhejiang are in line with feng shui. Unfortunately, Yang Hua was short-sighted and chose a small ravine seventeen kilometers away from Shaoxing, which also laid the groundwork for the later excavation of the Southern Song Emperor's mausoleum. There is a Taining Temple in the southeast of Shaoxing, Yang Hua came here, felt that the feng shui here was excellent, and spent many days in the Taining Temple. What is even more coincidental is that Taining Temple is the meritorious temple of Lu Tong, the ancestor of the great writer Lu You. Yang Hua believed that the construction of the imperial tomb in this place would certainly ensure the long-term prosperity of the Great Song Dynasty.
After Yang Hua returned to Beijing, he stated in the song chapter the reason why Taining Temple was suitable for building an imperial mausoleum, saying that Taining Temple was surrounded by mountains on all sides, and there were Qinglong, Purple Cloud, Lianwu, and Wufeng Mountain Arch Guard in the east, west, south, and north, which corresponded to the meaning of the former Suzaku and Hou Xuanwu Left Green Dragon and Right White Tiger. At the time of the country's difficulties, Zhao Zhuo also had no time to carefully consider the rationality of the mausoleum site, and seeing that Yang Hua's "report" was true, he immediately issued an edict and recruited the people to start the imperial tomb project.
Of course, the national strength of the Southern Song Dynasty could not be compared with the Northern Song Dynasty, and neither human nor material resources could meet the emperor's needs for the imperial tomb. In desperation, the project is simple, and it can be saved. Therefore, the specifications of the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty are very sloppy, with neither towering mausoleums nor majestic stone statues. Later generations called the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty "Saving Palace", which means temporary underground palace. According to historical records, in the mausoleum area of only 2.5 square kilometers, six Southern Song Emperors, as well as their concubines and favorites, were buried, and more than a hundred mausoleums were crammed into a narrow mausoleum area, which is rare in history.
To be fair, if it is a peaceful and prosperous world, Yang Hua's location is not to blame. At that time, it was a chaotic world, and the southern Song Dynasty's acres and three points of land were precarious, and when choosing a mausoleum, it should not care about the so-called feng shui, but should consider the concealment of the imperial tomb. After all, maybe one day the Southern Song Dynasty will collapse, and the foreign tribes that will enter the Central Plains at that time will let go of the tomb of the Southern Song Emperor? Obviously, neither Yang Hua nor Zhao Shuo considered this issue, and it is also possible that they did not predict the fall of the Southern Song Dynasty at all, so that later tragedies occurred.
In 1278, the iron hooves of the Yuan army stepped into Hangzhou and captured the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty. A few months later, Yang Zhenjia, the head of Buddhism in Jiangnan and a monk from the Western Regions, began to excavate and destroy the imperial tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty.
As we mentioned earlier, due to the lack of manpower and material resources, the specifications of the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty were very shabby, and the structure of the underground palace was not strong, and Yang Lian Zhenjia easily destroyed the tomb wall and entered the underground palace. The first to be excavated was the Yongmu Tomb of Zhao Yun of the Song Dynasty, and the tomb robbers only dug up the floating soil on the surface to easily find the location of the underground palace. We know that the boulders that the emperors have blocked the underground palace, and if there is no modern technology to open, no explosives to explode, it is difficult to open it and it is difficult to ascend to the sky. However, the sealing stone of The Yongmu Tomb was not strong, and the tomb robbers effortlessly pried open the palace door and drilled into the tomb passage.
It is said that although the Southern Song Dynasty was weak, the emperor was the emperor after all, why was the mausoleum built so shabby? It turned out that the Emperor of the Southern Song Dynasty spent all the money on the burial goods, so that everything in the mausoleum was simple and the burial was as usual. Judging from the specifications of the tomb of Emperor Lizong of Song, the construction of the underground palace of the Southern Song Emperor at that time was not solid. You know, when the tomb robbers of the past generations excavated the imperial tomb, they had to make a lot of effort, and even there were cases where a thousand people were dispatched to excavate for several months. Obviously, Yang Lian Zhenjia did not bother to excavate the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty. After Yang Lianzhen opened Song Lizong's coffin, several brilliant rays of light were emitted from the coffin, making the tomb robbers unable to open their eyes for a while.
It turned out that Song Lizong's coffin was full of gold and silver jewelry.
When the coffin was opened, Song Lizong had just been buried four years later, so his body was well preserved. Only to see Song Lizong come to life, like asleep, lying on the Qibao Fuhu pillow, with Yang Guifei's used yunqin at his feet, and a splendid silk mat under his body, and a shiny cool mat under the silk.
At that time, the grave robber unveiled this cool mat and accidentally dropped it on the ground, making a metal crashing sound. Yang Zhenjia picked up the cool mat and looked at it, and found that this cool mat was actually made of gold wire! Song Lizong could not have dreamed that the funerary goods he had saved from the mausoleum had now become the belongings of others. However, the doom that awaited him was not over.
In order to boast of his "achievements", Yang Lianzhenjia took out song Lizong's body and hung it upside down on a tree, until all the mercury in Song Lizong's stomach poured out, and then he removed it. Subsequently, Yang Lian Zhenjia saw that Song Lizong's head was as big as a fight, and he was so different from ordinary people that he broke his head and took it away as a trophy.
Subsequently, Yang Lian Zhenjia ordered someone to scrape off the rotten flesh on Song Lizong's head and polish the skull into a wine cup for treasure. As soon as someone visits Yang Lian Zhenjia, he will take out this special "wine glass" and show off to people. The reason why Yang Lian Zhenjia is so cruel is because there is such an ugly custom in the Western Regions, and the use of human skulls as wine glasses has the effect of warding off evil spirits and eliminating disasters. Yang Lian Zhenjia felt that the skull of ordinary people already had this miraculous effect, let alone the emperor's skull? Therefore, the skull of Song Lizong became a collection in the hands of Yang Lian Zhenjia.
Most of the tombs of the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty were looted by Yang Zhenjia, and historical records record that Yang Lianzhenjia and his men excavated a total of one hundred and one mausoleums, and the tombs of all the Southern Song Emperors, concubines, princes, princesses and some heroes were destroyed, and their bones were arbitrarily discarded in deep ditches, which was extremely miserable.
Perhaps Yang Zhenjia thought that this was not enough to satisfy his perverted psychology, so he ordered people to collect the bones of six emperors, pile their bones and cattle and horses in Lin'an City, and build a tower up to thirteen meters high on it. The people of Jiangnan could not bear to see, and the "Southern Song Dynasty Miscellaneous Poems" had clouds:
The Forbidden City thinks of the old holly, and a tower is like a mountain stuffed with zero.
Receiving the fish shadow incense bone case, from where to cry and cry.
Yang Zhenjia wanted to use this "art of victory" to suppress the foundation of the Southern Song Dynasty and make the Song Dynasty no longer have a day to turn over. For a time, the common people talked about this, and Jiangnan Shizi complained.
Perhaps because he was also the emperor of the Han Nationality, after Zhu Yuanzhang established the country, he ordered the restoration of the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty, and sent people to the Western Regions, where he spent a lot of money to buy back the skull of Song Lizong and re-buried it. Zhu Yuanzhang was ruthless in iron blood, but at least in this matter, Zhu Yuanzhang's approach was quite commendable. Zhu Yuanzhang ordered people to put new tombstones in front of each imperial tomb, and arranged for special personnel to guard the tomb. In order to prevent the common people from invading the resting place of the former emperors, Zhu Yuanzhang also demarcated a forbidden logging area outside the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty, so that a lush forest grew above the mausoleum area.
However, in the Qing Dynasty, the imperial court no longer paid attention to the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty, so that the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty were repeatedly looted by tomb robbers. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in order to raise military expenses, the Wang puppet regime carried out a final raid on the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty, destroying the Six Tombs of the Southern Song Dynasty at one time. Nowadays, we can only see some sparse ancient trees from the site of the mausoleum, telling us about the history of humiliation that cannot be looked back.
Resources:
【History of the Song Dynasty", "Miscellaneous Poems of the Southern Song Dynasty"】