Nian Tang Yao
01
In the film and television dramas about the Kangxi and Yongzheng dynasties of the Qing Dynasty, the character of Nian Qianyao often appears. Indeed, General Nian Qianyao was the tyrant of that period. In his body, many thrilling, ups and downs of historical stories have been deduced.
Nian Tang Yao rong horse life, strategizing, galloping on the battlefield. He made great achievements in quelling the chaos in Tibet, especially in leading the Qing army to quell the Rebellion of Lobzang Danjin in Qinghai.
Nian Qianyao showed extraordinary talent in the Kangxi Dynasty, and he rose to the governor of Sichuan and the governor of Sichuan and Shaanxi. After the Yongzheng Emperor ascended the throne, Nian Qianyao was even more heavily relied upon, and was promoted to the rank of General of Fuyuan and promoted to the title of First Rank Duke. Usually, he received special favor from Yongzheng, and even his family was cared for by the emperor.
However, in the end, he was arrogant and arrogant because of his arrogance, and he did many perverse things. As a result, he was dismissed from his official position by the Yongzheng Emperor, stripped of his title, listed ninety-two major crimes, and imprisoned. Yong Zheng remembered Nian Qianyao's outstanding merits and extrajudicial grace, and gave him self-judgment in prison.
For a time, the great general Nian Tangyao, who was powerful and arrogant, was good at doing weifu, coupled with the alliance of the party for personal gain, did not know how to restrain himself, and eventually led to the destruction of his reputation and the destruction of his family, which was enough to warn future generations.
In film and television dramas, Nian Qianyao is often an arrogant and arrogant warrior image, but he is actually a literati who does learning. Nian Qianyao has been reading poetry since childhood, and has considerable talent and ambition.
In the 39th year of the Kangxi Dynasty, Nian Qianyao passed the imperial examination and passed the jinshi examination, and then was admitted to the Hanlin Academy and was given the official position of responsible for the revision of the history of the country. Nine years later, Nian Qianyao entered the emperor's advisory team and became a cabinet scholar, which was already an official title from Erpin.
Soon after, he was promoted to governor of Sichuan and became a powerful feudal official, when He was not yet 30 years old. Nian Qianyao's achievements are of course inseparable from his family origins.
02
Nian Qianyao's ancestral home was Huaiyuan, Anhui, and his ancestors later moved to the town of Northern Liaodong. In the late Ming Dynasty, his great-grandfather was forced into the flag by the Qing army. It was not until the Shunzhi period that Nian Qianyao's grandfather Nian Zhonglong passed the Jinshi examination, and the Nian family broke away from their inferior status and entered the Han army with a white flag. Three years later, Nian Zhonglong was released and became the governor of Hezhou, which is now Anhui And county, and the Nian family began to prosper.
Nian Qianyao's father was named Nian Lingling. At first, he was only a low-level official in charge of translating and copying Manchu Chinese documents and in charge of the departmental archives, "pen and post style", and by virtue of his family lineage, he was constantly promoted.
When he was 50 years old, he was an official to the Ministry of Works, and the inspector of Huguang. Three years later, he was promoted to governor of Huguang and became a feudal official. He was a clean and honest official all his life, low-key and diligent, and at the same time achieved remarkable political achievements. At the age of 62, Kangxi approved his retirement request and returned to Beijing for his retirement.
Later, he also assigned the younger daughter of the elderly to be the side Fujin of Yin Chan the Prince of Yong. When Prince Yong succeeded to the throne as the Yongzheng Emperor, the Lateral Fu Jinnian clan became the emperor's favorite concubine of the Dunsu Emperor.
The elderly second son Nian Qianyao was also sent to the inspectorate of Sichuan, gradually soaring, and later promoted to the governor of Sichuan and Shaanxi, becoming a great general of the Weizhen dynasty.
Little is known is the eldest son Nian Xiyao, who is old, but in fact, his achievements in other aspects are no less than the influence of his second brother Nian Xiangyao.
03
Nian Xiyao, like his father, also started from the pen style. In the Kangxi Dynasty, he was promoted to be a political envoy in Anhui. After Yongzheng ascended the throne, the Nian family naturally received special favors because of the relationship between the imperial concubines. With this relationship, Nian Xiyao became the inspector of Guangdong and the attendant of the Ministry of Works, and became a member of the imperial court.
Nian Xiyao
However, he does not seem to be competent for politics, is not good at being an official, and people do not have a high evaluation of him in the official arena. The Yongzheng Emperor also did not have much regard for this brother-in-law, and commented that he "had the disposition of a foolish prince".
In the third year of Yongzheng, the Nian family suffered major blows one after another. First, Nian Qianyao fell out of favor, was relieved of his post as viceroy of Sichuan and Shaanxi, handed over the seal of the general Fuyuan, and was transferred to the general of Hangzhou. He was then arrested and imprisoned for ninety-two major crimes. At the end of the year, the Nian family's patron, The Noble Concubine, fell ill and died at this time.
At the beginning of the following year, Nian Qianyao was given death. His sons, except for the second son Nianfu, who was killed for other crimes, were all sent to the remote cities of Yunnan and Guangxi, and the younger ones were distributed to the remote cities of Yunnan and Guangxi, and the younger ones were distributed after they were 15 years old. Moreover, the descendants of Nian Qianyao were never allowed to be employed as officials.
The fall of Nian Qianyao was connected to the entire family, and all the civil and military officials in the Nian family, whether in office or as alternates, were dismissed from their official posts. Nian Xiyao was naturally not spared, and was also deposed and raided.
People think that the Nian family is finished from now on. Who knew that after a few months, I don't know which nerve of Yongzheng was touched, and Nian Xiyao actually came to work again. Yongzheng appointed him as the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and entrusted him with the affairs of the royal family's food, clothing, housing, and transportation.
At this time, Nian Xiyao was already nearly a year old, and he had nothing to ask for for his career. Besides, after withstanding the previous blows, it is even more indifferent. He began to create another kind of excitement in his own life. From then on, Nian Xiyao threw himself into the writing of books without distraction, letting the world see a scientific and technological all-rounder comparable to the Song Dynasty scientist Shen Kuo.
04
The "stupid prince" in the eyes of the Yongzheng Emperor was actually a great wisdom and foolishness.
Nian Xiyao is knowledgeable and has a deep study of Chinese medicine. He often discussed medicine with friends, recorded new prescriptions when he encountered them, and verified them in the practice of treating diseases. Later, he compiled six volumes of "Nian Xiyao Collection of Good Recipes", which was divided into more than 50 categories such as health maintenance, emergency treatment, stroke prevention, typhoid fever, and cold. The selected columns are all empirical recipes with clinical practical value.
In addition, there are ten volumes of "Materia Medica", which divides the appendages in the "Compendium of Materia Medica" into more than 100 categories, and each class lists the diseases and the prescription drugs used. It is still published today.
Nian Xiyao was a calligrapher and painter who was good at painting landscapes, flowers and birds. Many of his paintings still survive.
Nian Xiyao paintings
Nian Xiyao likes music and has a special love for the guqin, and once worshiped under the door of Xu Changyu, a pianist in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, and was one of the descendants of the Guangling Qin School. He has a monograph on musical rhythm, "The Complete Book of Re-correction and Supplementation of Five-Square Vowels", which studied and supplemented the common rhyme dictionary "Five-Square Vowels" at that time. In addition, he also has a score.
Nian Xiyao was also a historian, and he compiled a book on the Chronology of Chinese history based on Zhu Xi's "Outline of The General Jian". The book was translated into the Chronology of Chinese History in Europe and published in Rome in 1729, attracting the attention of European sinologists.
The most incredible thing is that as a court official who served as an inspector in the middle of the Qing Dynasty, Nian Xiyao actually liked Western science, especially mathematics that was generally considered boring, and could also make achievements.
Nian Xiyao focused on the dissemination and practical application of Western mathematics in China. His efforts in this regard are mentioned in the Biography of Chinese astronomers and mathematicians of the Qing Dynasty.
Nian Xiyao was good at using Western science to solve mathematical problems through practice. His mathematical works include three volumes of "Measuring Knife Gui", including "Abstract of the Trigonometric Method", "Eight-Line True Number Table" and "Eight-Line False Number Table", and a volume of "Surface Proportion Handbook", which introduces practical knowledge such as the calculation method of the volume of utensils.
Mei Wending, a mathematician of the Qing Dynasty, also had a sincere admiration for him, saying that he "made a hand-made small armillary instrument to measure the instruments, listed a few cases, and was extremely fine, shining between the seats." The public is simple, and the servants are many, and they also personally inherit Di, and look at the strange instruments and strange books they have hidden, and they have never heard of it."
Nian Xiyao even wrote a book called "Logarithmic Guangyun", which introduced such a modern mathematical tool as the logarithmic table to China for the first time.
What is even more amazing is that Nian Xiyao, with the assistance of the Western painter Lang Shining, wrote a scientific book "Vision Studies". This book not only introduces the Western focus perspective and engineering view system to China, but also the world's earliest monograph on the geometry of painting, more than 60 years before the French mathematician "Geometry of Painting", which is known as the founder of pictorial geometry.
In "Vision Science", Nian Xiyao expounded the principle of perspective with dozens of focal perspective paintings drawn by hand. This perspective painting method, which originated in Europe, is different from the "scattered perspective" of traditional Chinese painting, which uses natural science knowledge such as geometry and optics to more realistically show the three-dimensional form of the object on the plane.
In the legend, Nian Xiyao uses two views of the three-dimensional graphic to represent its size and shape, which is actually a modern engineering drawing method. We would not have thought that the terms "horizon" and "horizon", which are widely used today, were invented by Xi Yao in "Vision" 300 years ago.
05
In the autumn of the fourth year of Yongzheng, Nian Xiyao was once again released from Beijing and sent to Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, to manage the taxation of the Beijing-Hangzhou Canal Plate Gate, which was the first major tax in the country during the Ming and Qing dynasties. At the same time, Nian Xiyao also served as the inspector of the Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln.
He is not stationed in Jingdezhen, and only goes to inspect and guide in the spring and autumn. The daily production management of the royal kiln is his assistant, and the ceramic artist Tang Ying is in charge of the jingdezhen site.
As the head of the official kiln, Nian Xiyao not only had to arrange production according to the emperor's preferences and intentions, but also samples of imperial kiln porcelain were sent to Huai'anGuan twice a month, and Nian Xiyao personally reviewed and approved before it could be put into mass production. At this time, the artistic quality of Nian Xiyao's calligraphers and painters played a very key role, and his aesthetics and grasp of the shape of the utensils were incomparable to others.
The official kiln porcelain of the Yongzheng Dynasty is recognized as exquisite and unparalleled, and the artistic realm achieved by the Yongzheng Dynasty has not been surpassed so far, and it has also been a big hit in the collection industry in recent years. Of course, this is indispensable to nian Xiyao's credit.
During his nine years as the governor of Jingdezhen, he not only inherited and excavated traditional crafts, but also innovated various new technologies, especially the addition of more than a dozen bright glazes such as factory official glaze, beige glaze, eel yellow, okra green, West Lake water, parrot green, peacock blue, antique jade, imitation lacquer glaze and so on. Those pure and elegant, otherworldly porcelain masterpieces are called "Nian Kiln" by the world.
After Qianlong ascended the throne, Nian Xiyao was impeached and dismissed, and at that time some people demeaned him with "playthings and delays". As everyone knows, Nian Xiyao has played with achievements and contributions. Nian Xiyao's energy was not on being an official, but on the science he loved, and his achievements were not only recognized by European scholars at that time, but also contributed to future generations.