YI REN YI CENG
01
In the late autumn of 1899, Beiping was full of yellow leaves and the autumn wind was blowing. At the door of the long-established Crane Nian Hall opposite The Xiang Hutong, there came an extremely important abdominal pain patient in human history:
The Great Qing Dynasty's sons were in charge of the wine king Yi Rong.
His other identity is that he is a well-known expert in gold and stone collection. In the medicine bag caught from Tsuru Nian Tang, there was a strange herb known as "keel" that attracted his attention.
It was pieces of bone of different sizes, actually turtle shells and animal bones, full of scratches of different shades. They are clumsy and persistent, regularly outlining information from unknown times.
Wang Yirong firmly believed with experience that this was a text from ancient times and must point to some lost dynasty. In the tens of millions of years of chinese civilization history, who is leaving the first mysterious message of mankind for future generations.
These bone pieces may be able to open the secret chamber sealed in the complicated era.
Wang Yirong, who had been tormented by dysentery for a long time, seemed to have been injected with a panacea. In his collection room, he studied the candlelight and finally recognized three words:
Day, month, rain.
Moreover, through the scorch marks on the back of the oracle bones, he consulted many historical materials and deduced that this was used by Yin Shang for divination. The world of Oracle, buried in the dirt, was opened.
After that, Wang Yirong began a rescue collection, searching for keels across the country. The news that he was looking for a written keel did not go away, and the merchants sat on the ground to start the price, and the price of the keel once rose to: two or two silver per word.
In order to collect, Wang Yirong began to sell it, until he finally issued his wife Huang's jewelry.
△ Wang Yirong
As the first person in China to be an oracle bone, Wang Yirong collected more than 1500 keels. And trying to find ways to successfully decipher the information on these keels has become the luxury of Wang Yirong, the last Great Confucian.
But contrary to wishes, 1900 was the "Gengzi National Difficulty" in Chinese history. The Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Peiping, Li Hongzhang made peace with the Eight Kingdoms, and Empress Dowager Cixi fled with the emperor in a hurry, leaving this magnificent capital city to be defended by Wang Yirong, a scholar.
In the torrent of wilderness and wilderness, in the shuttle of hot weapons in the rain of bullets and bullets, Wang Yirong used the body of a reader to resist the wave of attacks of the Eight-Nation Alliance.
Those soul-haunting oracle bones, in the sinking and remnants of the national fortune, in the afterglow of the roar of the guns, are too late to mention.
02
In 1902, Wang Yirong's son arrived in Beijing, and in order to repay the debt, he sold cultural relics, and more than 1,500 oracle bones hidden by his father were acquired by the novelist Liu Yan.
In Beijing at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the novelist Liu Hu was unique at that time, and his satirical novel "The Journey of the Old Remnant" became a rare reading in the streets and alleys, and it was also the favorite bridge section of the storytellers in the teahouse.
Later Hu Shi commented on the book as: No ancients have ever been.
Liu Hu was good at arithmetic, water conservancy, and medicine, and once practiced medicine in Shanghai. Later, he studied with the epigrapher Wu Dacheng, and after completing his studies, he had a close relationship with Wang Yirong and became friends.
Liu Hu was obsessed with the collection of broken antiquities. He even named the study as "Holding the Broken and Missing Fast". After buying Wang Yirong's oracle bones, he collected "dragon bones" in high gold all over the country.
In the former Qilu, Zhao Wei, Henan and other places, a total of more than 5,000 pieces of oracle bones were obtained, and Liu Yan also became the first collector in the field, and after research, he proposed: Yin Ren knife and pen writing.
In 1903, Liu Hu selected 1058 pieces from the keels he had hidden, and then in the midst of the crippled and missing fast, he personally used lithograph ink to expand, and finally published China's first oracle bone book:
"Iron Cloud Hidden Turtle".
"Tieyun" is Liu Hu's character, and "Hidden Turtle" is his collection of oracle bones.
This is an amazing masterpiece, under the dim candlelight, Liu Yan printed out pieces of oracle bones, sorted out the numbers, and wrote views, as if the dawn of a dream thousands of years ago, illuminated the vast night sky in the crumbling end of the Qing Dynasty.
Those antiques that could only be viewed and rubbed in the study hall could finally be seen by the world.
△ Liu Hu
Luo Zhenyu, Jin Zutong, Li Danqiu, Ye Yusen, Shen Yinmo, Fang Ruo, Liu Tieyun, Wang Guowei, Japanese scholar Torajiro Naito and other oracle bone researchers have all looked for clues in Liu Hu's bone tablets and his works, and it has also been rated by posterity as "a pioneer in the study of oracle bone writings".
After Liu Yan, Sun Yirang, who was praised by Zhang Taiyan as "the absolute double of three hundred years", also examined the oracle bones, and wrote "Examples of Qiwen" and interpreted hundreds of oracle bones.
Luo Zhenyu, one of the "Four Halls of Oracle Bones", is also the son and daughter of Liu Hu. He compiled the "Pre-Contract of the Book of Yin Ruins" and investigated the origin of the oracle bones as follows:
Xiaotun Village, Anyang, Henan.
Time turns, the fortune tellers of the Shang Zhou Dynasty, after praying to the sky, will be engraved with words of tortoiseshell animal bones, thrown to the earth, fate and qi numbers will alternate in time and space, through some kind of mysterious code, to us three thousand years later, sending a silent band.
To this day, it continues to do so.
03
In 1916, Wang Guowei became a close friend of Luo Zhenyu, who returned to China from Kyoto, Japan, and began to devote himself to the study of oracle bone script and Shang Zhou history.
Based on the oracle bones, he made many studies of the "History".
Sima Qian's first monarch, Chengtang, lived in a place called "Bo", and Wang Guowei found place names such as "Yong", "Cao", and "杞" from more than 200 place names inscribed by the oracle bone Bu Ci.
Later, Wang Guowei also examined Wang Hai, Wang Heng, Shangjia and other former princes and kings, clarified their blood relations, and also corrected the errors in the order of the "Records of History" in the order of the report b, b, and ding.
In Wang Guowei's lifelong study of oracle bones, he also wrote many works.
△ Luo Zhenyu
In 1919, Luo Zhenyu, a friend of Mo Rebellion, also returned from Japan and chose to join the imperial court at the last moment of the Qing Dynasty. Wang Guowei was also appreciated by Emperor Puyi, who specially ordered him to walk for the South Study.
At that time, the Qing Empire, like a lost ship, hit the reef, and the sea had flooded the deck and would sink at any time.
It was also in the year that Luo Zhenyu returned to China, Wang Guowei's eldest son and Luo's third daughter married. Two good friends, close to each other, they studied the oracle bones together, on Yin Zhou, Shi Oracle, and Shi Zhongding, everywhere outstanding, achieved the famous:
The Study of Luo Wang.
But a rupture also came soon. After the death of his eldest son at the age of 26, Wang Guowei also received a letter from Luo Zhenyu. He was devastated, and the road ahead, as in that era, was shaky and the end was blurred.
On June 2, 1927, Wang Guowei sank in the Kunming Lake of the Summer Palace, and a superstar in the field of oracle bone science fell. When he sank the lake, he had a suicide note in his pocket: "Fifty years, only one death is owed." After this world has changed, there is no more humiliation. ”
In just a few words, sad and resolute, it has given posterity countless speculations.
△ Kingdom Dimension
In fact, several pioneers involved in the study of oracle bones eventually went astray. In the Gengzi national disaster in 1900, Wang Yirong, the first person in the oracle bone, took his wife and daughter-in-law to repay the country. His brother-in-law, Zhang Zhidong, who was also one of the three famous ministers of the Qing Dynasty, commemorated it at the ancestral ancestral ancestral shrine of Wang Yirong's hometown in Shandong.
In 1908, Liu Was wronged, was accused of "traitor" and "privately bought grain from the national treasury", exiled to Urumqi, Xinjiang, and soon died of a stroke and cerebral hemorrhage.
After Wang Yirong, Liu Yan, Luo Zhenyu, Wang Guowei and other Confucian oracle bone scholars, the Yin Ruins in Xiaotun Village in Anyang also became a sacred place for oracle bone research.
Dong Zuobin, who presided over or participated in the excavation of Yin Ruins 8 times, divided the oracle bones excavated from Yin Ruins into five periods, which is the most important period in the history of oracle bone research;
As for Guo Moruo, he edited the "Oracle Bone Collection", which is known as the greatest achievement in the collation of ancient books in New China;
Luo Zhenyu (号雪堂), Wang Guowei (号觀堂), Dong Zuobin (Zi Yan Tang), and Guo Moruo (Zi Ding Tang) are known for their great achievements in oracle bone research:
Oracle Bones Four.
In the cycle of destiny, human beings always place their highest hopes. Behind the deciphering of the pieces of oracle bones is just our difficult review of that era.
04
More than 3,000 years ago, the Shang kings were superstitious and everything must be predicted. From the yin and the clouds, down to marrying and having children, to whether you can live for another five hundred years, you must ask god what he means.
This is the famous "Shang Zhou Guibu".
The turtle, which was enshrined as one of the four spirits in ancient times, was sacred in the hearts of the ancients and symbolized longevity. Before each turtle, the buguan selects a superior turtle, and after coating the live turtle with animal blood, the turtle is killed to remove the abdomen and back armor pieces, and then chiseled with a stone knife.
First of all, Bu Guan drilled the back of the turtle shell, calling it "zhaoxiang", in order to make the front of the turtle carapace more prone to cracks;
Next, the tortoise shell is placed on a charcoal fire and burned until a crack is created on the front, which is called "burning turtle";
Finally, the buguan observed the zhaowen, judged the auspiciousness, and then wrote down the contents of the buci. "The number of divinations for the same thing cannot exceed three times", and the number of divinations for the same thing cannot exceed three times.
This small fragment of the daily life of the Yin merchant is full of a sense of quaint ritual. More than 3,000 years later, people began to explore the important scale of Chinese civilization by following their records on the turtle shells.
Whether it was Wang Yirong's kingdom and their maintenance, or the researchers who continue to this day, through the deciphering of the oracle bones by these scholars and Confucians, we can capture some chapters in that period of history:
There is a merchant's city, there is a gorgeous bronze, There are the gods of the heavens, there is the murderous killing, There is joy and sorrow, love and hate, confusion and heaven asking.
Eventually, in the dust of time, we too will sink into the depths of the flood.