What is Dock Fort?
Fort, also known as dock wall, is a kind of civil defensive architecture, formed around the time of Wang Mang Tianfeng, is a kind of defensive building, also known as dock wall.
The exterior of this type of building is quite similar to that of a castle. Surrounded by deep ditches and high walls, the inner houses are adjacent to each other, and the four corners are connected to the central tower, and its image can be seen in the murals and pottery ming ware of the Han tomb of Lujiazhuang in Anping, Hebei, such as the pottery Ming ware from the Eastern Han tombs of Mayinggang in Guangzhou, Wuwei Leitai in Gansu and Dongzhuang in Suiyang, Henan. The large dock fort is quite a village, and the smaller one is like a house. Some of them are accompanied by fields and ponds. The fort gate is generally opened in the middle of the south wall, and there is a courtyard at the entrance, and the main hall and building are built in the courtyard. There are also auxiliary buildings such as kitchens, toilets, and pigsty, and most of them are located on the north side. The back door is often located at the northern end of the east wall.
Wubao can be regarded as a kind of local self-defense force, which later evolved into the rebel army of the Southern Song Dynasty and the regimental training of the Qing Dynasty.
How did The Dock Fort rise?
This should start from the Wuhu into the Central Plains, the Wuhu Chaohua disintegrated Chinese society to the point of no return, that period can be said to be the darkest moment of the Central Plains, not only the culture was devastated, the people were also suffering from the war, and the population was rapidly decreasing.
Historian Chen Yinke, in his article "Circumstantial Evidence of the Peach Blossom Origin", argues: "At the end of the Western Jin Dynasty, when the Rongdi thieves rose up, the people who took refuge in the Central Plains at that time ... Those who could not move far from their homeland to other villages were more or less entangled with the clan township party, gathered at the fort dock, and defended themselves according to danger, so as to avoid the difficulties of the Thieves of Rong Dikou."
Those peoples who do not belong to each other, like a group of wild horses chasing water and grass, run wildly, under the iron hooves of the rain, the traditional social organization of the Central Plains fell apart with the fall of one city after another, and the Han people who lost any protection were almost out of the instinct to survive, fleeing the countryside that had become a battlefield, and wandering around. Under the command of the remnant generals of the Western Jin Dynasty or the powerful townsmen in the townships, they formed independent organizations one after another, fighting for their own battles and striving to protect themselves. "The Yongjia Rebellion, the exile of the people, the gathering of the tun", the self-defensive nature of the Dock Wall gathering all over China, which is the characteristic of the wide geographical distribution of the Dock Wall.
The rise of the Wubi has created a new political pattern of powerful door valves, and the resulting rural organizations have been absorbed and transformed by the state power, which is the evolution process of the strengthening of centralized power and the decline of the door valve politics, showing the in-depth development of the internal unity of the country in the early days.
China's dock fort is a product of the feudal era, and after the formation of the nation-state, it lost its space for existence. The original dock forts everywhere have also completely disappeared, and traces can only be found in archaeology.