Underestimating the intelligence of the ancients may be a common disease that many people now make, for example, there are still some scholars who firmly believe that the ancients did not know where Kunlun Mountain is, and then regard the Qilian Mountain as Kunlun Mountain, which is now called Kunlun Mountain, which is a ridiculous common disease. Although these people have given a lot of explanations to the names of Kunlun Mountain and Qilian Mountain, I still like to start from the level of pinyin and interpret them. So, I pronounced Kun as Kun, pronounced exactly the same: kūn; pronounced Qilian as Qian, pronounced slightly differently: qílián and qián, and pronounced "Qiankun" between Qilian Mountain and Kunlun Mountain.
"Yi": "The Yellow Emperor Yao Shun draped his clothes and ruled the world, covering all the Qiankun." This means that the Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun set up positions according to the names of the main parts of the garment to govern the world, taking the Fa Qian and Kun Er Gua. The sun and moon are easy, and the cold and heat (yin and yang) are alternately easy. The Yi is a part of the I Ching, which refers to the three Yi books of Lian Shan, Gui Zang, and Zhou Yi. Among them, "Lian Shan" and "Guizang" have been lost, and only "Zhou Yi" is extant. "Lian Shan" is one of the three yi, headed by "Gong Gua"; "Gui Zang" is headed by Kun, so it is named Gui Zang; "Zhou Yi" begins with Qiangua; "Lian Shan" is said to have been created by the first generation of monarchs after Pangu opened heaven and earth; "Gui Zang" is said to have been composed by the Yellow Emperor; "Zhou Yi" is said to have been composed by Ji Chang, the king of Zhou Wen, in prison.
The Yellow Emperor, Yao, and Shun ruled the world according to the officials of the Yibu, and the Qilian Mountains and the Kunlun Mountains were the qiankun of our nation on the earth. Just as "Lian shan" and "Guizang" were lost, but it cannot be said that they do not exist, Qilian Mountain and Kunlun Mountain came from ancient times, and from the moment they opened up the world, they stood in the landscape of our lives, which is a major event related to our national history and the context of national fortunes, and cannot be casually created.
Did the ancients really not know where Kunlun Mountain was?
Pangu is groundbreaking. In ancient texts, Kunlun Mountain is also the dwelling place of the gods: the Classic of Mountains and Seas: "The kingdom of the Queen Mother is in the western wilderness." All those who received the Taoist teachings were the Queen Mother of Kunlun. "Bamboo Book Chronicle, Guo Notes" Yun: "King Mu marched west to Kunlun Qiu, and saw the Queen Mother in the west." In the "Fengshen Yanyi", the Kunlun Mountain Jade Void Palace is the dojo of yuan shi tianzun and its status is revered.
At the same time, the ancients believed that Kunlun Mountain had aura and produced various treasures: the peach tree of the Queen Mother's mother was originally from Kunlun and later transplanted to the Heavenly Garden. And Kunlun Yaochi has immortal elixirs, and the White Lady once risked stealing for Xu Xian. In the Journey to the West, it is said that the banana fan of the Iron Fan Princess is said: "The banana fan was originally a spiritual treasure formed by the heavens since the opening of the Kunlun Mountains, which is the essence of the sun, so it can extinguish the fire." If you fan a person, you will float for eighty-four thousand miles, and the wind will be in the air. ”
However, some bricklayers now will tell you that the Kunlun Mountain mentioned here is the Qilian Mountain, because where the Kunlun Mountain is, the ancients did not know. The reason is as simple as a sentence: our nation is a jade nation, from the Shang Dynasty to the early Han Dynasty jade is not from Xinjiang Hetian, but from the Ancient Qilian Mountains known as "Kunlun Mountain", the exact date of Xinjiang Hetian jade entering the Central Plains is the middle of the Western Han Dynasty, the discoverer of Hetian jade seed material is Zhang Qian, the envoy of the Han Dynasty, and the development time of Hetian Jade Mountain Material is in the Ming Dynasty.
Is this really the case? Woman Hao, wife of King Wuding of the Shang Dynasty, good surname, female is an honorific title, the first female military commander in Chinese history (Oracle), and also an outstanding female politician. The large number of oracle bones unearthed shows that in a series of wars between Wuding and the surrounding Fang states and tribes, the woman was repeatedly ordered to recruit soldiers on behalf of the Shang King, and repeatedly served as an army general to fight on the battlefield. Zeng commanded 13,000 troops to attack qiangfang, captured a large number of Qiang people, and became the general with the most troops in a single conquest during Wuding. Participated in and commanded major operations against the Turkish, Pakistani, and Yifang sides. Therefore, Wu Ding liked her very much, and after her death, Wu Ding was deeply saddened and posthumously called her "Xin", and the descendants of the Shang Dynasty honored her as "Mother Xin" and "Stepmother Xin".
In 1976, the tomb of The Woman Hao was found in The Yin Ruins in Anyang, Henan Province, and a large number of jade raw materials were unearthed, and after visual identification of 300 of them, it was believed that most of them were Xinjiang jade, only 3 pieces of mouth-shaped utensils were similar in texture to Xiuyan jade, 1 piece of jade was considered to be Dushan jade, and a few siliceous slates and Dali rocks. This shows that the Shang royal family used jade with Xinjiang Hetian jade as the main body, which was different from the jade used by other nobles and leaders of various countries in, thus ending the stage of using colored stone jade for 2,000 to 3,000 years in ancient China.
The jade came from Xinjiang, but the Qilian Mountains were still there. The Shang Shu Yin Zheng records: "Fire burns Kungang, and jade burns." About 4,000 years ago, there was a volcanic eruption in the Kunlun Mountains, and jade and mountain stones burned in flames. The "Thousand Character Text" compiled during the Southern and Northern Dynasties records: "Jinsheng Lishui, Jade out of Kungang", "Kungang" is Kunlun Mountain. Because Xinjiang jade once cut off the supply to the Central Plains at a certain period, it cannot be said that the ancients did not know where Kunlun Mountain was.
In 2017, Zhang Chunlong, a researcher at the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, found that Qin Shi Huang's government decree for "immortal medicine" could be issued to townships more than 2,000 years ago when he studied a batch of archives from the Qianling County Office of Dongting County in the Qin Dynasty. Its contents were written with a brush on a narrow and long piece of wood, and it was an official report of the township government, to the effect that a township called "Duxiang" did not have the herbs and herbs that the official documents asked for; a place called Langya, probably located in the area of linyi and Qingdao in today's Shandong Province, offered the "five apricot medicines" collected from a "Kunlun Mountain". This Kunlun Mountain may have been used together with the "Five Apricot Medicine" to deceive Qin Shi Huang, but it can be seen that the Kunlun Mountain was in the hearts of the emperor and the people at that time.
Qin Lisi's "Letter to qin shi huang": "The jade of Kunshan to your majesty now has the treasure of easy-going." "Kunshan jade was taken as an idiom at that time. When Qin Shi Huang unified China, Hetian jade was called "Kunshan Jade" because it was produced in Kunlun Mountain, and later it was called "Khotanese Jade" because it was located in the territory of "Khotan". Obviously, these have little to do with Qilian Mountain, or even have anything to do with it.
Why do some scholars study the ancient Kunlun Mountain as the Qilian Mountain?
In 2007, several jade enthusiasts formed a so-called Jade Road Expedition to confirm that the ancient jade mine located in the Dry Gorge of the Three Dangers Mountains in Dunhuang may have begun between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago. He also issued an article claiming that the reason why the academic circles in the past were not very clear about the two place names "Yumen" and "YumenGuan" with the name of jade was because according to the common sense of the literature of Traditional Chinese Studies, it could only know that The Kunlun Mountain Jade in Xinjiang was imported into the Central Plains, but it could not know the existence of the Mamanshan Jade Mine and the Dunhuang Sanweishan Jade Mine.
There is nothing wrong with this text, but behind it is the fact that some so-called scholars are "fighting for jade". We say that the jade produced in Qilian Mountain does not affect the jade produced by Kunlun Mountain, and the jade produced by Kunlun Mountain does not annihilate the jade produced in Qilian Mountain, and there is no need to confuse the public because of the origin of jade, and say that Qilian Mountain is Kunlun Mountain. The study of history must also talk about the pattern, at least we should also understand that qilian mountain and Kunlun mountain are chinese mountains, not the mountains of a certain province, and the history they contain is the history of China, not the fangzhi of a certain province.
Why has Kunlun Mountain always been our spiritual sustenance?
In China's mythological system, there are 4 major systems, namely the Western Kunlun myth, the Eastern Penglai myth, the Southern Chu myth and the Central Plains myth, the Kunlun myth is the earliest, represented by the Queen Mother of the West and nuwa, is the main part of the Chinese god, and the Greek myth is the same name, recording the important course of the Chinese nation from birth to development, which has a history of 3.6 million years, and the process of production and circulation is synchronized with the survival and development of the Chinese nation. For this reason, Kunlun Mountain has always been our spiritual sustenance from ancient times to the present.
Qu Yuan was a Native of The State of Chu during the Warring States period, a poet and politician. He said, "Deng Kunlun looked around, and his heart was flying wildly. "Tan Sitong, a famous politician and thinker in modern China, a native of Liuyang, Hunan. He said, "I smiled at the sky with my horizontal knife and went to keep the liver and gallbladder for two kunluns." "Kunlun Mountain is the knot in Chinese heart that has never been lost."
Turning to our history books, the accounts of Kunlun Mountain are even more numerous, and it is recorded in the "Chronicle of the Three Emperors" that Fuxi Nuwa grew up in Kunlun, and Fuxi was inspired by celestial phenomena in Kunlun Mountain to deduce Taiji Bagua and establish the Taikou tribe, and Kunlun became the royal capital of Fuxi; the Classic of Mountains and Seas records that Kunlun lived in the Western Queen Mother and was in charge of the matter of Xiu Xian Deng, and the "Ten Continents of the Sea" records that there is a place at the top of Kunlun Mountain that is dedicated to the Sacrifice of Heaven and Enlightenment by the Yellow Emperor. In addition, it is also recorded that the uppermost level of Kunlun is the immortal land inhabited by dragons, which shows that in ancient times, Kunlun was the core sacred place where the chief of the tribe could set foot. Wait a minute.
If we now "say" Qilian Mountain as Kunlun Mountain, it would be nothing less than a joke.
Historically, we have no way of denying that some of the ancient Chinese crossed the Pamir Plateau and migrated into the Chinese mainland. Therefore, some people boldly speculate that after crossing the Pamir Plateau, people saw the towering Kunlun Mountain and thought that it was not a height that could be reached by human beings, but must be the residence of the gods. Later, the ancestors continued to migrate to the east, and the migration route was guided by the Kunlun Mountains, which stretched for thousands of miles, so that they eventually reached the fertile Guanzhong Weishui and multiplied. Subsequently, Kunlun Mountain became the oral memory of the ancestors and evolved into a beautiful legend.
What does it mean to pass through this?
In the Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian went on an envoy to the Western Regions, passing through the Kunlun Mountains. The "Chronicle of Dawan" records: "The source of the Han Dynasty's Poor River (Yellow River), the source of the river is from The Lonely, its mountains are jade, it is quarried, the ancient books of the Tianzi case, and the mountains from the famous river are known as Kunlun Clouds." ”
Subsequently, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty named the mountain from which the Yellow River originated as Kunlun (present-day Karakoram Mountain). The "Case Ancient Books" are the texts and map materials handed down from ancient times, and Emperor Wudi of Han used them as a basis to illustrate the fact that the ancient Chinese maps before Emperor Wudi of Han were full of information about present-day Xinjiang and painted into the mountains and rivers of Xinjiang. That is to say, in Chinese culture, "Kunlun" and "Heyuan" symbolize the national pulse, which is the memory of the past in the depths of Chinese's heart, and it is also a cultural complex in the depths of the soul. At the same time, it shows that the western region has been an inseparable and important area in the Chinese cultural community since ancient times.
Therefore, Kunlun Mountain is not only a regional issue for us, it is our "Qiankun" together with Qilian Mountain. (Text/Lu Sheng)