"No wine, no banquet", "no wine, no ceremony", "no wine, no customs", since ancient times, whether it is the emperors and nobles, literati and ordinary people, they are inseparable from wine. Celebrating gifts, feasting guests, welcoming four o'clock... Wine has long been integrated into the daily life of Chinese.
From December 21, 2021 to April 10, 2022, the Guangdong Provincial Museum will launch the "Wine Song - Chinese Wine Culture Exhibition" after holding a series of exhibitions on jade culture, Chinese tea culture and incense culture.
With "wine" as the core, the exhibition integrates natural customs and cultural relics in the collection, and interprets Chinese wine culture from the perspectives of etiquette, health care, customs, export and other perspectives through natural specimens and bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy and paintings and other collections of 254 pieces/sets (185 pieces/sets of Chinese objects). This exhibition will exhibit for the first time a bronze jue, a squirrel grape pattern rhino horn cup, a silver dragon pattern flower and bird character story diagram three dragon foot ice wine barrel, silver coat of arms left white Three Kingdoms Romance character story picture goblet, Qing Chen Yunlong night feast picture scroll, tin carved flower small jug, wine making tools, wine cheng and other cultural relics and natural specimens.
Complete sets of developed cultural and creative products have existed in ancient times
China's wine-making technology has a long history, and its winemaking technology is unique. With the cultural exchanges of the Silk Road, the raw materials for winemaking in China have become increasingly abundant, and the koji-making technology has continued to progress and develop, and has gradually become a typical representative of the oriental brewing industry.
The reporter found that the various related cultural relics exhibited in the exhibition can be called the "cultural and creative" awards of the past generations under the theme of "wine".
For example, the Ming Jiajing Jingdezhen kiln qinghua Shou character gourd bottle using tree trunk coiled to form the pattern of Shou, Fu, Kang, Ning and other characters was the most common ornament at that time, and the gourd bottle contained the beautiful image of Fulu double complete, multiple children and many grandchildren because of the harmonic sound "Fulu", and many seeds. According to the experts of the museum, many ethnic groups have the custom of using gourds to fill wine, and wine utensils are also made into gourd-type, which can be called the "cultural and creative popular style" at that time.
Today, cultural and creative products such as "set cards" and "series dolls" are very popular, and in fact, this method has been used very skillfully in ancient times. Qing Kangxi Jingdezhen kiln colorful December flower pattern cup set of 12 pieces, the same size. The shape is exquisite, and the cup body is transparent and delicate and warm. The body is painted with blue and white flowers in December flowers, and the corresponding verses are inscribed. The poems are all selected from the "Quan Tang Poems", written in blue and white, and the blue and white seal at the end of the sentence is "rewarded" in the square chapter. The verses and the picture complement each other perfectly, fresh and elegant. According to the experts of the museum, the "December Flower God Cup" is a set of wine glasses fired in the official kiln of Jingdezhen in the Qing Dynasty, each set of twelve, the same size and shape system, decorated with seasonal flowers for twelve months of a year, and inscribed with poems that match it. It was first burned during the Kangxi Dynasty, and has been produced in all subsequent dynasties, and the heirlooms are mostly blue and white and multicolored varieties. The whole set of Flower God Cups is rare and extremely precious.
Design docking market Cultural and creative to help export
Many products reflect the prosperity of Guangzhou's export market at that time. This was the best embodiment of the "industrialization" of cultural creativity at that time. Many of these artifacts are extremely exquisitely designed, which is also of great reference significance for today's cultural and creative development. According to the curators, the rise of export jewelry manufacturing has promoted the exchange of craftsmanship and technology and culture between the countries and regions of the East and the West.
Squirrel grape pattern rhinoceros horn cup was made in the early Qing Dynasty, the color is tan, the pulp is thick, the luster is soft and moist, and a variety of exquisite carving techniques such as skeleton carving and relief are used to carve out smooth lines, and the shape and texture of the grape branches and leaves and squirrels are spread throughout the corner, and the shape and texture of the shape are rich, realistic, and have strong artistry. This kind of cup is mostly used as a "persuasion cup", which is passed between the host and the guest and the accompanying guest, and it needs to be drunk every time, so it is also called "helpless cup".
Dehua kiln white glaze Gongdao cup mouth is petal-shaped, deep arc abdomen, circle foot. White glaze is applied throughout the body and inside the hoop foot, and there is no glaze on the foot end. In the cup of a standing person, there is a hollow porcelain pipe in the human body through the small hole at the bottom of the cup, the end of the porcelain pipe is equal to the height of the cup rim, and there is a dark hole at the junction between the foot of the standing person and the cup. If the injection of wine is the same as the hollow in the human body, the wine cannot flow into the tube, but when the wine is too full, when the wine is higher than the mouth of the tube in the cup, the wine will leak out with the small hole at the bottom of the cup, and the wine in the cup will disappear. Therefore, it is also called "Pingxin Cup", which advocates the meaning of "full loss and modesty".
The neck and belly of the silver hollow chrysanthemum pattern green glass wine bottle in the Qing Dynasty are decorated with a shaped set of silver chrysanthemum pattern cutout decoration, and the bottle mouth has a silver bottle cap with a round cap button on the lid. The whole glass bottle is exquisitely designed, which is both practical and ornamental. Green glass has strong thermal insulation and can reduce ultraviolet interference; the glass bottle is wrapped in silver, which plays an excellent protective role. The gall bottle shape and the chrysanthemum pattern of silver carving, which are common in Chinese ceramics, skillfully combine oriental elements and Western aesthetics.
The Qianlong Guangcai Foreigner Return Chart Bowl is a large number of goods that Europeans have ordered from Jingdezhen and Guangzhou to cook, used to prepare cocktails or fruit wine, mainly in western style, styles, ornaments are made according to Western aesthetic design.
Look at the development thinking of Guangdong famous wine "according to local conditions"
The reporter learned that the "Wine Song - Chinese Wine Culture Exhibition" will lead the audience to explore the origin and inheritance of wine, taste the elegance and worldliness of wine from the perspective of the integration of modern science and technology, nature and history, and the display method of combining exquisite cultural relics and interesting experience.
The exhibition is divided into four parts, the first and second parts are "Green Ant New Wine" and "Wine Talk Mulberry", which cut from the perspective of natural science, with the collection of plant specimens and interactive installations, to show the audience the raw materials of wine, the aroma of wine, the types of wine and brewing technology; the third part, "Can Drink a Cup of Nothing", through bronze ceremonial vessels, ancient books and paintings, etc., leads the audience to review the wine ceremony and wine customs of Qu Shui Liu to Tu Su Drinking Fun; The fourth part is "Xia Shadow into Yao Yao", The selection of traditional Chinese wine utensils and export wine utensils that are exquisite in form and style of the times shows the fusion and ingenuity of Chinese and Western cultures carried in various wine utensils.
In the exhibition, the reporter saw the well-known old wines from all over China in the early years, such as Lai Mao, Si Special Wine, Wuliangye, Fenjiu, Hengshui Laobaigan, etc., and the wine bottles and trademark styles with a strong sense of the times and strong local characteristics, allowing people to glimpse the ingenuity and ingenuity of people who injected cultural elements into product design at that time. The tools and equipment of brewing in the past generations remind people that cultural and creative development must be combined with actual industries in order to open up a broad world.
Today, Guangdong has many intangible cultural heritage items related to wine, such as Tai Po Niang wine, which relies on hand-brewing methods. As one of the representative varieties of Chinese rice wine, it has now become a very famous Guangdong local specialty "souvenir".
Rice wine is also a very distinctive Chinese wine. More than 300 years ago, the art of brewing Koji rice wine has been widely spread in the Chaoshan rural market towns. At that time, farmers and wine-making workshops used rice as raw materials and used small oven tiles to make wine. Koji rice wine has a strong local flavor, sweet and pleasant.
The distillation equipment in the exhibition gives us a glimpse of how the most Chinese characteristics of "baijiu" are brewed. The more famous of Guangdong's indigenous liquors are Changle Roast and so on. Qing Daoguang's 25th year of the "Chronicle of Wuhua County" records: "The county produces a lot of shochu, and Changle is famous, and Qiling is the best." "Here is the famous mountain of eastern Guangdong hawksbill turtle mountain, the water quality of the sweet spring that comes out of the stone is very good, it is neutral and acidic, and the hardness is low, coupled with special Hakka brewing techniques, which has been passed down from generation to generation to create this famous wine."
The custom of drinking during the Spring Festival should date back to a long time ago. Among the large number of bronze vessels excavated in China that are considered to be "ceremonial vessels", wine vessels account for most of the species. It can be seen that in the grand ceremony scene, wine is an extremely important carrier, and the wine ceremony has developed very well very early. Later, the Spring Festival drinking was generally arranged after the ancestor worship. Because the ancestor worship must use wine, after the ancestor worship is completed, the family, regardless of whether they are respectful or inferior, old or young, gather together to drink. Some wines are unfamiliar to people today, such as pepper wine. This solemn wine ceremony can still be seen everywhere in many places in Guangdong today, especially in the Chaoshan and Hakka areas.
These "cultural relics" and "intangible cultural heritage" are actually the best and most active cultural creations.
Text: Guangzhou Daily Xinhuacheng reporter Bu Songzhu correspondent Huang Suzhe
Pictured: Wang Weixuan, a reporter from Guangzhou Daily And New Flower City
(Some images courtesy of Guangdong Provincial Museum)
Video: Guangzhou Daily New Flower City reporter Wang Weixuan Bu Songzhu
Guangzhou Daily New Flower City Editor: Xie Yufen