More than 5,200 Jian Mu have been excavated from the tomb of Liu He at the site of the Marquis of Haixia in the Han Dynasty in Nanchang. A few days ago, the research team of Hai Di Jian Mu interpreted an edict from these Jian Mu - the Edict of the Removal of the State. According to Yang Bo, the compiler of the edict and an associate researcher at the Institute of Ancient History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, this is the first physical copy of the Western Han Dynasty's ex-edict excavated so far, which records the history of the ex-kingdom of The Marquis of Haixia after Liu He's death, and some of the contents are not recorded in history, such as the time of Liu He's death.
The picture shows the newly excavated remnants of the tomb. Courtesy of Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology
The edict was written in the shape of a han one foot (about 23 centimeters today), with a writing format of two (vertical) lines and a written text of Lishu, which was the standard "exoneration" edict. The process of removing the edict is "proposed by local officials→ the central officials meeting → become the highest will after the consent of the emperor→ to the local level", with a clear writing process and accurate forwarding record, basically building a relatively complete Han Dynasty high-level document writing process and transmission system.
Yang Bo said that the edict of the state provided the historical facts of Liu He and his family, the basic situation of the kingdom of Changyi and the marquisate of Haixia. Liu He's "death in September", the Kingdom of Changyi 's "Heliu County as a Kingdom", and the Marquis of Haidu's "Number of Waters and Droughts, Many Disasters" are all undocumented in history, which can make up for the lack of records in the Book of Han. The researchers deduced that Liu He died on the "Ninth Month of Yiwei", that is, the eighth day of the first month of September in 59 BC, when the calendar used was the newly created "Taichu Calendar" of emperor Wu's dynasty.
The picture shows an infrared scan of some of the residue after preliminary cleaning and repair. Courtesy of Jiangxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology
The edict also clearly records the shangshu of Yuzhang Taishou Liao for the survival of the Marquis of Haixia after Liu He's death, "Dahong Chu Shangzi Chong = Guo = Illness and Death Fu Shangzi Feng = Relatives = Fu Illness and Death is Heavenly Extinction" (Note: "=" is a heavy text number), which can be corroborated with the content of the "Biography of the Five Sons of Han Wu". Combined with the time when the "Edict of The Removal of the State" was issued to Yuzhang County, "October Jiashen (Seventeen)", it can be calculated that the time interval between the death of Liu He and his two sons Liu Chongguo and Liu Fengqin to the time interval between the removal of the state of the Marquis of Haidian was less than forty days.
In the Han Dynasty, there were many counties and states, many of which were expelled for various reasons. In the Book of Han and the Chronicle of Emperor Wu, it is recorded that "the marquis sat down to offer gold and sacrifice to the temple and the temple was inferior to the one hundred and sixteen people who seized the knighthood of the law". In September of the fifth year of the Yuan Dynasty, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty issued an edict to directly remove more than a hundred princes from the country, and there was no need to discuss it; but the removal of the state of the Marquis of Haixia was obviously very different, not only after the group of courtiers, but also by the list of hundreds of officials.
One of the wooden tablets reads, "May dr. Gongqing discuss the system of Dr. Xia Xiang Xiang Zhong 2 = Thousand = Stone = Chenji Chenwang's Minister Changchen ...". The "system" here represents the emperor, and "a certain official under the system" is a kind of procedure approved by the emperor. The general meaning of Mu Mu is that Emperor Xuan of Han issued an edict to the high-ranking officials of the two thousand stones and two thousand stones, such as Cheng Xiang and Dr. Xiang, and requested that a meeting of the secretaries of state be convened to discuss the removal of the marquis of Haixia. Researchers believe that "Ji" and "Wangzhi" were respectively The Xiang Bingji and the Imperial Master Xiao Wangzhi in the "Eleven Heroes of the Qilin Pavilion" during the Han Xuan Emperor's period. It can be seen that the content of the edict not only involved most of the high-ranking officials of the imperial court at that time, but also implied the political power of Emperor Xuan of Han, which was the actual embodiment of the political ecology of Emperor Xuan's dynasty.
According to Yang Bo, the collation of the state's edict is still in progress. More discoveries will be made in the future about the historical facts of the Liu He family and the Marquis of Haixia, the official document system of the Han Dynasty, and the system of princes and princes of the Han Dynasty.
Source: Xinhua Viewpoint, Half Moon Talk
Reporter: Yuan Huijing
This article is transferred from Xinhua Net