The ancients built a city, first of all to establish a "central platform" as the geometric center of the city, from the Western Zhou To the Liaojin song, the center of the city has always been changing, people often say that the "central axis" is naturally also in the Central Plains land constantly drifting, until the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongolian iron horse swept around, Kublai Khan established the Yuan Capital, that is, today's Beijing has become the political center of the country, the layout of the streets of the Yuan Capital City, laid the basic pattern of today's Beijing City.
In the early years of Hongwu, under the capital of the general Xu DaChen Bingyuan, tens of thousands of Ming troops entered the city by filling the trenches at Qihua Gate, and the Yuan Shun Emperor fled into the wilderness, out of the idea of destroying the Yuan Dynasty, Xu Da adhered to Zhu Yuanzhang's will and quietly did several major things:
1. Drive the residents of Dadu to Kaifeng, Henan Without leaving a trail;
2. Rapidly emigrate from all over the country to enrich the population of Peiping;
3. Completely destroy the Yuan Palace. (Ming Dynasty Xiao Xun's "Records of the Forbidden City")
After that, although the yuan capital wall was abandoned, it was not completely demolished, and a small part was retained, mainly playing the role of arching and defending the city. Peiping has since become the residence of Zhu Di, the King of Yan, and the basic pattern of the city has hardly changed. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the struggle for imperial power became increasingly fierce, and Zhu Di ascended the throne as emperor after defeating Zhu Yunzhao at the Battle of Jingnan, in favor of Emperor Taizong of Ming (later changed from Emperor Ming to Emperor Ming chengzu). Zhu Di attached great importance to the management of the north, and Peiping was his "land of longxing", and finally decided to start construction of the Forbidden City in 1416, and officially moved the capital to The Capital in 1421.
So, was the Forbidden City, which Zhu Di ordered to be built under the urban pattern of the Yuan Capital, really repaired as the title suggests?
Let's first popularize the meaning of "repairing crookedness" in the title.
The Forbidden City, like many royal cities, in terms of architectural arrangement, uses the methods of shape change and high and low to form a whole, which is in line with the hierarchical system of feudal society in terms of function, and also achieves the artistic effect of balance and physical change, and as a royal garden, it must become the central axis of the entire city.
As we all know, the central axis of Beijing today is the guide from YongdingMen, north through the Zhengyang Gate, the Forbidden City, Jingshan, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, a total length of about 7.8 kilometers, with the Forbidden City as the center, connecting the main line of the north and south of the city, even today, this central axis still plays the role of backbone, still word of mouth.
The so-called "crooked" refers to the fact that the central axis of the Forbidden City does not coincide with the meridian of the earth, and there are countless meridians of the earth, but each one is a "line" connecting the north and south poles of the earth, and this line is abstract. In other words, it is easy to understand, the title refers to "repairing crooked", which means that the Forbidden City is not "due south and north" facing.
If that is the case, Beijing, once the imperial capital of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and the thrones of the 33 emperors who claimed the title of emperor in the Forbidden City were "crooked", and our Beijing city today is not due north and south. What's going on? Read on.
Discover the process of "repairing the crookedness" of the Forbidden City
Before his retirement, he was a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping, and in 2004, when he was still in charge of surveying and mapping, he discovered that the central axis of Beijing deviated from the meridian line, and when he was designing an accurate flight route for aerial photography of the buildings on the central axis of Beijing, he found the problem after carefully observing the "Beijing Satellite Image Map" and "Beijing Aerial Image Map".
After discovering the problem, he carefully confirmed the correctness of the map used, but he was still afraid that the map in his hand was not drawn wrong, so he bought a lot of maps of Beijing, including the Beijing traffic tour map, and finally determined that the central axis did deviate a little counterclockwise, that is to say, the layout of the housing buildings in Beijing City, all built according to the central axis, were slightly biased towards the southeast, not due south and north.
The discovery of this problem was like a thunderclap that blew up the nervous and sensitive nerves of Zhongyu, and he was no longer limited to the map in his hand just in case, after all, the stakes were very high, and he decided to personally go to the field to measure, and to prove with practical actions that the wisdom of the ancients was superb, and that there was no problem in using practical actions to prove the accuracy of the calculations of the ancients.
Together with the experts, Zhongyu determined the noon time when the sun passes through the Yongding Gate based on multiple key factors such as the division of the world time zone, the local time difference, and the time difference of the day.
Subsequently, Chu Zhongyu and the experts began to carry out immediate experiments on the ground, they erected a 2-meter-long pole in the center of Yongdingmen Yonglu, and then drew a 6-meter-long straight line on the ground north of the centerline of Yongdingmen, when the time reached noon, the sun just passed through the Yongding Gate Zhongtian, the angle between the shadow line formed by the shadow left by the pole and the line drawn before, that is, the angle between the central axis and the meridian, which indirectly explains the "crooked" repair of the Forbidden City.
Moreover, after accurate measurement and calculation, The Central Axis and the experts finally found that the central axis deviated from the meridian by two degrees and ten points, according to the angle of this deviation, then the central axis starting from the Yongding Gate to the bell tower has deviated from the meridian to 300 meters, such a deviation can not be described as outrageous.
But then again, were the measurement techniques of the ancients really so incomprehensible? It should be known that scholars in the Tang Dynasty once measured the meridian very accurately in Henan, and the straight central axis of the imperial city can be seen from the model of the Northern Song Dynasty imperial city restored by Henan archaeology.
As we all know, the wisdom of the ancients in our country is infinite, there are many major achievements in the astronomical calendar, such as the Spring and Autumn Period there is a record of Halley's Comet (in 613 BC, there are stars into the Big Dipper), the Astronomical Work "Ganshi Xingjing" appeared in the Warring States Period, the Han Wu Emperor formulated a complete calendar book "Taichu Calendar", zhang Heng of the Eastern Han Dynasty explained the lunar eclipse, and invented the ground motion instrument, the Tang Dynasty monks and masters made the "Great Yan Calendar", and used scientific methods to measure the length of the meridian. Guo Shoujing of the Yuan Dynasty created twenty astronomical observation instruments such as simple instruments and high tables, and also presided over the compilation of the Chronological Calendar.
Of course, the ancients have many achievements and contributions in the astronomical calendar, which are not listed here, it can be said that the ancients have reached a fairly high level in the mathematics of the astronomical calendar, so the deviation of the central axis from the meridian should not be an error in measurement and calculation. What's going on?
As for the reason why the central axis of the Forbidden City deviates from the meridian, there are three mainstream theories
1, the earth's north and south pole movement said.
Longitude, latitude and azimuth all over the earth are changing with time, from the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty to the current twenty-first century has passed more than seven hundred years, the earth in the spiral around the sun forward around the Milky Way in all aspects of the process of continuously undergoing small changes, which in astronomy is called polar shift, chapter movement, precession, according to astronomical data, polar shift will affect the slight change in the latitude and longitude of the ground.
2, pointing to the meta is said.
Considering that many ancient buildings would have a certain relationship with distant local buildings, They no longer looked for natural and technological reasons for measurement, but turned to the humanistic aspect, that is, whether it was artificially deliberate when the central axis was determined.
Later, he found several topographic maps of Beijing to Inner Mongolia, and when he unfolded the maps, he was surprised to find that the central axis of Beijing extended northward, pointing directly to Gukaiping, where Kublai Khan's Longxing land was.
During the Yuan Dynasty, there was a two-capital system, one was the Yuan Dadu (present-day Beijing), and the other was the Yuan Shangdu (present-day Xilin Gol Zhenglanqi Shangdu Town, Inner Mongolia), would Liu Bingzhong, the chief designer of the Yuan Dynasty City Pool, deliberately use the connection between the capital and the Shangdu as the central axis in accordance with the thinking of the rulers at that time, in order to reflect the unity of the two capitals?
3. Take the southeast sunrise.
People who hold this view believe that the ancients will be related to feng shui when building buildings, the buildings that are just south and north do not conform to the theory of yin and yang, and in ancient times, the prosperity of the pole must decline, the pole of things must be reversed, the anode is yin, the water is full and overflowing, and all Chinese-style buildings will be slightly biased to the southeast, and will not be due south and north, because the buildings of the south and north are not only ordinary people who cannot sit still, even the royal gardens of the emperors and generals cannot sit still, which is very unlucky.
In addition, seeing that some people say that the Beijing time used by modern people when measuring is not the local time of the Forbidden City, this statement should not be considered a mainstream view, the wisdom of the ancients is beyond doubt, but the modern expert GPS positioning is so skilled, it should not be ignorant to the point of not knowing Beijing time, I believe in such a simple problem, they must have already considered it, it will not be so unbearable.
In short, although the people who originally repaired the Forbidden City repaired the Forbidden City, this did not affect the wheel of history rolling forward, nor did it affect the rapid development of Beijing today, the Yuan, Ming, qing, these dynasties only lasted for one or two hundred years before they perished, nor will it be because the emperor "sat crooked" in the Forbidden City, the historical and cultural monuments on the central axis that have experienced hundreds of years of wind, frost, rain and snow will also flow forward with the rotation of the clock.