"Qiantang Momei in the West Lake,
Jinling Momei in the back lake. ”
This is Ouyang Xiu's poem praising Xuanwu Lake.
This pearl in the city of Nanjing,
It is the largest royal garden lake in China
and the largest inner-city park in Gangnam.
However, more than 600 years ago, it was once a forbidden place for the royal army.
During the reign of Ming Hongzhi, the eunuch Guo Yong (郭镛) was summoned to Beijing to be punished for passing through Nanjing by highway and leading his retinue on Xuanwu Lake, and was immediately reprimanded by the inspector Yushi Sun Hong in the name of unauthorized travel to forbidden places.
What kind of secrets made the Ming Dynasty so cautious?
On New Year's Day this year, after more than two years of meticulous construction, the Minghou Lake Yellow Book Library Ruins Exhibition Hall was officially opened to the public, and the "Daming National Archives" showed its true appearance to the world more than 600 years later.
Dynastic Forbidden Land
Xuanwu Lake Liangzhou, passing through Xuanwu Cultural Square, a white-walled Dewa architectural complex is particularly eye-catching - this is the Minghou Lake Yellow Book Library Ruins Exhibition Hall.
With a total construction area of about 770 square meters, there are two exhibition halls of Houhu Yellow Book Library and Yellow Book History and Culture, which are divided into chapters such as "Forbidden Land under Heaven", "Lake Festival Culture", "Yellow Book To Perform", "Book Library Funds", "Book Library Defense", "Book Library Anecdotes" and "Yellow Book System", combining pictures, videos, physical objects and real scenes, and three-dimensionally showing the Minghou Lake Yellow Book Library, a miracle in the history of Chinese archives.
As soon as the museum progressed, a huge "Hongwu Jingcheng Tuzhi" was laid out. This map, painted in the twenty-ninth year of Ming Hongwu (1396), records the five major warehouses in the capital, namely the Luan Driving Warehouse where the Empress Dowager, the Empress Honor Guard, and the Emperor's car were stored, the military storage warehouse for grain and grass and other military supplies, the Yellow Book Warehouse for storing the National Yellow Book, the Gunpowder Bureau responsible for manufacturing gunpowder, and the Baoyuan Bureau in charge of minting money.
The Yellow Book Library is in third place in importance.
In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang overthrew the Yuan Dynasty and established the Ming Dynasty. How to establish a complete management system has become his first consideration.
In the third year of Hongwu (1370), Zhu Yuanzhang issued an order to investigate the household registration nationwide and officially implement the "household post system". The contents of the household postings include the demographic situation and family property.
In the fourteenth year of Hongwu (1381), Zhu Yuanzhang adopted the suggestion of Hubu Shangshu Fan Min - "Ordering the counties and counties of Tianxia to compile the Yellow Book of Enlistment." "The government sends household posts to each household, fills them out every year, and the local officials verify the changes in their dingkou, farmhouses and assets. Accumulated year by year, the yellow book is made once a decade, which is equivalent to our current large-scale census.
The reason why the yellow book got its name comes from the imperial court's stipulation that since the twentieth year of Hongwu (1387), the yellow book handed over to the ministry of households should be covered with yellow paper.
Because the Yellow Book Library was too important, when Zhu Yuanzhang built the Ming City Wall in 1386, he deliberately left more than 253 meters of "waste" city wall behind the Jiming Temple, and newly built Houhu City. In this way, the Yellow Book Library has two walls in the southwest. In order to store the Yellow Book, in 1391, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the lake to be drained and dredged, and several islands were piled up in the lake, and the pattern of the five islands of Xuanwu Lake was formed at that time. The inner lake was also deliberately separated at that time for the fire prevention needs of the yellow book library.
The lake is heavily guarded every day, patrolling and sentry day and night, and 36 boundary markers have been erected. At this opening, the only yellow book library boundary stele found so far is exhibited. The gray-black stone stele is thick and calm, and the red lines outline the four big characters of "Houhu Boundary Stone".
"At that time, there were city walls in the west and south of the Yellow Book Library, and there was a Taiping Causeway in the east, and the location was relatively fixed, only the north side was not fixed, so 36 boundary monuments were erected, which is the only boundary monument found so far in the Ming Yellow Book Library." Hu Kai, deputy director of the office of the Xuanwu Lake Scenic Area Management Office, introduced that this boundary monument is the treasure of the town hall, 143 cm high, 48 cm wide, 15 cm thick, weighing more than 200 kg, and the font on the stele is Zhao Mengfu body, which is carved with double hook line. "This boundary stone reminds the surrounding residents that after passing the boundary stone, this side is the Yellow Book Library of the Houhu Lake, and it is not allowed to come to cultivate land, collect firewood, raise pigs, etc. At that time, there was no wall on this side, and there was a shop behind the boundary monument, which was now a security post. ”
The discovery of this boundary monument was very tortuous. After the fall of the Ming Dynasty, this boundary stone was used by the locals as a ditch to build a plank and survived.
In the 1970s and 1980s, this boundary monument was discovered during the loosening of the board for maintenance, and after several turns, it was preserved by the army oil depot and handed over to the park in 1984. Because the boundary marker was once used as a whetstone, the original font in the upper right corner is blurred.
Big data in the Ming Dynasty
In the exhibition hall, a restored yellow book library standard warehouse makes people feel as if they have traveled back to the archives of the Ming Dynasty. Yellowed yellow books are arranged in stacks and neatly placed on top of the three-story pavilion. At the edge of the pavilion, there are regional information such as "Nanzhili", "Ying Tianfu", and "HuizhouFu".
"What's the storeroom like?" How are files kept? This time, we restored the appearance of a yellow book warehouse in the Ming Dynasty. Hu Kai said that the yellow book library was placed in an east-west direction to ensure that the sun was illuminated from morning to night, which was convenient for moisture-proof. A warehouse has four pavilions, each with three floors. Even the geographical information marked on the pavilion also conceals many "careful machines", "What we marked are places with stories, such as choosing Shangyuan County in Ying Tianfu, because the servants of the Yellow Book Library were mainly from here." We also chose Nanchang Province, Jiangxi Province, because the Yellow Book Library has been running for more than two hundred years, and the biggest case of malpractice occurred in Nanchang Province. ”
In order to preserve the yellow book, the warehouse is also a big one in ten years, with 30 rooms built at a time. In the fourteenth year of Hongwu, the first national collection, more than 50,000 yellow books were collected from all over nanjing, occupying a total of 9 warehouses and 35 pavilions. Until the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Yellow Book Library grew to 787 rooms, covering various islands in houhu, with 3,086 pavilions and a collection of nearly 2 million volumes, reaching a historical peak.
How detailed is big data in the Ming Dynasty?
"Fifty-seven men, twelve women, and six private houses..." In the "Yellow Book" of the "Upper Household" of a Ming Dynasty household called Wang Maojun, a page of paper was densely filled with words, including a few people, men, women, and children, a few acres of land, several rooms, how many buckets of wheat there were, and how many stones there were in the rice, which was accurate to a few millimeters, which was breathtaking. This is an archive contained in the "Wanli Yi Shi Nian Da Zhao Yi Shi Du Five Figures Yellow Book Bottom", Wang Maojun's family land transactions within ten years as long as six pages, involving fields, land, mountains, and ponds, which are all detailed records. The population records in the family alone are divided into four parts: old management, expulsion, new income, and reality. In other words, to subtract the number of deaths from the population of the previous decade, plus the number of new people, it is difficult to fake.
The original yellow book of Xiuning County, the capital of Huizhou during the Wanli Dynasty, is stored in the Anhui Provincial Museum, and is the only yellow book document about a map (village) found so far, which is very precious.
With the decline of the Ming Dynasty,
The yellow book has also gradually disappeared into the dust of history.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, when resisting the attack of the Qing army, the small court of the Southern Ming Dynasty carried out the precious books, some of which served as fillers for the walls and passes, and some as materials for making soldiers' armor and gunpowder fuses. As a result of this disaster, only a few hundred thousand copies of the more than one million yellow books remain.
After entering the Qing Dynasty, the remaining yellow books suffered a complete disaster. In the second year of Qing Shunzhi (1645), when the Qing army first entered Nanjing, Shunzhi once instructed all the yamen in Nanjing to carefully collect the geographical household registration books and not to be damaged. However, after the regime was secured, in order to erase the traces of the previous dynasty, it immediately struck a fierce hand, and either sold the few remaining yellow books or diverted them into military materials.
In the fourteenth year of Shunzhi (1657), the Tongcheng poet Fang Wen witnessed the Qing government selling yellow books as waste paper on the streets of Nanjing. What was once a national secret book has now fallen to this point, and his heart is deeply touched, and he can't help but compose a long narrative poem "Negative Edition Line", expressing his infinite feelings about the change of color and the robbery of culture.
END