Produced by Xinmin Evening News "Shanghai Moment"
Located at the junction of Zhidan Road and Yanchang West Road in Putuo District, the ruins of Shanghai's Yuan Dynasty Sluice Gate are surrounded by residential areas, fireworks and fireworks. This magnificent and low-key underground sewer bears witness to at least 700 years of Shanghai's history: the ancestors of Shanghai dredged the silted and shrunken Wusong River with their superb wisdom and industrious hands, becoming one of the most important geographical achievements of the Song and Yuan dynasties.
Pictured: Shanghai Yuan Dynasty Sluice Site Museum Xinmin Evening News reporter Wang Kai photo (the same below)
The river nourishes farmland on both sides of the river, promotes the vitality of commerce and trade, and has had an impact on the economy of Shanghai and even the Yangtze River Delta region for hundreds of years. Ren Renfa, a native of Qingpu, Shanghai, who presided over the project, may not have been able to predict that the river pattern laid the foundation for Shanghai's prosperous environment. His dedication to his hometown shines in the annals of history along with his paintings.
This is the only one site
Ren Renfa is an authentic Shanghainese, born in the Southern Song Dynasty, living in Qingpu Qinglong Town, Shanghai. He was raised in the middle of the southern Song Dynasty at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty, and later entered the yuan dynasty court, serving as a senior official in the water conservancy department, responsible for rectifying river disasters. In the past, Shanghai's shipping mainly relied on the Wusong River (now Suzhou River), but because of the long-term siltation and inconvenience of shipping, Ren Renfa wrote a letter asking for the treatment of the Wusong River, and the Zhidanyuan Sluice Gate was one of the water conservancy projects presided over by Ren Renfa. According to Song Jian, a research librarian at the Shanghai Museum, Ren Renfa has built 6 sluice gates (1304-1325) on the tributaries of the Wusong River, and only one site can be explored and completely preserved. Ren Renfa's water control achievements directly affected the shanghai river and brought about essential changes in the trade environment.
Pictured: Yuan Dynasty sluice gate site
Xu Pingfang, director of the Chinese Archaeological Society, commented: "The (sluice gate) was built on the old Wusong River Road in the Song and Yuan dynasties, indicating that Shanghai had attached great importance to water conservancy at that time. Its architectural model fully meets the requirements of the Song Dynasty's "Construction of the French Style". Its excavations are of great scientific value for the study of water conservancy projects and historical changes in the Jiangnan region during the Song and Yuan dynasties. The site was discovered in May 2001, and archaeologists revealed the full extent of the site in 2006, and was named one of the "Top Ten New Archaeological Discoveries in China" that year.
The project will not fall for thousands of years
After 10 years of archaeological excavations, site protection and cultural relics research, Shanghai built a modern site museum on the Yuan Dynasty sluice gate more than 700 years ago, with a total area of 2300 square meters, and most of the museum's space is submerged in the underground, which is the only site museum in Downtown Shanghai.
Pictured: Multimedia display of sluice gate construction steps
The museum is built above the ruins of the sluice gates, and the building embodies the architectural elements of the sluice gates, highlighting the theme of "water". The museum will show this unique cultural heritage to the public from multiple angles and in an all-round way, such as the discovery process, historical background, construction process, structure of the sluice gate, and technological functions.
The entire museum is located 7 meters underground and has a display area of nearly 1500 square meters. The entrance and the floor of the museum are heavily made of tempered glass, and the audience can see the whole picture of the site as long as they look down: the gate, the gate wall, the bottom stone, the rammed earth, the stone slabs, and the wooden piles are well distributed. The entrance to the sluice gate resembles a treasure, and two beams and columns hanging from the sluice gate stand in the ruins, the most eye-catching of which is the wooden stakes of different heights and heights, each with a number on it. Chen Xiejun, former director of the Shanghai Museum, revealed that such wooden piles totaled more than 10,000 in the entire ruins area, exposing more than 2,000, they reinforced the sluice gates, used wooden stakes to top the wooden beams, and cushioned wooden slabs and stone slabs on them, so that the construction of the sluice gates was impenetrable, and it was the largest and most exquisitely made place in the same kind of ruins. "Technically speaking, the level of architectural construction in the Yuan Dynasty should be rated as the 'Luban Award' when viewed today."
Pictured: Wooden stakes of varying lengths
The underground space of the museum displays the artifacts excavated by the archaeology of the original site, including pottery pots, porcelain, tiles, iron hooks, nails, coins and other restorations, replicas, fragments. After the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty entered the Central Plains, a group of Skilled Craftsmen of the Song Dynasty were used, so some of the fired products continued the firing process of the Song Dynasty, and the remains of these cultural relics outlined a scene of life with pyrotechnic gas, substituted into the scene of the sluice gate site, and the audience seemed to have crossed back to the port of Wusongjiang, where the handicraft casting industry was developed and trade was busy.
Illustration: Schematic of the sluice foundation profile
A master of Haipai painting
Ren Renfa, who presided over the water conservancy, was also a great painter, good at painting kurama horses, flowers, birds, and figures, and was on a par with the contemporary calligrapher and painter Zhao Mengfu. He was highly skilled in horse painting, and was once asked by the emperor to paint famous horses in the stables of the imperial garden, which was appreciated, and later generations praised Ren Renfa's paintings as comparable to famous paintings such as Han Gan's "Illuminating the Night white map".
Pictured: Ren Renfa
It may be that the water control is busy, ren Renfa has very few surviving paintings, and most of the existing works are collected in the two museums of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the National Palace in Taipei. The popular "Five Kings Drunk Return Scroll" was auctioned at Sotheby's in Hong Kong in October 2020, and liu Yiqian, the founder of the Shanghai Long Art Museum, eventually pocketed it for more than HK$300 million, which set a record for the sale price of Asian art auctions that year.
"Five Kings Drunken Return Picture Scroll" depicts the scene of the five brothers of Tang Xuanzong returning drunk at the calyx Xianghui Building, which is a rare work on paper written by Ren Renfa, the Song notes are fine paper, the pulp is good, and the colors are bright; the pen is relaxed and natural, the whole line is condensed and elegant, and the tiled composition is exactly the Tang style and the Song and Yuan pens. (Xinmin Evening News reporter Le Mengrong)