In recent years, a small village in Xianyang, Shaanxi Province, has become more and more "fire", and many people who have come to visit it, if for no other reason than to see a bare pit - the patio. What kind of mysterious pit is this, and what little-known secrets are hidden? If you're also curious, let the editor reveal it from scratch.
The small village is located in the northwest of the county seat of Sanyuan County, Xianyang, called Tingtian'an Village, which is the village on the patio shore as the name suggests. In fact, among the nearly one million villages in China, there are countless ordinary villages like Ting'an Village, but this is the only one that has puzzled countless experts. However, the peculiarities of the village of Patio Shore are all concentrated in a large deep pit (patio) outside the village, and from the satellite map, the pit is circular, about 200 meters in diameter and about 40 meters deep.
Look away from the deep pit, the patio shore village is tens of miles away from the plain, so why is there a lonely deep pit here? Is it natural, or is it dug by man? This is a question that comes to mind of everyone who comes to the pit. According to the villagers who have lived here for generations, this deep pit has existed as early as their grandfather's grandfather's generation, and there are still many inhabited caves in the circle of the deep pit, but now they have been moved, leaving only those broken cave holes.
Later, the villagers found that the soil in the pit was fertile, so they went through some leveling and used it as farmland, and the crops planted were indeed better than the harvest elsewhere, so in the minds of local villagers, the pit was a "treasure land". In recent years, in addition to tourists visiting, local archaeologists have also begun to survey and study at two ends in three days...
Once, when experts explored the pit, they found a large amount of "living soil", that is, artificially accumulated soil layers, which means that the deep pit was dug out by man, not naturally formed, but it was not dug by modern people, because the experts also found a lot of broken pottery pieces and rubble from the Han Dynasty, so it can be determined that the deep pit was dug by the Han Dynasty.
Immediately after, the experts expanded the scope of the survey, and about 500 meters east of the Big Pit, they found a large altar site of the Han Dynasty, the Five Emperors Altar. Therefore, experts speculate that the deep pit may be the site of the Han Dynasty Sacrifice, that is, the Tianqi Ancestral Hall. In addition, the "Book of Han Dynasty Suburban Ancestral Records" records that "Tianqi, such as the belly of heaven Qiye", which shows that the Han Dynasty people used the Tianqi Gong ancestral hall as the "navel" of the earth, that is to say, the deep pit here was the "origin of the earth" in the Han Dynasty, which also confirmed the saying that people often say that the world is in Shaanxi.
However, the unthinkable ensued. Experts have observed through satellite maps that the Han Dynasty Chang'an City has been extended along the north-south central line, connecting the ruins of the Han Dynasty Xuandu Temple to the south and the deep pit (patio) to the north. Not only that, but there are also many Han Dynasty ruins on this line, such as the Qin capital Xianyang Palace, the Han Dynasty Weiyang Palace, the Changling Tomb of Han Gaozu, as well as the Chongwen Pagoda and the Zhou Family Compound. In addition, the difference between this land origin of the Han Dynasty and the current origin of the mainland is only 60 meters, which is enough to show the good intentions of the Han Dynasty craftsmen in selecting this north-south axis.
In summary, the deep pit of Tingtan'an Village is not ordinary, not only the site of the Han Dynasty's heavenly sacrifice, but also the original place of the han Dynasty's earth, and calling it "the navel of the earth", which is obviously a very vivid metaphor. However, for archaeologists, the veil of the deep pit has just been lifted, and the little-known secrets behind it have yet to be further studied and explored.
Wenlan Hairun Studio Editor-in-Chief Wen Xiucai, this article is written by: Special History Writer: Liu Lijiang's