Walk into the Nanjing City Wall Museum
Feel the connection between man and the city walls
Reporter Yin Xiaoyu
Overlooking the Nanjing City Wall Museum. The images in this article are all provided by the Nanjing City Wall Museum
The bricks of the city walls on display inside the museum. The images in this article are all provided by the Nanjing City Wall Museum
"What to see at the Nanjing City Wall Museum?" Ma Lin, executive deputy director of the Nanjing City Wall Protection and Management Center in Jiangsu Province, faced such questions when planning to build the museum in 2016. Because if you just look at the city wall and look at the city bricks, it is better to walk on the city wall, and the audience does not need to come to the museum.
A few days ago, the Nanjing City Wall Museum opened for trial operation. This largest thematic museum of the city wall in China, with a total construction area of about 13,000 square meters, basically displays around the theme of "Kuangshi City Wall", from the five aspects of design ideas, city construction technology, imperial capital prestige, military defense, heritage inheritance, display more than 2,000 pieces (sets) of various cultural relics, and through scene restoration, digital sand table, multimedia display, etc., let the audience deeply feel the historical and cultural value of nanjing city wall, experience the connection between people and the city wall.
City brick firing is very exquisite
In 1366, two years before the founding of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang issued a "city building order". After 28 years, hundreds of millions of city bricks were spent, and finally the Nanjing Ming City Wall including the Imperial City, Miyagi Castle, Beijing City, and Waiguo Fourfold City Wall was built. The existing 25-kilometer beijing city wall is "Gao Jian Jia In Hai Nei", which is still the largest and best-preserved ancient city wall in the world today.
In the Nanjing City Wall Museum, there is a mantou kiln relocated from Lichuan, Jiangxi, with a diameter of more than 3 meters and a height of more than 2 meters, the kiln door was broken when the kiln was opened in the Ming Dynasty, and there are 3 short chimneys above the back. The brick blanks excavated in the kiln are printed with the words "Jianchangfu" and "Xincheng County", which coincide with the city bricks printed with "Jianchangfu" on the Nanjing city wall, confirming that this kiln is one of the sites where the Nanjing city wall bricks were fired in the Ming Dynasty.
The ming city wall bricks require "knocking sound, breaking no hole", and there is great attention to firing. The mud material should be selected from the clay that is sticky but not scattered, powdery and not sandy, stacked after being drizzled by the sun and rain to make the particles in it decomposed, and then sieved to make it more delicate, and then used the water that has been exposed to the sun, soaked to remove the acid and alkali components, and then removed the bubbles through repeated trampling by people or cattle, and finally filled the brick mud into the city brick mold to make a blank, molded or carved out the brick text on the brick blank.
Kiln firing is the most critical link in brick making. After the brick billet is burned enough, the kiln workers block the flue, and in the hypoxic environment, the red high-priced iron in the brick billet is reduced to light green low-cost iron, and the black carbon particles of the firewood penetrate, and the brick becomes blue-gray, and the hardness is higher than that of the red brick. At this time, there is also an important step called "watering" - a lot of watering on the top of the kiln, and the water seeping into the kiln can both cool down and isolate the air, avoid the oxidation of the bricks and turn red, so that it remains blue-gray.
According to Ma Lin, from the perspective of historical materials and archaeological excavations, the Ming Dynasty participated in the firing of Nanjing city wall bricks in as many as 37 provinces and nearly 160 counties, mainly concentrated in today's Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces. The vast number of working people used ingenuity and sweat to create high-quality city bricks and masonry to build the Nanjing city wall, which has stood for hundreds of years.
Inscriptions are rich in information
From the day the Ming City Wall was built, the city wall became a part of the life of the people of Nanjing. Citizens who live near the city wall have been integrated with the city wall for many years; every Chongyang Festival, climbing the city wall has become an expression of the custom of Nanjing people ascending; on the city wall bricks, old Nanjing may find the names of their ancestors...
At the Nanjing City Wall Museum, an exhibition hall composed of more than 700 city bricks brought great visual shock to the audience. Bricks are lined up on the exhibition wall, the inscriptions face outward, and the inscriptions on the bricks convey rich information.
The bricks of the city wall printed with the inscription "Nanjing Gongbu Guanfang" indicate that in addition to the areas along the river, the Ministry of Works of the central government is also directly involved in brick making; the bricks printed with the inscriptions "Water Army Right Guard" and "Guangyang Right Institute" indicate that the army is also involved in burning bricks; and the names "Tianjie Temple", "Bao'en Temple", and "Long Yin Guan" appear in the inscriptions, indicating that the temple temple also has to undertake the task of burning bricks.
The content of the inscriptions on the bricks is gradually rich, the early inscriptions generally only see the words "so-and-so province", and the later inscriptions can see a certain province and a county, and multi-level personal names, which is the embodiment of the continuous improvement of the responsibility system for the production of city wall bricks. In the exhibition hall, there is a brick that identifies the nine-level responsibility system, and the inscription involves the transfer officer, the general judge, the official, the main book, the general A, the first head, the small A, the kiln maker, and the brick maker. Once the quality problem of the brick occurs, it can be held accountable accordingly. According to statistics, the level of responsibility on the bricks of the Ming City Wall is generally nine levels, and the maximum is eleven levels.
Ma Lin told reporters that since 2018, the Nanjing City Wall Protection and Management Center has implemented the "Nanjing City Wall Body Brick Information Collection" project, with the help of GPS positioning system, unmanned aerial vehicles, three-dimensional laser scanners and other technical means, completed the existing 25 kilometers of Nanjing City Wall Body Brick Information Collection, obtained more than 170,000 clear inscription city brick photos and coordinate positioning, realized the rescue protection and permanent preservation of the Nanjing City Wall Brick Information, and established an electronic database of city brick inscriptions that can be queried and used.
There is a city brick inscription inquiry equipment in the Nanjing City Wall Museum, and the audience can inquire according to the surname, location, etc., and find the city bricks that are "related to themselves". Outside the exhibition hall, there is also a multimedia screen of "Our City Wall", where more than 100 narrators tell their stories about themselves and the city wall, taking personal memories as the starting point to reflect the changes in the Nanjing City Wall over the past half century.
Cultural relics bear witness to the smoke of history
Ma Lin introduced that the military defense plate is a more distinctive plate in the exhibition of the Nanjing City Wall Museum, and the history and role of the Nanjing City Wall as a military fortification are an important part of the cultural heritage value of the Nanjing City Wall.
The mezzanine of the Nanjing city wall is not rammed earth, but is made of bricks, which is related to the firearms battle that appeared at the end of the Yuan Dynasty.
Among the exhibits is a bronze Flang machine made in the sixth year of the Ming Dynasty (1578), which is about 1.5 meters long and can be mounted at the battlements of the city wall to adjust the firing angle. It has a rectangular groove at the rear to fill the sub-reams and ammunition, which can be replaced after firing. In the first year of Jiajing (1522), the Ming army defeated Portuguese ships at the mouth of the Pearl River and captured more than 20 Flang cannons. The power of this advanced artillery impressed the Ming army, and the imperial court immediately ordered the Ministry of Works to imitate it in the Nanjing Military Bureau, and the first batch of 26 successful pilot-produced Flang machines became the weapons to guard the walls of Nanjing.
The nanjing city wall also witnessed the fierce anti-Japanese war. A number of anti-war cultural relics are exhibited in the museum: on the plaques of "Zhonghua East Gate" and "Zhonghua West Gate", bullet holes are clearly visible; the shisha pots, alabaster bottles, seals, bayonets and bullets found in the Wudingmen machine gun bunker are the testimony of the Wudingmen defenders resisting the Japanese army invading China during the Nanjing Defense War in December 1937.
Walk out of the exhibition hall and follow the ramp modeled after the Zhonghua Gate Urn City Horse Road to the roof of the museum, which is a wide viewing platform with a stretch of the Zhonghua Gate section of the city wall as far as the eye can see. "The integration of the museum and the surrounding scenery not only respects the city wall and respects history, but also makes the people feel the development and good life of the city." An Laishun, vice chairman of the International Association of Museums and professor of Shanghai University, commented after visiting the Nanjing City Wall Museum.
"All aspects of the planning, design and construction of the Nanjing City Wall Museum reflect the respect for cultural relics everywhere, and properly handle the relationship between urban construction and the protection and utilization of cultural heritage." Ma Lin introduced that at present, Nanjing, Xi'an, Xingcheng, Jingzhou, Xiangyang, Linhai, Shouxian, Fengyang and other 14 cities of the Ming and Qing Dynasty city wall joint application, covering the "capital city - fucheng - county town - Weisuo City" complete system, and the Nanjing City Wall Museum is the largest display place for China's Ming and Qing city walls to declare the world cultural heritage.
Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition