Xihua Gate on the outside facing the right side
The buildings such as the palace warehouse inside the Donghua Gate are the east part of the former Chaozhong Road of the Forbidden City, and the symmetrical buildings centered on the Wuying Hall in the Xihua Gate, which is the western part of the former Chaozhong Road, and the buildings in this part are introduced separately below.
Xihua Gate has gone through vicissitudes, is the west gate of the Forbidden City, and is in a symmetrical position with the Donghua Gate, and there is also a stone plaque outside the door. This gate is also the entrance and exit gate for ministers and officials to enter the palace. The Empress Dowager of the Qing Dynasty wished for a birthday or usually went out to play in the official, and most of them came and went from Xihuamen, because the places they wanted to play, such as the Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, the Changchun Garden, the Leshan Garden, and the Xiyuan Garden, were all in the west of the capital. Later, the Eight-Nation Alliance invaded Beijing, and Empress Dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor fled in a hurry, also from the Xihua Gate. It is said that at that time, the empress dowager was wearing a green coat and walking on foot, crying and walking, with Guangxu and his empress following behind. A desolate and tragic scene, compared with the past when the Xihua Gate went out of the palace with great fanfare, it was simply heaven and earth.
There is a city tower on the Xihua Gate, which stores the cotton armor used in the military parade, and the corner tower on the north side of the Xihua Gate also stores such cotton armor and ingot armor.
The source of the book of the temple edition - Wuying Hall
Inside the Xihua Gate, west of the Xihe Gate, in front of the hall is the Neijinshui River flowing from east to west, and there are three stone bridges on the river. Cross the stone bridge and enter the Wuying Gate, which is the Wuying Hall, and its east hall is called the Ningdao Hall, the west side hall is called Huanzhang Hall, and the rear hall is called Jingsi Hall. To the northeast of the hall is Hengshou Zhai and to the northwest is Yutoku Hall.
The Front and Back of the Wuying Hall are double, and both store books. During the Kang Dynasty, the special bookstore was opened in wuying hall. After Qianlong, Wu Yingdian was in charge of engraving books, and they were never abolished. The published subset of the history of the scriptures is called the WuyingDian Edition, referred to as the Dian Edition. The prince has always been in charge of his affairs, and there are officials such as president, promotion, general editor, repair, assistant repair, etc., and the specific affairs are the people who record the school and the members who take charge, and those who are rigidly bound are undertaken by many craftsmen. It was not until twenty years after Daoguang that the national strength declined, the funds were insufficient, and the publication of books was reduced, and even in vain.
During the Kangxi Dynasty, talented and learned scholars from the people were often directly promoted from Buyi to Wuyingdian to show respect for scholarship. For example, Fang Bao, who directly served as the president of Wu Yingdian with cloth clothes, and for thirty years before and after his tenure, all kinds of books he undertook were awarded as academic officials and were the standard reading books of the Guozijian.
The Kangxi Emperor toured the south, and along the way, the scholars offered poetry to praise the virtue, and Kangxi admired Wu Tingzhen's poetry the most, and soon let Wu serve in the Wuying Palace. At that time, most of the people serving in Wuying Hall were famous literati, sometimes called The Hipster Cluster, so Chen Pengnian had a poetry cloud:
Secret House View Books, Western Qing Dynasty.
Each point is like a pipe pen, whisking the dragon incense stone.
The moon tree can be draped, and the wind curtain sits on the roll.
If the four seas are like brothers, will they be in the same township and county?
The most famous seal of Wuyingdian is the Juzhen Edition created by the Qianlong Emperor. The so-called Juzhen edition, that is, movable type imposition printing method. The Qianlong Emperor said in the preface to the "Ten Rhyming Poems of the Juzhen Edition of the Wuying Temple":
Shen Kuo of the former Northern Song Dynasty once recorded in the "Mengxi Pen Talk" that Bi Sheng used glue clay to burn movable type printing method, and later Lu Shen said in the "Jintai Chronicle" that the Biling people first used lead type movable print, which was the beginning of movable type printing. However, the clay font is thick and the lead character is soft, which is not as delicate and durable as the single word carved from wood, so the Wu Ying Temple uses more than 250,000 woodcut words, called the Juzhen Edition, although hundreds of books can be used to print.
The books printed with Wuyingdian wooden movable type are called "Juzhen Edition" books, which are very famous in the history of ancient Chinese engraving, among which the most influential books are "Ancient and Modern Book Integration", "Four Books and Five Classics", "Thirteen Classics Commentary", "Peiwen Yunfu", "Zishi Essence", "Tongzhi", "Tongdian", "Literature Tongkao", "Five Dynasties Hadiths (Five Dynasties refers to Taizu, Taizong, Shizu, Shengzu, and Shizong of the Qing Dynasty)", "Yuanjian Class Letters", "Twenty-one History", etc., all of which are multi-volume giant books.
In fact, the compilation and printing of the "Integration of Ancient and Modern Books" began in the Kangxi Dynasty, and it was also printed with movable type. However, the movable characters in the Kangxi Period were all made of copper, and it was changed to wooden characters until the Qianlong period. And the copper characters stored in the Wuying Hall, over the years, many people stole, the person in charge of the affairs is afraid of being found out later and punished, it just so happens that in the early years of Qianlong, the capital is expensive, so he asked to melt the copper characters to be used to mint money, after Qianlong agreed, the copper characters of the Kangxi period were all destroyed, and the copper characters that were stolen and missing naturally could not be raised. It can be seen from this that the Juzhen edition began in the Kangxi Dynasty.
The Book of The Treasure Edition of Wuying Hall was very valuable, and at that time it was often used as a reward for the emperor to reward literati and poets. For example, when Qianlong compiled the "Four Libraries of The Whole Book", there were not a few book devotees in various places, especially the four people of Zhejiang Bao Shigong, Fan Maozhu, Wang Qishu and Lianghuai Mayu who donated the most kinds of books, so Qianlong En allowed these four people to give each of these four families a copy of the "Integration of Ancient and Modern Books" in Wuyingdian Juzhen. For Jiangsu Zhou Houyu, Jiang Zengying, Zhejiang Wu Yujie, Sun Yangzeng, Wang Ruyao, and the imperial officials Huang Dengxian, Ji Yun, Li Shouqian, Wang Ruzao, etc., because they each entered more than a hundred kinds of books, they were also awarded a juzhen edition of "Peiwen Yunfu".
Wu Yingdian's inscriptions flourished most during the Qianjia period, and the emperors of his descendants were of little interest, causing them to gradually decline. In the eighth year of Tongzhi, the Wuying Hall unfortunately caught fire, and more than thirty houses were burned, and the book plates were lost. By the twenty-seventh year of Guangxu, there was another fire, when the Eight-Power Alliance had already invaded Beijing, and when the fire broke out, the American and Japanese officers and soldiers worked very hard to fight the fire, fortunately not much was burned. In addition to the fire, the craftsmen in the temple often stole books from the temple. For example, in the fifth year of Daoguang, the craftsmen and servants stole four copies of the PeiWen YunFu, one each of the Kangxi Dictionary, the Zhou Li, and the Four Books, and got the palace takeaway money. This is only the one who was captured, the rest of the unknowing, it is difficult to estimate?
The apse of the Wuying Hall is the Hall of Jingsi, which is a warehouse for printing books, and there are many secret books that are rare in the world. In the nineteenth year of Jiaqing, Xie Song led people to check the books in the library, and once found a bag of strange books on the windowsill. At that time, it was full of dust, and the bag was neither on the shelves nor opened for many years. Xie Song felt strange at this time, and when he opened the bag, there were twelve books, which were a kind of soldier's book. There is no name, no author, there are pictures in the book, each according to the map, such as a white rainbow through the sun, evil wind and thunder and so on. All are based on the celestial signs, and the corresponding methods of using soldiers are explained separately.
There are also portraits of severed corpses and missing heads of generals, all of which are colored and terrifying to see. However, the commentary was all in Zhu Xi's name, Xie Song had never seen such a book, thinking that he was probably a royal secretary, did not dare to read it carefully, and hurriedly offered it to the emperor. As a result, the emperor's decree was still stored in the temple and was not allowed to be transmitted. There are many books in the temple, and so on.
There is also an open room at the east end of the Wuying Hall, called the Western Ocean Hall, but it is not a place for books and engravings, which is full of Western medicines and flower dew, so it is called an open room. Drugs in the room are mostly stored in bottles, such as cloves, cardamom, cinnamon oil, etc., because they have been stored for a long time, the oil has become a paste, and the spoon has not been dug. There are also dog treasures, turtle treasures, spider treasures, lion treasures, snake teeth, snake eyes and other things. Among them, the spider sister treasure, black as a pill, as big as a walnut, can be imagined, this is how big a spider can be formed. And then there is Haili Yag, like an ointment. There was also Ka Zhongde, such as small flowers and fruits, or the shape of Pu'er small tea cakes, and later all the items in this room were handed over to the Internal Affairs Office, and it was disassociated from the Wuying Hall.
