When I was a child watching "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", what interested me the most was Zhuge Liang's wooden cow and flowing horse. The story takes place during Zhuge Liang's Southern Expedition, in order to quell the rear of the Shu state and the barbarian rebellion in the south, Zhuge Liang left the Qi Mountains six times and captured Mengmeng seven times, during which time he also invented a tool for carrying grain and grass, that is, this tool, which determined the victory on the battlefield.
This tool is the wooden cow and the flowing horse, which is said in the novel to carry "one-year-old grain" and "tens of miles for special travelers, and thirty miles for groups". It means a wooden cow, or a flowing horse, carrying 400 kilograms of grain and traveling dozens of miles a day, which was an extremely efficient means of transportation during the Three Kingdoms period.
Through the wooden cattle and horses, Zhuge Liang solved the grain and grass transportation of 100,000 troops, thus unimpeded on the road of the southern expedition. However, the novel only records the magic of this tool, does not explain how it was made, and its method has not been passed down, so it has become a mystery for eternity.
Some people will ask, since it is recorded in the novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", it is likely to be fictionalized by Luo Guanzhong. After all, the author has a clear bias towards the Shu kingdom, and it seems reasonable to mythologize Zhuge Liang through such an invention.
In fact, it is not that there are wooden cattle and horses in the interpretation, and it is also recorded in the "Biography of Zhuge Liang of the Three Kingdoms" in the history of the classics: "The brightness is longer than ingenuity, the profit and loss are continuous, and the wooden cattle are flowing horses, all of which are unexpected." And in the "Three Kingdoms Chronicle later biography" it is written: "In the ninth year of Jianxing, Liang returned to Qishan, transported the army with wooden cattle, and ran out of grain; in the spring of the twelfth year, Liang learned that the masses came out of the Xie Valley, and transported them by flowing horses, according to wugong Wuzhangyuan, and Sima Xuanwang against Weinan." ”
It can be seen that the wooden cow and the flowing horse indeed exist in the correct history, not Luo Guanzhong's fiction. However, throughout all the historical documents, none of them record its practice. However, according to the description of it in historical texts, historians have deduced that it may be a kind of wheelbarrow.
Chen Shidao of the Song Dynasty once said, "There are small carts in Shu, which carry eight stones alone, like a bull's head in front; and there are also large carts, pushed by four people, carrying ten stones, and gaimu cattle and horses." "It seems to vaguely confirm that the wooden cow flowing horse is a wheelbarrow, but the Song Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period have been separated by a thousand years, and there is no written record of the inheritance of the wooden cow flowing horse in this millennium, but a gap. Chen Shidao's statement is also likely to be fabricated out of thin air.
After Chen Shidao, Gao Cheng also wrote in the "Chronicle of Things": "The wooden cow is the predecessor of the present car, and the flowing horse is the one who pushes the current." "It seems even more firm to the fact that it is a unicycle.
However, there is a fatal loophole in these statements, that is, the unicycle must need to be driven by manpower, but in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the wooden cow and the horse are fully automatic equipment, which obviously does not meet the setting of the unicycle. Zu Chongzhi of the Southern and Northern Dynasties also said, "Zhuge Liang has wooden cattle and horses, but to build a vessel, not because of feng shui, to carry out self-transportation, not to work manpower." In this way, the true face of the wooden cow and the horse has become confusing again.
The only thing that is certain at the moment is that the wooden cow flow horse did exist in history. However, due to the inconsistent historical records of the ancients, modern people cannot figure out what it is, so it is difficult for today's scientific community to characterize it, let alone explain its principles, and restore it one by one. I believe that with the development of time, history will give us more clues. This long-lost ancient Chinese wisdom will always be revealed to the world.