After the Battle of Makino, the King of Shang committed suicide and the history of the Shang Dynasty ended. But the Zhou Dynasty Shang's project is not yet completely over. Some of the large and small clans of Yin Shang had submitted, and some were still rebelling. After a period of time, Zhou Cai quelled the war with various means.
However, there were still some Yin Shang clans who were neither willing to submit nor able to resist, so they had to choose a third way - to flee their homeland and find another place.
In 1959, a villager in Huangwu Town, Ningxiang Township, Hunan Province, went to the waste station to sell a batch of waste products, and the owner of the waste station felt that these things were not like ordinary broken copper and rotten iron, so he reported them to the cultural relics department. Cultural relics workers went to the scene to take a look and found that these were bronze fragments, dating from the late Shang Dynasty.
The cultural relics workers followed the clues to find the villager who sold the waste, and traced more than a dozen fragments. When we pieced it together, we found that it was a bronze Fang Ding from the late Shang Dynasty. This is the famous "Shang Da He Fang Ding", because the square is carved with a human face, so it is also called "human face pattern Square Ding".
At this point, there is a very puzzling place, the territory of the Shang Dynasty is mainly distributed in the Yellow River Basin, and its sphere of influence has not reached the Yangtze River, why will bronzes of the late Shang Dynasty be found in Hunan?
The cultural relics department decided to continue to investigate the town of Huangwu in Shangda Hefangding to see if it could find some clues. As a result, there was a big harvest in a mountain basin in Huangwu Town, where more than 200 bronze artifacts were unearthed! It's all Shang Dynasty bronzes!
Archaeologists immediately thought that as early as the 30s, a batch of bronzes including the national treasure "Four Sheep Fangzun" had been found on a hill near the town of Huangwu. Could it be that the Shang Dynasty's sphere of influence had reached Hunan?
In 1963, the archaeological department continued to excavate in this basin in Huangwu Town, and an ancient city was revealed! According to archaeological identification, this ancient city was built in the late Shang and early Zhou dynasties, and the main use date was the early and middle Western Zhou Dynasty. This is the ruins of the ancient city of Western Zhou in Tanheli.
In 1973, a small excavation was carried out on the ruins of the ancient city of Tanheli, and in 2003, a large-scale excavation was carried out, and the full picture of the ancient city was roughly revealed. Palaces, walls, moats, and even ancient tombs, as well as a large collection of bronzes, are all available.
But the ruins of this ancient city, which has been lost for three thousand years, bring more mysteries to people.
Huangcai Town is surrounded by mountains, and it is necessary to cross the mountains and mountains to come in outside, and the traffic is extremely inconvenient, which is really not suitable for the establishment of a city. But why do merchants spend so much manpower, material resources, and financial resources to build a city here? Idle? Too much money to spend?
Therefore, experts and scholars put forward a kind of idea:
After the Zhou Dynasty destroyed the Shang, a Yin Shang clan that was unwilling to submit to the Zhou people and was unable to resist chose to flee from its homeland and find another place. They fled south to the small basin of Huangwu Town, Hunan Province, which is surrounded by lofty mountains and mountains, which are not easy to be disturbed by the outside world, and the small basin is fertile and rich in water resources, which is a good secluded habitat. It can be said that it is similar to the peaceful and peaceful peach blossom source found by the fishermen in Wuling in Tao Yuanming's "Peach Blossom Origin".
These remnants of the Merchants flourished in this new land and still maintained the customs and habits of the merchants. However, they will also communicate with the local indigenous people in the south, so in the later bronze style, it is slightly different from the pure northern Shang Dynasty bronze, which shows that they slowly absorbed the customs and customs of the south.
Of course, this is just a beautiful and moving hypothesis. There are also many people who disagree, they believe that the ruins of the ancient city of Tanheli are a southern country during the Shang Dynasty, because they have absorbed the culture of many northern Yin shang, so they appear to be very similar to Yin Shang.
However, this statement does not explain why an ancient city was built in the middle of a mountain and inaccessible place. This city obviously looks more like it was built for seclusion, so why should it be reclusive if it is a fang country?
The above mysteries are likely to haunt people for a long time, until the day when the mystery is really solved.
Driven by curiosity, excavating historical materials anecdotes—— [Curiosity Mining Group]