"Zhuangzi Zhibei Tour" Yun: "Between the heavens and the earth of life, if the gap between the white colt is suddenly over." "Time flies, and I look back, I have been engaged in the work of oracle bone sorting at the National Library for eighteen years. I vaguely remember the scene when I first entered the oracle bone warehouse, trance yesterday. In the middle of the summer of July 2003, after joining guotu, I stepped into the warehouse with my colleagues for the first time, and the cool feeling soaked into my heart. As the antique cabinet door slowly opened, carefully opened a box of oracle bones wrapped in layers, which were the oracle bones from Yin Ruins more than 3,000 years ago, and the "spiritual objects" of the Shang King's communication with heaven and earth! The special collection warehouse of the National Library of China preserves more than 35,000 precious Shang Dynasty oracle bones, and its collection ranks first among various collection institutions at home and abroad. Each oracle bone is engraved with words about the activities of the Shang royal family, clearly telling the long history to future generations. In the face of these precious cultural relics, I can only be full of piety and reverence, and every time I open the box of oracle bones, I am extra careful and take it lightly.
I come from a poor old revolutionary area, and I have the privilege of coming to the bustling city through study, and after graduation, I can also work in a job with the national first-class cultural relics - oracle bones, which is something I never dreamed of before. I am proud and happy, and my heart is full of gratitude, grateful for the teachers who have led me out of ignorance and ignorance and patiently taught me to grow. Thinking about it carefully, how did I form a relationship with yin xu oracle bone step by step? I think three of the teachers who had a particularly great influence on me were my initiation teachers, master tutors, and internship instructors when I was studying ancient scripts in college and graduate school.
First acquaintance with Yin Ruins Oracle
I had no idea of "what archaeology is" at the beginning, and in 1996, I was transferred to the Department of Archaeology of Jilin University, and I was once confused. There is a compulsory course in ancient chinese, which is taught by Teacher Bai Yulan. At that time, Mr. Bai Yulan was studying for a doctorate with Mr. Lin Hu, and he served as an assistant lecturer to give lectures to our undergraduates. What I remember vividly is that Teacher Bai stood on the podium somewhat shyly in his first class, and after a moment of silence, he turned around and picked up the chalk and wrote his name on the blackboard, "White to Blue", and a row of "Heavenly Books" words. The classroom was silent, and the students were all staring at the beautiful words on the blackboard with wide eyes and doubtful faces, and they didn't know a single one. After Teacher Bai finished writing, he wrote "Oracle, Small Seal" next to the "Heavenly Book" and other annotations, and finally wrote the corresponding letters. In a state of surprise and sighing, everyone began to learn ancient characters. Teacher Bai's oracle bone script is very beautifully written, which can be seen from his "Compilation of the General Collection of Interpretations of the Oracle Bone Inscriptions of Yin Ruins" (based on his doctoral dissertation), and the skill of copying the oracle bone is very admirable. Teacher Bai silently wrote one ancient text after another with beautiful lines on the blackboard, and the students copied their notes without saying a word below, and then left almost half a lesson to explain. As we copied curiously, we secretly pondered these fantastic words. In the future, once a week in the ancient script class, Teacher Bai still carefully wrote the board book before the lecture, so that after a semester, I had copied a thick ancient script notebook according to the cat. This was one of the courses I found interesting in college, and I met Oracle for the first time and learned the name of "Yin Ruins". Each oracle bone script is full of the wisdom and vitality of the ancients, and the interesting image text symbols are exquisite, describing complex things perfectly and abstractly. I can't help but sigh and pay homage to my ancestors from the bottom of my heart. "The predecessors are therefore behind, and the posterity is so knowledgeable", the role and influence of the ancients in creating writing is no less than the sacred fire stolen by Prometheus from the Emperor of Heaven, and human civilization has been continuously spreading and communicating since then, inheriting and developing. It was these wonderful ancient texts that inspired me to gradually become more interested in the Xia Shang Zhou and the ancient mysterious history.
Coincidentally, in my junior year, I also had the opportunity to listen to a report by Liu Yiman of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on the oracle bones of The East of The Yin Ruins Garden. Teacher Liu Yiman is a well-known female archaeologist who is admired in contemporary times, and she has participated in the excavation and collation of several major Yin Ruins oracle bones in New China. In that report, I saw the real picture of the oracle bone for the first time (later I heard that Teacher Liu came to participate in the defense of Bai Yulan's doctoral dissertation). When the wonderful slides of the Shang Dynasty oracle bone relics from three thousand years ago were displayed in front of me, I felt an incomparable shock in my heart, and since then the magical oracle bone has left an indelible impression on me. Later, when I was preparing for graduate school, I very firmly chose the direction of ancient script at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Trainee Yin Xu Huanbei
It left me with unforgettable memories, and it was also an experience worth showing off in my life, that is, the internship time in Yin Hui and Huanbei Mall in the spring of 2002. Twenty years is so long, but the scene of that year is vividly remembered! After graduating from the Department of Archaeology of Jilin University in 2000, I went to the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences to pursue graduate studies, and studied paleography with Professor Feng Shi. After a year and a half of intense study, we finally ushered in the desirable internship life in the first half of 2002. At the beginning of the new semester, Teacher Feng Shi arranged for me and Ying Meng, who was in the same door, to go to the Yin Ruins Archaeological Site for internship. Coinciding with the excavation of the No. 1 palace base site in Huanbei Mall, we could not wait to report to the Anyang workstation at the end of February.
Huanbei Shangcheng is a large-scale Shang Dynasty city site discovered by the Anyang Team of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences from October to December 1999 on the north bank of the Huan River in the northwest suburb of Anyang City, Henan Province. Located on the northeastern outer edge of the Capital of YinXu, the castle site is mainly composed of Guocheng and Miyagi, with an area of 4.72 million square meters. The base site of the palace is mainly located in the middle of Miyagi Castle. After several years of archaeological excavation work and in-depth research by scholars, everyone gradually realized that Huanbei Shangcheng was the capital city of the middle Shang Dynasty, and its era was between Zhengzhou Shangcheng and Yin Ruins, or the place where Heqi Jia lived together, or the place where Pan Geng first moved to Yin Ruins, and was later abandoned due to fire. I had the opportunity to apprentice and participate in such a grand and important archaeological excavation, and I am still very fortunate in retrospect!
Teacher Tang Jigen is the captain, he has a lot of daily work, very busy, but also often comes to the construction site to guide and inspect. Most of the time, the excavation work of the daily construction site is led by Three teachers, Yue Hongbin, He Yuling and Yue Zhanwei, and Yin Ruins also has other archaeological sites to take care of. Since the excavation site in Huanbei Mall is far from the workstation, everyone sits in an old jeep to get on and off the site together every day. The jeep drove out of the courtyard and turned left, passed through Xiaotun Village, then crossed the Yindu Bridge on the Huan River, and then drove north a little way to the construction site; at noon, everyone took the car back to the workstation for lunch. There is a car responsible for picking up and dropping off every day, which is a "star treatment" for the field archaeological work that was still generally difficult in that year. Although the construction site was full of wind and sun all day and covered with dirt, everyone's heart was full and happy, often bumpy all the way and laughing all the way.
Figure 1: Scraping rammed earth surface and pillar foundation in the south corridor of Huanbei Shangcheng No. 1 Palace (white straw hat for himself)
For three months, we followed the teachers every day to excavate on the site of Palace No. 1. Although I also went to Fengjie County, Chongqing City, to participate in the rescue excavation of the Three Gorges Reservoir Area when I was a bachelor's degree, I felt that this internship in Huanbei Mall allowed me to learn more things and gain more. Under the guidance of the teachers, I gradually learned to distinguish subtle changes in soil color, to clearly draw out the stratigraphic lines of the formation, to identify the complex relationship between the overlapping and breaking of the ash pits, and to skillfully scrape out the flat ground with a hand shovel, to distinguish the boundaries between the rammed earth nest traces and the ash pits, and to use measuring tools and draw line diagrams. I still remember that joy when we found rows of well-distributed pillar holes on the rammed earth platform of the South Promenade, first shoveled and drew the line with our hands, and then took a long steel shovel and stuck it into the middle of the darker and softer pillar hole, and we would hear a crisp "clanging" sound when the steel braze collided with the pillar foundation. At the bottom of each pillar hole there is a pillar foundation stone, a circle of people hold their breath, when the "jingle" sound of the steel brazing hitting the stone is heard as scheduled, everyone will laugh at the same time.
Figure 2: Brazes that are used at any time when validating pillar foundations
Palace No. 1 is dominated by rammed earth buildings, other remains and relics are relatively few, excavations are progressing smoothly, and by late May, after the last two exploration parties of the South Corridor of Palace No. 1 were laid out, they were already close to the fence of the small airfield on the east side, and the airfield could not be excavated. After the topsoil of the last two probes was quickly cleared, the large and magnificent gate base site was soon revealed. There are two doorways in the gatehouse, and the traces of the wooden bone mud wall are still clearly visible in a scorched earth block that has been burned by the fire and turned red and black. Everyone looked at this large piece of red burnt earth that had collapsed and filled the doorway, and laughed and imagined while pondering: "If we clean up all this red burnt and collapsed soil until it reaches the floor of the doorway at that time, maybe we can still find the rut marks left by the carriage of the Shang King in and out of the palace." ”
Figure 3: The south doorway that has not yet been cleared and filled with piles of collapsed buildings
Figure 4: I was cleaning up the pile of collapsed buildings in the south doorway
When the excavations of the South Cloister and the South Gate Foundation site were completed, Captain Tang Jigen instructed the workers to display all the previous excavation areas. First clean up the thin soil that was sprinkled on the base site of the main hall and the west side hall on the north side to protect the site, and then use white lime to mark out all the contours, column holes, ash pits and other traces on the base site, and then contact the aerial photograph to take a panoramic view of the entire site.
Figure 5: Aerial panorama of Huanbei Shangcheng No. 1 Palace
The panorama of the base site of Palace One is spectacular, and since archaeological excavations cannot be carried out in the vicinity of the airport, only more than half of the total area can be revealed by excavation at that time. According to the existing excavations, the whole picture can be basically deduced. The overall structure of the base site of the No. 1 Palace is in the shape of a "Hui", much like a "quadrangle", which is composed of a gate (including two doorways), the main hall, the corridors on both sides of the main hall, the west hall, and the promenade on both sides of the gate. What has not yet been excavated should be the East Side Hall. Located in the south of the palace, the gallery and the gatehouse are located in the south, and two doorways about 4 meters wide pass through the gatehouse and lead to the courtyard of the palace.
I used to walk from the south to the north and from the east to the west on the base of The First Palace, trying to feel the grandeur of the palace with my own pacing back and forth through the courtyard, and occasionally make up for the scenes of the life of the Shang kings and ministers in this palace three thousand years ago in similar film and television dramas. When I wondered, "How big is this courtyard?" Teacher Tang Jigen told me that there were records in the history books of palaces, temples and other courtyards that could accommodate tens of thousands of people (now I have retrieved material one: "Tokyo Xiangguo Temple Isawa City, the monks' houses are scattered, and the two courtyards can accommodate tens of thousands of people, several business travel transactions, all of which are gathered, and those who seek to sell and resell other things by the four sides of the Beijing Division will be here." --Southern Song Dynasty Wang Di's "Records of the YanYi Yi Conspiracy" posthumously recorded in the tile city of The Great Xiangguo Temple in Tokyo). Imagine that the base site of The First Palace is more than 90 meters wide from north to south and more than 140 meters long from east to west; when the Shang King summoned his courtiers, the spacious courtyard here could definitely accommodate tens of thousands of people.
Another exciting news for me about this internship is that Mr. Feng Shi invited Mr. Liu Yiman to serve as our internship instructor. During that time, Teacher Liu Yiman happened to be in the workstation, busy with the pre-publication collation and proofreading of the oracle bones of Yin Xu Garden Zhuang Dongdi.
During the internship, I was deeply impressed by Mr. Liu's modest and rigorous attitude towards learning. During the day, after returning to the station from the construction site, I passed by the door of Teacher Liu next door, and I could often see the figure of Teacher Liu working on the case. Whenever I saw me in my spare time, Teacher Liu would always tell me some details and methods about the finishing of excavated oracle bones. Little by little, I gradually gained a deeper understanding and understanding of oracle osteology. Once, when Teacher Liu saw that I was curious about the drawer box full of catalog cards on her hand, she signaled that I could flip through it, but remember not to mess with the order of the cards. These are all the collation cards written by Teacher Liu according to the actual oracle bones, and each card is densely filled with information about the excavation of the oracle bone pieces and the interpretation of the text. When I looked through the cards, I stumbled upon an oracle bone glyph that seemed to be different from the strokes on the actual oracle bone. This is an uncommon oracle bone script, with many strokes, small glyphs, and weak knife edges, which are extremely difficult to recognize. So I tried to trace the glyph strokes with reference to the actual oracle bone, and after Teacher Liu saw it, he thought that the glyph structure I copied was still not very accurate. So she put on her reading glasses, picked up a magnifying glass and looked at the oracle bone again; repeatedly changed the angle, carefully observed it over and over again, and finally confirmed and completed the realistic imitation of the oracle bone text. Teacher Liu meticulously described the oracle bone text, which made me feel the serious and rigorous work attitude of the older scholars, and I was deeply impressed.
In late May, the internship at the construction site was basically over, and Mr. Liu asked us to learn how to make oracle bone rubbings. After thousands of years of crisp oracle bones, coupled with the extremely fine strokes of the oracle bones, rubbings are particularly important for the protection and study of oracle bones. After Teacher Liu patiently explained the basic essentials and precautions of rubbing production, he handed me a small piece of oracle bone, rice paper and small brush to let me practice making rubbing. When watching, I saw the master craftsmen holding small flutter bags in their hands, dipping in ink, brisking and skillfully pouring ink on the rice paper on the oracle bone pieces two or three times, and a clear-cut rubbing was completed. But for a novice, it is quite difficult to develop an oracle bone rubbing. The first time I tried to do rubbing, either more water or more ink, resulting in the rubbing not being inked, or the ink color was uneven. Teacher Liu tirelessly demonstrated from the sidelines, explaining the details that require special attention. After trying again and again, I finally grasped some basic essentials and managed to complete a relatively satisfactory rubbing.
Before going to the internship, Teacher Feng had roughly selected the scope of the graduation thesis for us, and asked me to write about the content related to the sacrifice of the temple master in the Oracle Bone Of Yin Ruins. Because the oracle bones are mostly fragmented words and broken sentences, the ancient ao is difficult to understand, the information is relatively scattered, and the collection is more laborious. So I wanted to avoid the oracle bone as much as possible, thinking that the title of the golden text would be relatively easy to write. When setting the direction of the thesis, Ying Meng took the lead in raising his hand to write the topic of the golden text, and when I later expressed that I wanted to write the topic of the golden text, I was rejected by Teacher Feng on the spot: No! Write the oracle bones, so that you can avoid the two of you grabbing each other's materials and reference books. Without arguing, I silently wrote down the main points that the teacher had commanded. Because the topic of the thesis, whether it is Oracle or Jinwen, is an unfamiliar research field to me, everything should start from scratch, first learn to slowly collect literature. The workstation has a not-so-large data room, next to the canteen, which contains many reference books and academic journals, and there is a photocopier in the reference room, which is allowed to be used by everyone during opening hours. During my usual breaks, I casually flipped through the books in the reference room, and when I saw some research materials related to the topic of my graduation thesis, I paid attention to them and copied them casually. By the end of the internship, I had gained a lot of information in the reference room. Later, the graduation thesis was successfully completed, and it was also rated as the excellent graduation thesis of the year. A few years later, I further revised part of my graduation thesis into "Re-study of the Problem of "Great Revelation" in Yin BuCi", which was published in Archaeology No. 3 in 2010. Of course, these are inseparable from the hard teaching and cultivation of Teacher Feng Shi, but I also want to thank the information room of the workstation for helping me.
At the beginning of June, we ended our internship in Anyang. Under the arrangement of the workstation teacher, we took a hitchhiker to Luoyang and Xi'an, visited the Erlitou ruins, Zhouyuan ruins, etc., further increased some perceptual understanding of the archaeology of Xia Shang Zhou, and thus the internship career of the graduate students came to a perfect end.
Good life inside the workstation
Now that twenty years have passed, I often think of the full and happy internship time, and I often think of the people and events and some beautiful scenes at that time.
The first time I walked into the courtyard door of the Anyang workstation, I had an inexplicable sense of familiarity. The simple and gray high courtyard wall, the large iron gate is open, in the middle is the main building, there is a row of bungalows with a corridor on the left and right, and there are flower beds on both sides, everything is so kind and peaceful. My dormitory is located in the middle of the row of bungalows on the right, and next door is The room of Teacher Liu Yiman. Teacher Yang Xizhang, who lives in the middle of a row of bungalows on the left for many years, speaks loudly. Every morning early in the morning, I heard him take the lead in taking the pot to open the water and shouting "boil the water"! When Teacher Yang shaved, he used a very old brush to make foam. He himself said that this brush had followed him at the Anyang workstation for more than thirty years. The teachers present at the time quipped that when he left the Anyang workstation to return to his hometown for the elderly, he must remember to donate this brush to the Anyang workstation as a souvenir. Sometimes after dinner, people gather in front of the TV in the conference room to watch the news or flip through the newspaper; occasionally they listen to the teachers discuss academic research or work arrangements, and the teachers often ask us about our lives and studies. I really liked the workstation dormitory, clean and tidy. At night, the station is quiet, and occasionally you can hear the footsteps of the big wolf dog wandering in the yard, or the rare low dog bark twice, and you can sleep sweetly every night.
The teachers at the workstation are mostly northerners and love pasta. In order to take care of the diet of our southern students (I am Hunan and Yingmeng Zhejiang), Mr. Cui, who is in charge of logistics, specially purchased a new rice cooker, and on the basis of the original noodles, buns, dumplings, pancakes and other rich pasta, one of the special arrangements was to eat rice for all. At that time, the newly hired master of the canteen said that he had never used a rice cooker to cook rice before, and the first time he used the old worry that the rice was not cooked, he opened the lid of the rice cooker many times to check and stir and add water, so that day everyone had to eat a "don't open raw noodles (with hard rice core)" sandwich rice.
In the warm atmosphere, what makes me feel more is the strong academic atmosphere of the workstation, and from time to time there will be scholars from home and abroad visiting. Everyone gathered around the round table in the canteen, eating while communicating, listening to the tall academic discussion to accompany the meal, and the nutrition became richer. From time to time, archaeology students from abroad come to participate in internships or collect dissertation materials. At that time, a Dutch female student studying for a doctorate at a well-known university in the United States came to the workstation for internship. Every day we came back from the construction site to our workstations, we saw her sitting on the steps in front of the storeroom, facing a large pile of broken pottery pieces, trying to select fragments that could be combined into pottery. Occasionally, we would go over and help her find one or two suitable pieces of broken pottery and say a few words of greeting.
Anyang Archaeological Workstation is a beautiful and quiet yard with small gardens and grapevines. There are two tall and short trees in front of the canteen door, the short one is a cherry tree, which can reach the fruit; the white apricot tree grows tall, and you have to look up to see the fruit. That year, the fruit of the two trees was hanging on the branches, every day I came back from the construction site, before and after eating, I would observe the cherry tree and the apricot tree, the cherry ripened earlier than the apricot, watching the small cherry turn from green to yellow and red, reaching out to pick one to taste, sweet and sour. Apricots to turn white to eat, one day after work back, the workstation of Teacher Cui has already picked the ripe apricots, washed and distributed for everyone to taste, very delicious. When I met Captain Tang a few years later, I talked about the two fruit trees in passing, and Captain Tang regretted to tell me that the white apricot tree was gone. I still remember the beautiful scenery of the two trees bearing fruit, and all the beautiful scenery in the workstation and the kind figures of the teachers have always remained in my mind.
Figure 6: A workstation full of life after a rain
Figure 7: The internship was taken at a workstation
Finally, there are pictures as evidence, I was raised fat and fat during my internship at an Anyang workstation, haha! At that time, as students, we did not have high-end configurations such as mobile phones and cameras, and the above photos were all captured by Teacher Tang Jigen with the camera at that time, and now they are valuable souvenirs. (Author Affilications:National Library of China)
Author: Hu Huiping
Review: He Yuling
Editor-in-charge: Han Han