Oracle bones
01
Legend has it that in 1899, Yi Rong, the king of guozijian, took chinese medicine because he was suffering from malaria, and one of the medicines was called "dragon bone".
The so-called keel is the bones of ancient animals buried in the ground, and Chinese medicine believes that they are used to make medicines with astringent and astringent kidney tonic effects.
The Wang family bought the dragon bone from the Chinese medicine shop DarenTang outside xuanwu gate, and when they returned home, Wang Yirong opened it and found that there was a seal-like text depicted on it.
Wang Yirong usually loves archaeology, is good at identifying Zhong Ding inscriptions, and vaguely feels that it may be ancient characters.
He immediately sent someone to the medicine shop, asked for the origin, and then selected some keels with clearer writing, and bought them all.
This legend is widely circulated and written in history textbooks.
However, according to the investigation, the keel of the Chinese medicine shop has always been mashed first and then packaged and sold, and it is generally unlikely that oracle bones will be found from the mashed keel.
Moreover, when the drug store acquired the oracle bone, it did not have words on it, so when selling the oracle bone, it basically needed to scrape the handwriting in advance before it could be sold.
Later, in 1911, another official scholar who loved epigraphy, Luo Zhenyu, sent his younger brother Luo Zhenyu to Anyang to conduct field investigations, and he recorded in the "Records of Huan Luo's Visits to the Ancients":
"The turtle bones buried here have been discovered more than thirty years ago, not since today. It is said that in a certain year, a certain surname ploughed the field, and suddenly several bone pieces were turned up with the soil, and there were depictions on the top, and there were those who made Yin color (that is, those who painted Zhu)... The natives are the keel because of their eyes... And at the end of the ancient bone research, and the knife is wounded, so the medicine shop buys it, and a pound can only count the money. The one who is strong in the bones, or the one who is carved. The townspeople have time to dig up everywhere, and the income is very large, and the big ones sell it. If the buyer does not take the inscription, he sells it by shoveling it. Those whose small pieces and words are not easy to go, are filled with dry wells. ”
Therefore, it can be seen that Wang Yirong took chinese medicine keel due to illness, and it was found that the story of oracle bones was only a rumor and not credible.
But Wang Yirong did discover the oracle bone first around 1899 and determined that it was a Shang Dynasty script, and then he began to vigorously acquire the oracle bone with characters.
02
Since Wang Yirong bought oracle bones at a high price, antique dealers have flocked to sell them.
In the autumn of 1899, Fan Weiqing, an antique dealer in Weixian County, Shandong Province, heard about this incident and sold the 12 oracle bones he had obtained from Anyang to Wang Yirong for 2 taels of silver each.
In the spring of 1900, Fan Weiqing sold Wang Yirong more than 800 pieces of oracle bones.
Among them, there is a very precious piece of full tortoise shell, the upper part of the tortoise shell is engraved with a total of 52 characters, Wang Yirong is very precious, very important.
In less than a year, Wang Yirong collected 1500 pieces of oracle bones.
Just when Wang Yirong was preparing to start an in-depth study, unexpectedly, the Eight-Nation Alliance attacked Beijing again, and Wang Yirong, as the training minister of the Beijing Division, was defeated because he was outnumbered by the enemy, and he threw a well in his garden and martyred the country.
After all, he did not wait for the day when Yin Xu found out that the oracle bones had seen the light of day again.
But Wang Yirong was not only the first to discover the oracle bone, but also the first to judge the use of the oracle bone as the Shang Dynasty.
His initial judgment of the Oracle was confirmed by later research to be basically correct, and the history of Chinese characters advanced by more than 1,000 years.
Although Wang Yirong did not leave any writings on oracle bones after his death, from the initial discovery of this point, he contributed to the history of oracle bone science.
03
In early 1902, after Wang Yirong's martyrdom, his son Wang Hanfu sold his family's antiquities, and the oracle bones held by the Wang family were transferred to Liu Hu.
Liu Yan, the word Tieyun, the number of the old disabled, most modern people only know that he wrote the "Old Disabled Travels", few people know that he is also an audiophile of Oracle.
In 1903 (the twenty-ninth year of Guangxu), the same year that the "Journey of the Old Remnant" was published, at the instigation of Luo Zhenyu, Liu Hu selected 1058 pieces of oracle bones in his collection and compiled them into "Iron Cloud Hidden Turtle".
Luo Zhenyu and the famous scholar Wu Changshou wrote the preface, which was the first time that the oracle bone was written into a special book, and it is recognized as the pioneering work of oracle bone science.
Liu Yan himself was eventually exiled to Xinjiang and died in Urumqi in 1909 because he sold the grain in the warehouse during the Gengzi Rebellion and distributed it to the people of Beijing at a low price, which later led to the disaster of killing.
His collection of oracle bones was also dispersed. After Liu Yan, the person who took the oracle bone collection and research to the next level was Luo Zhenyu.
Before Luo Zhenyu, whether it was Wang Yirong, Liu Hu, or other collectors, they did not know the true origin of the oracle bones.
In order to control the source channel of the oracle bones, antique dealers directly deceived the dignitaries who collected the oracle bones into saying that the oracle bones were from Tangyin, Henan, which even affected Japan.
Luo Zhenyu, on the other hand, did not follow the crowd, and he spent a lot of effort to investigate, and finally knew that the oracle bone came from Xiaotun Village in Anyang, Henan.
Xiaotun Village, Anyang, Henan
04
Just when domestic scholars are committed to the search and study of oracle bones, missionaries and scholars in some countries in Europe, America and Japan have also developed a strong interest in this precious oracle bone historical material, but they collect oracle bones not purely for research, but more for plunder and theft.
The earliest foreigners to plunder and sell oracle bones were Ku Shouling, the British Baptist missionary in Qingzhou at that time, and the American Presbyterian missionary in Weixian County, Shandong Province.
Ku Shouling first bought the oracle bone in 1900, only a year after the oracle bone was discovered, and was the first foreigner to collect the oracle bone.
At the end of the 19th century, the American Presbyterian Church established a church in Weixian County, Shandong Province, and in 1888, Fa Shu was sent to Weixian to preach, because of the Yihe Fist and the Gengzi State Change, Fan Weiqing, a large antique dealer who sold oracle bones to Wang Yirong, and others returned to their hometowns, and soon Weixian became the largest antique market in China.
Due to his limited personal financial resources, he could not buy the exquisite large oracle bones on the market, so he and Ku Shouling jointly bought them together, and most of Fan Weiqing's remaining oracle bones were sold to these two people.
The two of them collected the oracle bones in order to sell them for a profit, such as they once sold more than 400 pieces of oracle bones they bought to the Asian Society Museum founded by the British in Shanghai.
After 1906, Ku Shouling and Method Collect smuggled the purchased oracle bones abroad, resold or "donated" to museums and some private collectors.
The oracle bones that flowed out through the hands of these two people were no less than 4,000 pieces.
Ku Shouling said in his 1914 book "Bones from Henan":
"After buying the first batch of oracle bones, the continued coming from Henan, and we tried our best to buy them." The market price is getting higher and higher, and it is impossible to buy. The first joint collections were given to the (United States) Petrenburg Museums in Kane. Later, a batch was obtained and sold at the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh. The best third batch, some of the best specimens, also had a beautifully carved antler, which was first collected by the two of us and then by my personal research. In 1911, it was sold with the British Museum. ”
In 1914, Professor Bai Ruihua of New York University sorted out according to his manuscript, and in 1935, the Shanghai Commercial Press published the book "Kufang Ershi's Tibetan Oracle Bone Bu ci", which basically can understand the situation of Ku Shouling and the oracle bones collected by the method in China.
05
In terms of current research, the oracle bones collected by Ku Shouling and Method have generally flowed to the British Museum, the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Wild Museum in Chicago after going abroad.
The two largest of these were 1777 pieces sold to the Royal Museum of Scotland in 1909 and 484 pieces of oracle bones resold to the British Museum in 1911;
In 1973, the British Library was independent from the British Museum, and the oracle bones were assigned to the library for preservation, and the British Museum only preserved a piece of carved antlers no. 1989 of the "Kufang Ershi Collection of Oracle Bones", which is still displayed in the exhibition hall of the British Museum.
Carved antlers in 1989
The University Library of Cambridge in the United Kingdom is also one of the main institutions that collect oracle bones, with a total of 850 pieces.
Its collection is mainly derived from Jin Zhang, a Former British Diplomat who served as Consul General in Tianjin in 1901.
After the Gengzi Rebellion, the Church of England set up a school in Tianjin called "Xinxue College". Wang Yirong's son happened to have studied in this school, so he gave the school a batch of family antiques, including 25 oracle bones excavated from Xiaotun.
At that time, the school did not know what the oracle bone was, so it asked Jin Zhang, the British consul general in Tianjin at the time, to study and study. Jin Zhang became interested in Oracle as a result.
Later, when he heard that Fa Huo had published the book "Examination of Chinese Primitive Characters", he began to correspond with him and entrusted Fa Huo to search for oracle bones on his behalf.
Therefore, most of Jin Zhang's oracle bones were purchased by the method in Weixian County and resold to him.
There are about 850 pieces of jinzhang's old Tibetan oracle bones, and after research and collation in the 1950s, more than 600 pieces were selected to be fake and true.
The Cambridge University Library also houses 50 pieces of oracle bones donated by the British antiquities expert Yez, which Ye Zi bought in Beijing in 1913 from the home of the former governor Duan Fang, and these 50 oracle bones were originally part of Liu Hu's "Iron Cloud Hidden Turtle".
The above three batches of oracle bones in the United Kingdom are the largest number of the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh, of which there is a version of the turtle belly armor of the Wuding Dynasty, which is the best preserved belly armor in Europe;
The original British Museum is now the largest in a batch of oracle bone pieces in the British Library; the original Jin Zhang's old collection is now the most exquisite in a batch of contents belonging to the Cambridge University Library.
06
According to Mr. Hu Houxuan's statistics in 1984:
A total of more than 154604 pieces of oracle bones are stored at home and abroad; a total of 26,700 pieces of oracle bones lost overseas: 12,443 pieces in Japan, 7,355 pieces in Canada 7,355 pieces in the United Kingdom, 1,882 pieces in Germany and 715 pieces in the United States, 199 pieces in Sweden and 100 pieces in Switzerland, 64 pieces in France and 28 pieces in Singapore, 7 pieces in Belgium, and 6 pieces in South Korea
In summary, the loss of overseas oracle bones accounts for about 17% of the total number, and many have not been announced.
This is another great calamity in the history of modern Chinese culture.