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weave
he who
press
The Xiang River goes north and flows endlessly; on both sides of the river, it has become a trend. The new model of Shanshuizhou City, the new living room on both sides of the Xiangjiang River, and the core growth pole of Wangcheng. Wangcheng's 35-kilometer golden shoreline of the Xiangjiang River, a new round of innovation and entrepreneurship tide is coming. Resources and capital collide here, and industry leaders and elites gather here. Seize the opportunity, vision the future; one river and two sides of the strait, achieve dreams.
From now on, Le continues to launch a series of essays by Chinese and foreign famous artists, writers, literature lovers and other essays in Wangcheng, to see what kind of magnificent scenery is on both sides of the Wangcheng River written by the literati and inkers, so please pay attention!
copper
official
20 miles north along the Xiang River from Changsha, there is a place called Wazhaping, the name is very cold, but the ancestors have been calling it this way for generations, and they have become accustomed to it. No one knows the origin of the name of poverty, and no one wants to change it.
There are several pottery kilns in Tongguan adjacent to Wazhaping, and the kiln fire is not prosperous, and the business is not salty or light. Because of the small scale and ordinary skills, even the locals will only regard it as a livelihood, not as a capital to show off.
In the early days of liberation, because of the filling of lakes to create fields, the villagers moved high to make up for the low, and actually dug up a number of ancient kiln ruins near Tongguan. The earliest can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty. Judging from the porcelain tiles, this place is actually the birthplace of underglaze color. The world-famous Tang Sancai may not have been produced here, but it is likely that he inherited it. And the tile slagping turned out to be the depression where the ancient kiln had been pouring broken porcelain and broken pottery for many years. If you dig well, the place with this cold name is likely to be a thousand-year-old cultural relics treasure.
The discovery of the Tongguan ancient kiln group has thus broken the pattern of the two strong kilns of Chinese ceramics in the history of Yue kilns and xing kilns, and has evolved into a three-legged trend of "South Qingbei White Changsha Color". But unfortunately, at that time, people's awareness of cultural relics protection was not strong, even including those archaeologists. After they finished their identification, they received some samples and went home.
In the following decades, these pottery, which were dug out of the ground from time to time, became the childhood toys of the generation that grew up under the red flag. If foreigners pass by the Tongguan, they will see a group of children, tied with a string of pottery with ropes, and Ding Zhidang is dragging on the ground. It doesn't matter if it's broken, it doesn't matter if it's replaced, anyway, there are too many. The children want to use the sound of the ring behind them to make the poor life more fun, and at the same time, let the hard-working parents pay attention to their own existence.
Then in 1998, a German salvage company salvaged a Tang Dynasty Arab merchant ship off the Indonesian island of Belitung. Because there was a huge black reef near the shipwreck, the shipwreck was named "Black Rock". After counting, the "Black Stone" contains more than 60,000 pieces of Chinese ceramics, of which there are more than 50,000 pieces of porcelain from the Changsha Tongguan Kiln. At that time, domestic reports on this matter were also very lively, but the thunder was loud, the rain was small, and because the other party's asking price exceeded its own psychological estimates, no department or unit had the belief and tenacity to promote the national treasure to go home. Perhaps everyone thinks that there is also a tile slag flat near tongguan that can be excavated, and the things on the "Black Stone" are not so precious.
Fast forward another 20 years. In May 2017, General Secretary Xi Jinping mentioned the thousand-year-old shipwreck of the "BlackStone" at the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, in order to expound the long history of ancient China's exchanges with various countries, with a view to rebuilding close ties with countries along the ancient Maritime Silk Road.
At this point, the town of Tongguan in Wangcheng was finally on fire. All kinds of ceramic collectors, archaeologists, scholars, researchers, and investors flock to this land. The Ceramics Museum was soon completed, the Ceramic Art City is being built, and the relevant units are also actively snapping up the ceramics on the "Black Stone" at a price more than ten times higher than 20 years ago.
After the research of many experts on this batch of ceramics, Datang Grand has once again been pushed to a dazzling height. According to the analysis, the beginning of the Tongguan kiln should be in the Southern and Northern Dynasties period, when the world was in chaos, a group of northern fallen potters, came to Changsha, saw that the mud near the Tongguan was good, and then built a kiln here to burn pottery. Although the ceramic painting on the "Black Stone" is only the casual application of the low-level potters, its value is not in its artistic achievements, but in its unique painting process, in its all-encompassing painting content, which is the graffiti of the potters' temperament, but reproduces a corner of the colorful secular society of the Tang Dynasty.
The biggest feature of the "Black Stone" ceramic painting is that the Above Tang poems are everywhere, and many poems have never appeared in other literature. For example, "I was born to a king, I am old, I hate not to be born at the same time, and I am good with the king every day." Who would have thought that more than a thousand years later, "Quan Tang Poems" would still have the opportunity to fill in the gaps? The second characteristic of painting is that the daily atmosphere is very strong. The pictures depicted at will are full of the small wisdom, small strategy, small interest, small joy, small sadness, small love, small love, small pornography, and small style of the potters at that time, but together, they constitute a swaying and colorful Datang society. The third characteristic of painting is that foreign symbols are extremely rich. In addition to the flowers, birds, insects and fish that Chinese like, there are many mascots such as Arabic, portraits of people wearing beards, golden lions and white elephants on ceramics, and image symbols that reflect the customs of various ethnic groups in West Asia, and these exotic elements are obviously designed according to market demand. The fashion avant-garde and pioneering copper official kiln was thus raised to a prominent position. This also highlights the eclectic and daring Xiangchu culture from the side. According to research, the same ceramics as the "Blackstone" shipwreck have spread to dozens of countries and regions in East Asia, South Asia, West Asia, North Africa, eastern Europe and so on. China is called china (ceramics), and the copper kiln is the most powerful promoter, because from the beginning, it aimed at the foreign market and belonged to China's earliest export porcelain kiln. With ceramics, Changsha, like Yangzhou and Ningbo, is also China's earliest foreign port.
▲Tang Changsha kiln blue glaze maroon color cloud pattern bowl ("Black Stone" water relics)
Anthropologist Mr. Ye Shuxian has a point of view: "The history in the text is only a small history." Beyond the words, there is a larger and more authentic history. These words were like a bright light that woke me up, and for a long time I was in a state of mind opening. Now, when I linger in the ancient town of Tongguan in Wangcheng, looking at the Tang porcelain and Song pottery excavated from the ground, listening to the narrator's introduction to the history of the Tongguan pottery kiln, and reading the wreck of the "Black Stone" on the wall of the Ceramic Museum, Mr. Ye Shuxian's words echoed in my mind again. Only then did I discover that the history in the text was not only small, but also broken, fleshless, and decaying. Just like a pile of rags full of insect eyes, shattered at the touch, gray and black mold in the thousand-year-old tomb, it has nothing to do with the original bright and moving, fragrant and beautiful dress.
The reason why walking thousands of miles is as important as reading thousands of books. It is because walking thousands of miles is not only to go deep into geographical phenology and a hundred kinds of life, to connect theory and practice, but also to supplement "reading thousands of books". In other words, to walk a thousand miles is to read ten thousand books. The "Ten Thousand Scrolls Book" refers specifically to the official, temple, and academic sub-historical collections, while the "Ten Thousand Mile Road" refers to the folk, rural, and generational historical knowledge. Ten thousand books are explicit "small history", but there is a hidden "big history" hidden on the ten thousand miles.
Now, with the help of science and technology, through the excavation of the ruins of the Tongguan kiln and the salvage of the shipwreck of the "Black Stone", we have the opportunity to further transform the Datang in the "Ten Thousand Mile Road" into the Datang in the "Ten Thousand Books", in addition to the Datang itself, we may be closer to a real Datang than any other dynasty in history, but even so, we still cannot restore its full picture, nor can we restore the original social scene. The development of science and technology can only broaden our sense of touch and walking space, but it cannot make us forward or backward even for a second, and we are collectively stuck on the cross-section of time. Time is not so much a river as an impenetrable fence.
Because of this, at this moment, wandering in the ancient town, I have mixed feelings in my heart. I am pleasantly surprised and relieved that human beings, with the help of technology, can encounter the fragments of space in the past from time to time; I am dazed and sad that history seems to be within reach, but the relentless time has left us forever separated.