The Northern Song Dynasty collector Xiang Chuanshi stayed in an inn and was woken up in the middle of the night. Looking for it, it turned out to be a butcher sharpening his knife, and the blade was shining. Xiang Chuanshi suddenly noticed that some handwriting loomed on the whetstone. His whole body trembled with excitement, and this turned out to be "making a rough drum"?
Ignoring the butcher's strange eyes, Xiang Chuanshi pounced directly on the whetstone and carefully touched it.
The upper part of this large stone has been flattened and the middle has been hollowed out to make a mash. The edge of the mash becomes the whetstone of the butcher.
Most of the writing on the large stone had been worn away and badly damaged, leaving only the lower half of the four lines of writing.
Xiang Chuanshi was so excited that he almost burst into tears, disappeared for more than 200 years, and the "rough stone drum" that haunted the dreams of several dynasties and generations finally appeared.
Xiang Chuanshi immediately sent a message to the Fengxiang prefect, and the prefect mobilized troops to rush to the inn overnight, escorted Shi Gu and Xiang Chuanshi to the Gate of the Fengxiang Prefect, and then sent the stone drum to Bieliang.
Emperor Huizong of Song loved the stone drum like a treasure, and he moved the nine-sided stone drum he had obtained earlier and the newly found one into his main hall, and accompanied him day and night. He also ordered that the grooves of the stone drum be filled with gold.
Why are these stone drums so precious? The story also begins in 627 AD, during the reign of Emperor Taizong of Tang.
In Chencang Mountain, Fengxiang Province, Shaanxi Province, which is now Shigu Mountain in Baoji City, an old shepherd hid next to a rock in a mountain pass to avoid wind and rain.
Because it was too cold, the old man and the sheep snuggled together, clinging to the rocks.
After the wind and rain stopped, the old man suddenly found that the dirt on the rock had been rubbed off a large piece, and the mysterious words appeared on the rock, and the penmanship was strange, and he had never seen it before.
After the news came out, rumors spread, and villagers from eight townships rushed over. The crowd worked together to clean up the dirt from the rocks.
Everyone was shocked to find that this was actually ten granite boulders. The large stone is like a drum, narrow on the top and large on the bottom, and slightly raised in the middle, which looks very strange.
Many people think that this must be a god-given object, so they burn incense and worship, and people come and go endlessly.
For nearly 100 years, Chen Cangshan has become lively. Celebrities and collectors flocked to them, hoping to solve the mystery of the Book of Heaven.
Until the outbreak of the Anshi Rebellion, Tang Suzong, who was hiding from the scourge of war in Yongcheng, heard the rumors of the stone drum and ordered the officials to transport the ten strange stones down the mountain and place them in Fengxiang County, so that everyone could study the instructions of the heavens.
A few months later, the rebels approached Fengxiang, and Shi Gu could not be taken away for a while, so he was hastily transferred to the wilderness and buried in secret.
Two years later, the fighting subsided. The Chen Cang stone drum was dug up again, but unfortunately no one kept it well, and the ten-sided stone drum was thus exposed to the wilderness.
Later, the stone drum gradually lost its tracks, as if it had disappeared.
Another 100 years have passed, and the Northern Song Dynasty has unified the world. Song Renzong overheard the story of the stone drum and became deeply interested in it.
Sima Chi, the father of Sima Guang, who was the prefect of Fengxiang at the time, looked around for the legendary ten-sided stone drum in order to throw himself into the favor of Emperor Renzong of Song.
After several twists and turns, he found the nine-sided stone drum, but the stone drum called "the original stone drum" could not be found.
Sima Chi played a little clever, he found a craftsman, carved a stone drum out of the same stone, put it into ten sides, and presented it to Song Renzong.
However, cleverness was mistaken by cleverness, and Song Renzong soon discovered that there was a mixture of counterfeit and shoddy products in the ten-sided stone drum.
Sima Chi not only did not receive a reward for offering stone drums, but was convicted of "deceiving the king" for this.
The "rough stone drum" that Song Renzong could not see was actually discovered by Xiang Chuanshi, and Song Huizong was fortunate to see this stone drum before the destruction of the country and the death of his family.
After the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty, these stone drums were preserved in the Confucius Temple, which experienced the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, and survived the wars of the Republic of China.
It is now preserved in the Palace Museum in Beijing and has become one of the national treasures of the nine towns.
Except for the relatively complete text of the two-sided stone drum, the rest of the stone drum text leaves only a few words.
Judging from the only remaining texts, these are ten poems describing the safaris of ancient nobles.
Some experts believe that the verses on the stone drum describe the monarchs of the Zhou Dynasty, while others believe that these verses record the monarchs of the pre-Qin period.
And why carved the stone that records the verse into the shape of a stone drum? Which dynasty made the stone drum? Opinions remain wide open.
The fate of the stone drum and the displacement is the epitome of the thousands of years of history of the Chinese nation. The rumbling drums were heard, and the long songs were sung, and whoever left these stone drums had already passed on his wisdom.
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