In ancient mainland china, "stone tablets" were a very common object in ancient temples. The stone tablet is like the preface to a book, and by figuring out the words carved on it, we can understand the history of a temple and so on. In the Cangjie Temple, there is an "ancient" stone stele, but what makes everyone feel strange is that there is a round hole on the stone stele, and after understanding, we find that it is the embodiment of the wisdom of the ancients, what is the function of this round hole? Today, Xiaobian will reveal the secret to you:
The Forest of Steles Museum in Xi'an is the earliest museum created in Shaanxi, which mainly collects, displays and studies the inscriptions of previous dynasties, and now collects more than 11,000 cultural relics. Tourists go to the Forest of Steles Museum in Xi'an, the main purpose is to see the four horses in the "Zhaoling Six Jun", in addition to the four Jun stone carvings, the "Cangjie Temple Stele" is also not to be missed.
The "Cangjie Temple Stele" is one of the important cultural relics of the museum, it is 27.9 cm long and 15.6 cm horizontal (half open). From the stylistic point of view, the first stele of this stone stele is spire-shaped. In the early days, the head of the stele had two kinds of round head shape and a pointed head shape, and historians infer that the shape of the head of the stele was related to the two kinds of ritual jade of the Zhou Dynasty, QiGui and Yan Gui.
The "Cangjie Temple Stele" collected by the Forest of Stone Steles Museum in Xi'an, its original storage location was Cangjie Temple, from the perspective of protecting cultural relics, it was only moved to the museum in 1971.
The "Cangjie Temple" was built to commemorate Cangjie, who is the creator of chinese characters. After the completion of the temple, the local people also erected a huge stone stele to record his legendary life, but due to a flood, the stone stele in front of the temple was submerged, and during the Eastern Han Dynasty, the ruler rebuilt the Cangjie Temple and erected the monument again, that is, we see the Cangjie Temple stele now.
After the completion of the carving of the Cangjie Temple stele, it was erected in the Cangjie Temple, with the change of dynasties, the stone stele faced the erosion of the rainstorm, because of this, part of the text on it has become blurred, and after careful identification by cultural relics experts, they found that the words written on it were: "Xi Geng character May, Cangjie Ancestral Hall, Qiao Yue has been ..." and so on.
The stele of Cangjie Temple has 4 columns of characters, and the stele has 24 columns of characters, a total of more than 910 words. Through the words on the inscription, we can know the merits of Cangjie and the reasons why he was respected by posterity, in addition, this inscription also records the deeds of the descendants who donated funds to build the temple, so that we can understand the real history of that time.
Since the five years of the Eastern Han Dynasty, this stone stele has a history of two thousand years, even if some of the words on it have been blurred, but it will not affect its cultural relics value, it can be preserved until now, it is really not easy.
Seeing the "Cangjie Temple Stele" collected by the Forest of Steles Museum in Xi'an, many tourists are very curious about why there is a round hole on the stone stele, which affects the ornamentality of the stone stele, which does not look beautiful, in fact, this round hole is deliberately excavated by the craftsmen who make the stone stele.
In ancient times, productivity was low, and craftsmen did not have efficient means of transport, so they could only carry things with their hands and carry things with their shoulders. The main material of the stone stele is stone, made of the head of the stele, the back body, the stele, in the process of carving, the three parts are uniformly completed, connected together, the weight can be imagined, in order to facilitate the movement of the stele, the wise ancients used their brains, added round holes in the stele, when moving only need to tie the rope in the round hole, or use a wooden pole, directly inserted into the round hole, the worker on both sides to lift, you can easily move the stele.
The conditions in the feudal society period were not good, but the craftsmen used wisdom to create conditions, which made us feel that the wisdom of the ancients was infinite. Adding round holes to the stone stele is indeed convenient to move, but this practice also has drawbacks and will affect the beauty of the stone stele, so later, the stone stele with holes was gradually canceled.
If you are interested in the "Cangjie Temple Stele", you can go to the Xi'an Forest of Steles Museum to take a look, get close to this cultural relic, through this cultural relic, we can feel the charm of culture, from Cangjie to build a temple, to the construction of a temple by later generations, and then to the erection of stone stele. This process is the process of affirming culture, promoting culture, and making culture flourish!