Text/BaldWin
China has had no lions since ancient times.
But lions can be found everywhere in China. No matter the deep mansion compound, no matter the school gate, no matter the royal palace, no matter the building, the first king who enters the goal is the majestic lion. Cast in iron, carved in wood, carved in stone, gilded, jade, made of copper, woven of cotton, stroked, woven of bamboo, ink printed, everything is available. It is estimated that there are no less than 1 million male lions in China.
And the more than 1 million lions are almost the same male lion, the "man country" of lions, so much so that many Chinese children say that when they see African female lions in zoos, they say it is a tiger.
Chinese is really strange, why exclude the "opposite sex" on lions alone?
Is there anything more cruel than leaving more than 1 million male lions stranded in one place and suffering from single love for hundreds of years?
Chinese when is it only male and not female?
Europe has had no lions since ancient times, and like China, it is also a foregone conclusion. But lions can also be seen everywhere in many european countries.
No matter where the lions stayed, they were all male lions crouching, standing, walking, lying down, asleep, awake. I have never seen a royal palace, a palace, a castle, a bridge in Europe where a male and a female are carved with lions? It was as if there were only male lions in the world, not female lions.
I saw a pair of lions unique in the world on the bridgehead of the Danube Bridge in Budapest, Hungary. The two male lions stood guard at the head of the bridge, mighty and fierce, strong and beautiful. But look closely at the male lion's eyes there is sadness, the male lion's expression has pain, and the male lion's body seems to be trembling. It turned out that the tongues of the two male lions had been cut off, and they were two male lions without tongues. One said that the two male lions had their tongues cut off by God; the other said that they "chewed their tongues" and gossiped and were punished most severely.
This pair of poor and unlucky tongueless lions is said to have been waiting here for more than a hundred years, and the coming days will be long...
I used to drive along the Ring Road in Brussels to the southern outskirts, through the dense Suigné Forest, and I saw the endless plains of Waterloo, the battlefield where Napoleon fell to the sand on June 18, 1815, and where victor Hugo, the eminent romantic writer of the 19th century, completed his literary masterpiece Les Misérables. On the 226 steps, a huge bronze lion is looking down on the battlefield.
The male lion is a European lion with a loose mane and a round ball on the right foot of its forelimbs. In the interpretation of Chinese customs, it is a town evil beast, that is, for the alliance army that defeated Napoleon and the Prince of Orangi of Belgium, and to revive the ghost of Napoleon. No wonder Victor Hugo hated the lion so much, he once gritted his teeth and wrote: "If a gust of wind blows from France, and the Flemish lion that has been plucked out of st. Louis's toenails and teeth and removed its tongue and crown is thrown to the ground, and a French bird, whether it is an eagle or a rooster, to the pedestal, I will go to see Waterloo." ”
Hugo didn't know that the male lion wasn't really a lion either, and I looked around behind it carefully, it had no testicles, it was a castrated lion. The sorrow of the Europeans.
In Florence, Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance, on the pole of a 150-meter-high church, there is a male lion climbing up the pole, which makes people inevitably look a little worried, it may be the highest climbing lion in the world.
The most unique of the worlds is the Weeping Lion and the Laughing Lion. At the westernmost end of the ancient Silk Road, the ancient city of Aleppo, when the ancient city was built to defend against foreign invasion, there were three iron gates, and the left and right sides of the third iron gate were guarded by a large lion, which made people clap their hands and applauded that a lion was a weeping lion, and a lion was a laughing lion, which was beautifully shaped and vivid. In this way, the people of Aleppo are said to have called out to Allah, in the hope that Allah would protect them with his supreme power. Now that Syria is at war, I hope Allah can bless this ancient city and the only weeping and laughing lion in the world.
(ii)
When did lions come to China?
I think the lion was introduced to China from India along with Buddhism.
In the third century BC, when Ashoka of India conquered all of India, he carved lions on stone pillars, symbolizing kingship and Dharma. Buddha Shakyamuni was known as the "lion of men", and the Indians revered the lion as the king beast of great fortune, great goodness, great benefit and great wisdom at least the third century BC. In the statues of Buddhist art, the seat on which the Buddha Tuo sits is shaped as "Leo". With the introduction of Buddhism to China. This is why the soldier symbol for the mobilization of troops during the Spring and Autumn Period of China was a tiger symbol instead of a lion symbol, and if the lion had come to China 200 years earlier, the proof of military transfer might have been a lion symbol.
Tigers can't fight lions. Because by the Sixteen Kingdoms, Sui and Tang Dynasties, with the spread of Buddhist statues and the increasing influence of Buddhism, the lion symbolized the king and dignity, sacredness and strength, and the lion appeared on the stage of Chinese history.
China's Lion King is in Cangzhou, and Lin Chong in "Water Margin" should have seen it. Because "Lin Jiao's head stabbed with Cangzhou Road, Lu Zhishen made a big fuss about the wild boar forest." The huge male lion standing between heaven and earth was cast in iron, the lion was 3.8 meters tall, the head was 1.5 meters high, and the total weight was 40 tons, and it was cast in the 3rd year of Later Zhou Guangshun, 953 AD. When it was cast for the zhenhai, the male lion who could calm the sea was called the lion king, although more than 1,000 years later, it was still radiant and majestic. Above the iron lion's head and under the neck, the three words "Lion King" are cast. This is the only male lion in China, and possibly the world, to cast the Lion King.
The lion standing at the highest point in China is not far southwest in front of the tomb of King Songtsen Gampo in Shannan, Tibet, and I speculate that it should be a pair of stone lions, but now only a lone one remains. For more than 1300 years, the wind and rain above 5000 meters above sea level have made this stone lion look a little old, but on closer inspection, this beast king seems to be clinging to the majestic wind, and the majesty can still make people feel.
A friend who is engaged in art told me that all male lions in China and even in the world have been castrated, and I was surprised?!
I said that I had never intentionally seen the testicles of a male lion, and if so, I would have made a special trip to Donghua Gate to see if the two large stone lions crouching at the door had been taken to the root?
(iii)
Speaking of the roots of the lion.
The lion is the king of the beasts, especially in the African savannah. When he was full, he slept on all fours and did not hesitate. A day to sleep enough 18 hours, and then go hunting in a group, and the male lion in the group of lions, in addition to patrolling the territory, waits for the lioness to hunt successfully before going to eat, and the lionesses who have worked so hard to catch their prey sincerely avoid, respectfully waiting for the male lion to eat, until it is full, the lioness can eat again.
What do male lions do? Their primary mission of life is mating, and during lion estrus, male lions mate more than 120 times a day on average, often every 10 to 15 minutes. The male lion is beautiful and moisturized. But the cruel thing is that the average male lion will not rule a lion group for more than three years, and after two or three years, a younger, more majestic, and more robust male lion will be replaced, which is worthy of the name of the poem of Zhao Yi, who has been transformed: "There are talents in the Jiangshan generation, and each shows its own style for three or five years." "But the castrated male lion is more miserable than the male lion who has been defeated, and in this world there are those who are willing to be the male lions who have been defeated, and there are those who are willing to be castrated male lions."
Humanity is cruel.
The male lion that enters human life is not the totem of the king, it should be the lament of the sad...
It is said that there are more than 8,000 male lions in Beijing alone, there are still 489 lugou bridges, and there are 544 stone lions on the seventeen-hole bridge of the Summer Palace, which is 5 more than the lugou bridge, and these lions are all male lions that have gone to the root, like the war horses that are inspected are castrated horses. The Ming Dynasty produced 100,000 eunuchs, and China produced a million castrated lions.