In September 1956, the Wuhan University Railway Project was undergoing archaeological excavations, and an ancient tomb of the Song Dynasty was slowly opened...
This is a simple catacomb, without the nobility and magnificence of the princely generals, nor the unearthing of extraordinary cultural relics, but in it, half of the broken bronze mirror tells a love story that has been sealed for thousands of years.
▽ Schematic - Excavation of ancient tombs
Today, it's Valentine's Day! In the busy life, meeting your "crush" and feeling the purest romance is the moving part of this festival.
And in Ezhou, the earliest romance should belong to this story unearthed in ancient tombs-
Ezhou is known as the "hometown of copper mirrors". Since the Shang Dynasty, the earliest bronze casting system has been established in this ancient land, and the bronze mirror exhibition hall on the second floor of the Ezhou Museum is a treasured cultural memory of the Ezhou bronze mirror in the past thousand years.
▽ Ezhou City Museum - Bronze Mirror Exhibition Hall
Most of the bronze mirrors displayed here are exquisitely decorated and smooth mirrors, but there is a special display cabinet where the two halves of broken bronze mirrors put together a story of "broken mirrors and reunion", which makes many tourists stop and watch.
The idiom "Broken Mirror And Round Again" is a story taken from the Southern Dynasty period. According to the literature, during the Southern Dynasty, Xu Deyan and his wife Princess Lechang were afraid that the country would not be able to protect themselves, so they broke a bronze mirror, and the two held half of it as a keepsake, and then the half mirror was used as a clue and the husband and wife were reunited.
In the bronze mirror exhibition hall, this Song Dynasty Xu YuChao father story mirror can be called the excavated cultural relics version of the "broken mirror re-rounding".
▽ Broken Mirror Reunion - Xu Yu Nest Father Story Mirror
In September 1956, the wuhan-daye railway (Wuhan-Daye) project was undergoing cultural relics exploration and excavation work, and when the work reached the Huarong section, an ancient tomb of the Song Dynasty was found, and half of the diamond-shaped bronze mirror was excavated from the tomb.
Although exquisitely crafted, it is a great pity that no trace of the other half has been found in the entire tomb.
A few days later, in another ancient tomb nearby, archaeologists unearthed a half-sided diamond pattern copper mirror. In the process of finishing, it was accidentally found that the fragments of the mirrors excavated from the two tombs were of the same shape, and they tried to merge them, and the sections were connected to nature, which was actually a complete copper mirror.
The eight-petal diamond-shaped shape, the three-dimensional and exquisite reliefs such as flowing clouds, mountains and grass houses, the composition layout is decent, the lines are smooth and atmospheric, and it also shows the exquisite copper mirror manufacturing process in Edi at that time.
During the Three Kingdoms period, Ezhou was once the former capital of King Wu, with developed economy and culture, with the rich copper mines of the nearby copper green mountain, which was called the three major copper smelting mirror centers in the mainland together with Huiji and Xuzhou.
With the development of economy and society, the bronze mirror, which was once a single function of daily necessities, has gradually been given special meanings such as politics, culture, religion, love, marriage and so on.
Legend has it that since the Western Han Dynasty, bronze mirrors have often been used as a relic of love between men and women, and they were given to each other as a souvenir during their lives. If one of the husband and wife dies first, the bronze mirror in the family will be divided into two, half of which will be buried with the first deceased, and the other half will be buried with the spouse, and the mirror will be reunited in the next life, indicating that life and death will not be forgotten.
The excavation of this Xu yu chao father story mirror in Ezhou has further verified the ancient custom of husband and wife having a half-sided bronze mirror for burial.
"The old man went west, the broken mirror was two, life and death were inseparable"
In the worldview of the ancients, there was no shortage of hope for eternal love, and the owner of this Song tomb may not have thought that today, a thousand years later, it has ended their long wait and ushered in the reunion of two broken mirrors.
How did you arrange Valentine's Day this year?
Take a walk in the streets with your loved one and watch a movie
Or find a corner and talk about the world
Or, come to the museum
Look at this dusty millennium
But it's a sparkling love story!