As one of the traditional festivals in China, the Lantern Festival was valued in the Ming Dynasty, and the Ming Huidian records that "the Seven-Year Decree of Yongle decreed that the Lantern Festival should be given ten days off to the hundred officials from the eleventh day of the first month to celebrate the festival." ”
The Ming Dynasty people attached great importance to the Lantern Festival and preferred to hold colorful entertainment activities on the day of the Lantern Festival. The Xianzong Xingle Tu (also known as the Ming Xian Zong Lantern XingLe Tu), now in the National Museum of China, will be in the Forbidden City more than 500 years ago, "the new Zheng Ji Qing Duo Zhen Xiang, the Jade Tower Golden Hall are all illuminated." Yaochi Zifu played xianle, and the scene of "noisy Lantern Festival" full of persuasion was vividly portrayed.
The painting adopts a comic strip composition, with the red wall of the court dividing the picture into three scenes, and the famous "Roselle Futu" and "Han Xizai's Night Feast" also adopted this composition method.
Viewed from right to left, the first paragraph depicts Emperor Mingxianzong Zhu Mishen dressed in embroidered golden dragon robes and wearing a black beanie, sitting in a yellow tent on the stage to watch the eunuchs and children set off fireworks. There are many kinds of fireworks in the painting, some can be held like bamboo poles, some can be inserted on the ground, some can be held in the hand and waved, and some can be hung... In the lower right of the picture, there are also children who take out strings of fireworks from the rectangular mahogany box. These wonderful halos immerse everyone in the picture in a dreamlike joy, and the fireworks also hint that the time is not daytime.
Through a red wall that opens the palace door, we enter the second part of the picture, and the first thing that catches our eyes is a cart and a cargo man who carries a burden but is full of goods. At this time, Xianzong stood upright on the right side of the stone platform in front of the palace, and the palace people next to him dragged the children towards the goods and shelves that had been prepared in the center of the picture, and the slightly older children were holding various color lamps in their hands, including taiping elephant lamps, horse to success lamps, and toad palace laurel lamps, all of which contained good wishes.
At the edge of a zigzag red wall, the third segment of the painting begins, in which Xian Zong is not located in the center of the painting, but on the far left of the entire frame. Marching from left to right, all kinds of thrilling juggling exciting, accompanied by music to the right of the foreign envoy-like treasure offering procession, the leader of the hand holding the beast, the rest of the shoulders of the coral, showing the strength of the empire, in addition to the joy of the festival, added a strong political meaning, so that it added historical value to the folk value. The various opera costumed characters in front of them walk along the red wall to the second section of the picture, thus making the picture a joyful whole of organic interaction.
After the Lantern Festival, the year is really over, in this year's slowest and fastest days, so that people in the celebration, lively, but also especially can feel the passage of time, today look at the past, it seems to be more able to let us appreciate the ancient people's hopes for the New Year and the wishes for a better life, so that from generation to generation, more than a year, years of health.
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