On February 15, 2022, on this day, Confucius opened a new page on the cultural and creative calendar on the cover of the image: Nong Yin Year, Nong Yin Moon, Ji Hai Day, Lantern Festival.
"In the shade of the green poplar, the hungry people are relieved, and a person's name is named." Kong Shujuan said, "The mystery is 'Liu Xia Hui', a Lu state politician. Kong Shujuan is the full-time deputy secretary of the Confucius Museum and the seventy-fifth grandson of Confucius. She told reporters that the theme of this year's Confucius Museum exhibition is "Fushou Kangning", which exhibits some cultural relics with the image of "tiger" and the traditional Spring Festival. Visitors can guess the self-made lantern riddles of Confucius in the exhibition area and experience the fun and "brain-burning" in them.
Confucius homemade riddles.
The museum houses the old lantern festival
In the display case lay a large red paper with a non-destructive corner, which was a list of lantern festivals from the Qing Guangxu period, and the neat italic characters recorded the list of the division of labor of a Lantern Festival: family members, followers, lamp officers, cloud children, bamboo horses, caravans, flags, umbrellas, fans, and cards. The 56-year-old Kong Shujuan looked at this lantern festival list through the glass and sighed, "At that time, the Lantern Festival in Kong Province was really lively. ”
Confucius Lantern Festival List.
The lights of Confucius Were hung up, and the Lantern Festival in Qufu city began. Lu southwest folk, called the Lantern Festival the "Lantern Festival", on this day, the art groups of the surrounding villages in Qufu can enter the house to perform. From the first to the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, there are "Drum Tower Gate Clubs" on the streets from the front of the Confucius Gate to the front of the Drum Tower; in the afternoon, there are dragon lantern clubs, and groups that play with dragon lanterns, run dry boats, and dance lions also perform fighting in the Confucius House; on one street, storytellers, singing operas, and stilt walkers attract people in the agricultural and leisure period to watch with their wives and children.
Jining land spans the two major river basins of Huang and Huai, and the districts and counties of Yanzhou, Jiaxiang, Wenshang, Zoucheng and other districts and counties are well known for their distribution of ancestral life sites. Qufu, a small city of "seven or eight miles long", is particularly well-known, which was once the place where Kong Qiu, the founder of Confucianism, grew and studied, and gave birth to the Confucian culture that profoundly influenced the direction of civilization in China and East Asia.
The descendants of Confucius have been in the millions, divided into dozens of households. The "Yanshenggong" branch is called "Dazong Guang", which is the patriarch of the family, and the rest of the households determine the household name by the first village. Kong Shujuan's family belonged to Sibei Household, and there are documents that record, "Sibei Household is the twelfth household, belonging to the second faction, and the ancestor of the household is Kong Kejian's brother Kong Kemian, who lives in Zhangyang Village, south of Surabaya, and somehow got its name Sibei." In the ninth year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty, there were 289 Ding people, and in the ninth year of Qianlong, there were 341 people, and in 1937, when the genealogy was revised, the total income of the Bo'ai people living in Tangyi, Shandong and Henan soared to 1439. ”
The "Lantern Festival" on the banks of the Si River is the traditional Lantern Festival custom that Kong Shujuan is most impressed by. Ordinary people are not like the Confucius House, who can hold a grand and grand lantern festival; people make small lamps from radishes, put them on the water, and let the Si River walk.
"When we were young, we dug out the inner radish with a washed and neatly cut with a knife to form a small bowl, carved a blessing on the outer wall of the radish, and then put the cotton core made in the radish, lit it with oil, and the radish bowl became bright, which became a radish lamp. On the fifteenth night of the first month, people come to the river to 'put on the lights' and use their hands to draw water to make these lights go farther and farther. Kong Shujuan said that many of the activities of the traditional Lantern Festival cannot be seen today, but the museum happens to be a memory carrier that can reproduce the "New Year's taste" of the past.
Half a year to prepare for the "Fushou Corning" exhibition
The Confucius Museum officially opened on September 6, 2019. Since then, every spring festival, the librarians will screen and display some objects related to the Chinese zodiac or other events for people to visit. Kong Shujuan introduced that the museum has a collection of more than 700,000 cultural relics, and it is not easy to select thousands of cultural relics. For a Spring Festival exhibition, the preliminary preparation will take half a year.
In the Confucius Museum, precious cultural relics are on display.
This year's theme is "Fushou Corning". These four words come from the Hong Fan chapter of the Book of Shang, which mentions "five blessings: one is shou, two is rich, three is kangning, four is good and virtuous, and the fifth is the end of life." The exhibition of the museum is divided into three units: the first unit is "Fu", that is, the New Year's prayer, the ancients prayed to the heavens for prosperity and development in the coming year through various rituals; the second unit is "Shou", taking the ancestor worship of Confucius as the starting point, including the characteristics of Confucius in eating and dressing during the New Year, through the creation of a reunion atmosphere between the old and the young in the New Year, to express the annual customs among family members; the third unit is "Corning", from the perspective of welcoming the New Year, to pin the hope of physical health and good tranquility.
The theme of this year's Confucius Museum exhibition is "Fushou Kangning".
According to reports, in the exhibition area of the Confucius Museum "Fushou Kangning - Confucius House Great Annual Exhibition", the Wenmen gods and martial arts gods on both sides can drag the visitors' thoughts into the scene of the Confucius New Year in that year, including the sacrifice of stoves, the worship of the god of wealth, the worship of ancestors, and the preparation of eating and wearing. Based on the diary materials of Kong Xiangke, Kong Lingyi, Kong Decheng and other Yan Shenggong, as well as the drama list, the lantern festival list, the lantern riddle list, the Spring Festival manuscript in the archives of The Confucius House, and the oral accounts of the 96-year-old Mr. Kong Deyong, the old Mr. Kong Deyong outlined the scene of the Confucius House celebrating the New Year in the past. The exhibition also selects many cultural relics and treasures with the image of "tiger", such as the Western Zhou bronzes excavated from the ancient city of Luguo, such as the "'Lu Bo Gong' Beast Head Plagiarized Tiger Button Copper Cup", the Han Dynasty "Tiger Head Copper Gilt Car Decoration", and the Qing Dynasty "Qingyu Tiger" ornament.
Interior view of the exhibition "Fushou Kangning - Confucius's New Year".
"The riddle of the Confucius House is difficult to guess." Kong Shujuan said that many of the riddles in KongFu are based on popular operas such as the Four Books and Five Classics, as well as popular operas such as the Book of the West Chamber, and guessers who are not familiar with these traditional cultures cannot guess riddles. "For example, there is a riddle called 'The wife is a mute', typing a sentence from the four books. But there were only four words at the end of the puzzle, and Madame didn't believe it. ”
During this year's Spring Festival holiday, the Confucius Museum received a total of 25,000 visitors, an increase of 12% year-on-year. Young people who participated in the exhibition said that when they saw the old objects in the past, they did not expect that the "New Year's flavor" of people in the past would be so strong, but the riddle was difficult to guess.
Beijing News reporter Zhao Lixin
Images courtesy of the Confucius Museum
Edited by Tang Zheng Proofreader Guo Li