In the Nanjing Museum
There is a seemingly inconspicuous exhibit
An ordinary bowl
Inside is a stack of "ash" with a burst of gray.
The bowl is a jade bowl
"Ash" is the best dragon's brain.
This is the cultural relics unearthed from the Changgan Temple Underground Palace
- A jade bowl full of spices.
1
"Taliuxiang"
Nanjing Zhonghua Gate and the Qinhuai River are closely related, and the ancient city wall tells the vicissitudes of history. On the south bank of the Qinhuai River, there is an open area, which local residents call "Pagoda Root".
As the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, Nanjing has produced many royal temples since the beginning of The Eastern Wu Dynasty. One of the most famous is the Ming Dynasty Bao'en Temple, which was built by the order of Ming Chengzu Zhu Di, and the glass pagoda in the temple was once called "the eighth wonder of the medieval world" and was later destroyed by the Qing Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement.
In 2007, Nanjing launched the reconstruction of the Dabao'en Temple project and began a four-year archaeological excavation. In 2008, a large number of state-level cultural relics and Buddhist relics were unearthed in the Changgan Temple Underground Palace, the predecessor of Dabao'en Temple, and the ruins of Dabao'en Temple were also called "the highest-standard, largest-scale and most completely preserved ancient Chinese temple ruins" by the expert group of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage, and was rated as "China's Top Ten Archaeological Discoveries in 2010".
Viewers who watched the live tv broadcast of the iron letter that opened the Changgan Temple Underground Palace in 2008 may remember that when the top cover of the iron letter was opened, the archaeologists at the scene subconsciously covered their noses with their hands - this move made many viewers think that there was a "peculiar smell" in the iron letter.
A silver-gilt lotus flower treasure incense burner excavated from the underground palace of Changgan Temple
Afterwards, the expert explained that what emanated from the iron letter was a faint aroma.
Later detection studies revealed the mystery: it turned out that tiehan and Ashoka's tower contained a large number of spices, which was also the largest number of spices unearthed in the history of field archaeology on the mainland.
Among these spices, there are agarwood, sandalwood, dipterocarp, bean curd, cloves, etc.; as well as utensils for storing and using spices, such as incense sachets, jade bowls, incense spoons for picking incense, incense sticks, incense burners, and net bottles filled with perfume.
2
"Sea Amoy"
Don't underestimate these spices, most of them come from the "sea amoy" goods of the "ocean dock" more than a thousand years ago.
In order to find out the specific composition of these millennium spices, the Nanjing Municipal Museum once cooperated with the Wood Science Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Forestry to sample and analyze the plant fibers of the excavated spices. The identification results show that the spices unearthed from the Underground Palace of Changgan Temple mainly include two categories: woody spices and resin spices, and the specific ingredients include agarwood, frankincense, cloves, cardamom and so on. The sandalwood tire used in Ashoka Pagoda is also a precious spice in itself.
Among the spices excavated are long strips of wood chips, which are actually valuable woody spices - agarwood. Agarwood is the result of the "mutation" of special wood's long-term absorption of resin, which takes decades or even hundreds of years to form, and is named because of its "heavy black matter, sinking when entering the water". As an extremely rare high-grade spice, in ancient times, there was a saying of "a piece of ten thousand dollars", and this batch of spices from the Northern Song Dynasty was probably imported from Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian regions through sea routes.
A silver box inside the Ashoka Pagoda contains a box full of yellow-white resin spices, naturally dried and dehydrated in powder form. Through the qualitative analysis of infrared spectroscopy, its main component is frankincense. Mainly produced in northern Ethiopia and Somalia, frankincense is a fragrance resin containing volatile oils oozing from the bark of the frankincense tree, and when dried, it is mostly teardrop-like. Although it has gone through thousands of years, the aroma is still impressive.
Among all kinds of imported commodities in ancient China, spices account for the most bulk, it can be said that it has always been a "hot" commodity, and the Maritime Silk Road is therefore called "Spice Road", and all kinds of imported spices have greatly enriched the connotation of Chinese incense culture.
3
"The Age of 'Taste'"
The Song Dynasty, where jade bowls and spices were born, was perhaps the most fragrant era in Chinese history.
China's incense culture can be traced back to the Spring and Autumn Period, after the trade exchanges between the Han Dynasty and the Western Regions, as well as the comprehensive development of the Tang Dynasty, the incense culture reached its full glory during the Two Song Dynasties, forming a Confucian and elegant social trend. Not only is the inner courtyard of the palace respected, the cultural circle is popular, even in the circle of friends of ordinary people are traffic items - "Wind Ya Song" is not blown.
In the "Qingming River Map", there are many scenes related to incense: for example, the large characters in front of a incense shop are written "Liu Jia Shang Colored Sandalwood Neem Incense", which is quite grand.
Spice billboard in "Qingming On the River Map"
The "Tokyo Dream" also has records of related industries: in the Northern Song Dynasty, farmers, industrialists, and merchants, all walks of life, dress has their own rules, while the incense people in the incense shop need to wear top hats and shawls. It can be seen that the "incense people" have become a specialized industry and have their own line - they charter fixed shops, make incense molds every day, and collect incense money on a monthly basis.
The account of life in the city in the "Past Affairs of Wulin" is also very interesting: in the restaurant of Lin'an in the Southern Song Dynasty, there are old women who specialize in providing guests with the service of selecting incense and burning incense, called "Xiang Po".
Even if you eat soil, you have to burn incense - incense became a necessity for the life of the Song people. In the Song Dynasty, when the service industry was developed, there was a professional organization "Four Divisions and Six Bureaus" that specialized in organizing banquet celebrations for people. Among them, there is the "Incense Pharmacy Bureau", which is in charge of "ambergris, sinking brain, Qinghe, Qingfu incense, incense stack, incense burner, incense ball" and "incense cluster fine ash", etc. The Song people are really exquisite with incense.
Ma Yuan's "Bamboo Stream Burning Incense Map" shows the little brother of the literati whose incense talent is displayed
At that time, many of the articles with hundreds of thousands of hits in the circle of literati circles were related to incense- for example, Song Ren Ding's "Tianxiang Biography", focusing on the tasting and theoretical summary of agarwood; Song Fan Chengda's "Zhixiang" in "Guihai Yu Hengzhi", summarizing the incense products produced in Shudi; Ye Tingjue's "Famous Incense Spectrum" and "Sea Record Fragments - Xiangmen", Yan Zhizhi's "History of Incense", Hong Jiao's "Incense Spectrum", and Chen Jing's "Chen's Xiang Spectrum" at the end of the Northern Song Dynasty, which is a complete collection, including eleven predecessors' works, which can be described as the essence of Song Dynasty Xiangdao.
At that time, the popular cultural activities also included Douxiang. Just like the "Tea Fighting Party" and the "Fighting Poetry Society", at the Douxiang Meeting, the literati exhausted their solutions and took out their best private incense and competed with each other.
Of course, incense is a social event, indispensable to tea, wine, poetry, books, paintings, but also must be organized in the Internet celebrity attractions - this elegant life, is a scene of the Song Dynasty. The Song people called the incense vessel "out of the incense", a "out" word, adding the dynamics of incense to it, which was a little more flexible and interesting.
Song · Zhao Tuo's "Listening to the Qintu" Collected by the Palace Museum
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