A city is made heavier by museums, so when I traveled to Urumqi, I first went to the Xinjiang Museum here.
Xinjiang Museum may be inferior to many provincial capital museums, both in terms of architectural scale and the number of collections, but the only cultural relics show its unique style, especially those with a very Silk Road style, which makes it one of the top museums in China and become a first-class museum in China.
However, after admiring the Xinjiang Museum, I was deeply impressed that most of the precious cultural relics in the museum came from an ancient tomb group called Astana.
So what is the Astana Tombs? This is a group of ancient tombs 40 kilometers away from turpan city and 6 kilometers away from the ancient city of Gaochang, and there are densely packed ancient tombs in a radius of 10 kilometers.
Pictured above is a mural in the tomb of Astana, Turpan
Most of these ancient tombs are mainly Han Chinese, of course, there are also some people who are a few people with the surnames of Cheshi, Turks, Xiongnu and Zhaowu jiu at that time, through which it can also be known that in the Gaochangguo period, most of the people here were mainly Han Chinese, and there were other ethnic groups integrated, and they were equal to each other and could be buried together.
According to statistics, the number of ancient tombs in the Astana tomb group exceeds 500, covering a span of more than 500 years from the early years of the Western Jin Dynasty to the middle of the Tang Dynasty, and the owners of the tombs include officials, magnates, and ordinary people.
Most of the most precious cultural relics unearthed are from the ancient tombs of Zhang Xiong and his wife, a famous general of the Gaochang Kingdom of Ju, and the cultural relics contain paintings, clay figurines, documents, wooden figurines, gold objects, ancient coins and many other types of cultural relics.
Among the many cultural relics, I personally prefer cultural relics such as fuxi nuwatu, painted silk maid, painted king stepping ghost figurines, and various types of food.
Then let's start with the treasure of the town hall, Fuxi Nuwatu, which is a 2.2-meter-long silk flower made by a Tang Dynasty painter who used silk to color it. The content depicts the scene of Fuxi Nuwa embracing each other in ancient Chinese myths and legends.
If you look closely at the silk painting, you can find that Fuxi Nuwa embraces the upper body, Fuxi holds the moment in her hand, Nuwa holds a rule in her hand, which means that the heavens and the earth are round, and the lower half of the snake's tail intersects and intersects the seven sections. The figures use lines up and down to outline the itinerary of the sun and the moon, representing the movement of celestial bodies in the universe.
At this moment, you may wish to count the dots in the silk painting, no more and no less just 74, representing the "great Yan number fifty, its use of forty has nine".
In 1973, the tombs of the famous general Zhang Xiong and his wife were found in the ancient tombs of Astana in Turpan, and a large number of painted wooden figurines and silk figurines were unearthed, of which the wooden figurines in this exhibition cabinet were the most beautiful.
This is a Yellow, Dotted Noodle Jing (yè), slanted red, lips painted Tang Dynasty women, on the body liked the popular Ayala brocade silk, after thousands of years, silk clothing is still glamorous, through this cultural relics we can also see the openness of the society at that time.
Chinese has been good at making food since ancient times, and this food relic can be learned from the food artifacts excavated from ancient tombs. In the history exhibition hall of the Xinjiang Museum, travelers can see a wide variety of food.
Dumplings with a similar shape and wrapped in fillings; mooncakes in the shape of baoxiang flowers; dim sum with beautiful shapes such as plum blossoms, eight-petal patterns, and leaves; noodles such as wontons and roasted wontons; preserved fruits such as raisins, red dates, and dried apricots;
Of course, there are also the popular grilled lamb chops and kebabs. It can be seen that as early as more than a thousand years ago, Xinjiang people had such a rich cuisine.
In addition to the amazement of the cultural relics themselves, we should also be grateful for Xinjiang's special climate and the ancestors who contributed to the protection of cultural relics. Because of their efforts, we can see such precious relics in peacetime, and read the life and art of the ancients through cultural relics. (Author: Horse and stop, life is about walking, the journey needs to be recorded!) ）