I like to read the miscellaneous histories of the ancient literati, and I especially like to pay attention to the various mysterious phenomena recorded in them.
The Tang Dynasty Su Yan's notebook novel "DuYang Miscellaneous Compilation" records various anecdotes and strange events, including one:
(Yuan He) Eight years, The Great FuGuo Tribute Heavy Ming Pillow, Shen Jinyuan, Bi Mai, Purple Rice. ...... The heavy pillow is one foot two inches long and six inches high, and it is whiter than the water essence. There is the shape of a building platform, and there are ten Daoist priests in the four directions, holding incense and sticking to jane, and the cycle is endless, which is called the true person of the path. Its building platform is wamu danqing, real people's clothes are hairpins, all of them are all equipped, and they are as bright as water.
It may seem puzzling to read. In fact, if combined with archaeological findings, it can be inferred that the protagonist of this paragraph, "Chongming Pillow", may indeed have a physical prototype in the Tang Dynasty, which is a glass pillow produced in West Asia and using the top craftsmanship of the time.
From about the first century AD, in the region of West Asia, mainly in the area of present-day Iran, glassmakers created a unique process of using engraving and polishing techniques to make one circular, oval or hexagonal concave decoration on the outer wall of a transparent glass or bottle. Those concave finishes are carefully polished to form a slightly concave curved spherical surface evenly, and the focus is accurately located in the center, and the effect is a concave mirror. In this way, the appearance of a glassware is covered with evenly arranged concave lens ornaments, because the concave lens has the effect of gathering, so each mirror on the wall reflects the epitome of other mirrors on the opposite wall, forming a wonderful visual effect.
Glass jug excavated from the North Tower of Chaoyang, Liaoning
We also call that type of West Asian glassware "Cohobo Glassware". Nanjing Xiangshan Shandong Jin M7 tomb excavated a piece of oval concave mirror decoration "Juying Cup", indicating that as late as the Eastern Jin Dynasty, The "Juying Glassware" of West Asia had been imported into China and loved by the upper class. In addition, there are also the "Juying" glass bowl excavated from the tomb of Li Xian and his wife in the Northern Zhou Dynasty of Guyuan, Ningxia, the "Juying Cup" of the Southern Dynasty era unearthed in Jurong, Jiangsu, and the green "Juying Bottle" excavated from the Tomb of the Sui Dynasty in Xi'an. This kind of West Asian glass masterpiece also crosses fusang in the east, and shosoin has a "white glass bowl", which is the same process as the "Juying Cup" excavated from Jurong, and is covered with continuous tortoiseshell mirror decorations.
Glass bowl excavated from the tomb of Li Xian and his wife in the Northern Zhou Dynasty
In the years that followed, in West Asia and beyond the Middle East and North Africa, glass craftsmanship was further refined, and ingenious techniques for adding trinkets to the interior of large glassware appeared. Liaoning Chaoyang North Pagoda unearthed a transparent glass pot, very rarely, the bottom of the pot is built with a pocket green glass with handle pot, forming a spectacle of large pot set small pot. The pot is dated inferences from the 10th to the first half of the 11th century, and is a typical Islamic glassware in terms of shape, style and craftsmanship.
According to the physical objects found in the above archaeology, we can make a reasonable reduction of the "heavy pillow". The most incomprehensible of the author's descriptions is that the ten figures inside the pillow are "circulating endlessly." A transparent solid hard pillow, decorated with ten figures, how can it be looped non-stop?
The text says, "Tong Ying is like water seeing things", that is, the pillow is completely transparent no matter from which angle it is viewed, and the image reflected on the pillow wall is like the effect of the human eye viewing objects in the water. Although the ancients did not understand the scientific truth, they knew from practical experience that the images in the water would refract, deform and shift. Therefore, for example, seeing objects in water, which means that the image seen on the "heavy pillow" is the same as looking at objects in water, which is an image after refraction. From this, let us boldly speculate that the "heavy pillow" is actually a hand-made glass pillow, and the four walls of glass are polished on the outside of the multi-sided concave lens decoration.
In the production, you can first cast a cabinet-shaped pocket handicraft at the bottom of the glass pillow tire, and stick it to the bottom of the pillow while the glass material of the pillow tire is still half melted. The four walls of the pillow are then shaped, and the top surface is added to cool and fix it to form a closed glass box, that is, the glass pillow body. The upper and lower sides and four walls of the finished product are glass plates, enclosed together, and the interior is a cavity, and there is a set of pocket terraces in the middle of the cavity.
There are two possibilities for the arrangement of ten portraits:
When the bottom surface of the glass is still in a semi-hot melt state, around the pocket terrace, ten three-dimensional villains with different postures are fixed at the same time, forming a circle. Then the four walls are shaped, the pillow top is sealed, and the cooling is formed to form a complete glass pillow body. The next step is to grind a number of concave lens decorations on the four walls and top surfaces of the glass. Those mirror ornaments are continuous with each other, so that people can always see the portraits and pavilions in the pillow through the mirror ornaments, and due to the agglomeration effect, the images of three or five small people adjacent to each mirror ornament will be seen. If an observer rotates around the pillow, he will see groups of portraits in a continuous manner in one mirror ornament, and the portraits in the adjacent mirror ornaments will overlap, thus forming a visual effect of "circulation without end".
The second is to first make a glass pillow body with a pocket pavilion fixed inside, and after molding, in the form of engraving flowers or depicting gold, ten portraits are carved or drawn on the outside of the four walls of the pillow tire, and the posture of the portraits is different. Between each of the two portraits, a concave lens ornament is ground. Then, when an observer faces the side of the pillow, he will see the carved flowers or gold depicted on the pillow wall in front of him; at the same time, the back of the figure on the opposite pillow wall will also be superimposed on the front pillow wall, so that a double shadow has been formed. But what is even more wonderful is that on the pillow wall facing the observer, the concave lens ornament between the portraits will also reflect the miniature of the portraits on the opposite wall. The triple images are presented at the same time, and there are large and small, as if magic. Most importantly, no matter from any angle, you will see the portrait of different sizes, change the angle, the image will change, but the change is repetitive, which is the meaning of "cycle without end". In addition, the pocket terrace fixed in the center of the cavity is also reflected in the glass wall and the concave lens decoration, participating in the game of image change, the whole glass pillow is transparent throughout, but it is reflected heavily, so it is called "Heavy Pillow".
In this way, the mysterious color of the "heavy pillow" was dispelled, and it was a glass masterpiece that combined a variety of processes, bringing together the highest level of technology at that time. The accounts of the Duyang Miscellaneous Compilation may have contemporary real objects as samples, but the author may not have seen it with his own eyes, and the content he wrote down came from hearsay or copied to and fro, so the narrative was vague and became difficult to understand.
Text/Meng Hui
Source/Beijing Evening News