Tuoba Xianbei ancestor "Stone Chamber" - the ruins of Gaxian Cave
Text / Chang hai Tu / Pang Lei
Gaxiandong Vista (South-North)
The site of Gaxian Cave is located at the eastern foot of the eastern peak of the northern section of the Daxing'anling Mountains and on the cliff on the left bank of the Ganhe River, a tributary of the Nen River, and belongs to alihe town of orunchun Autonomous Banner in Hulunbuir City, Inner Mongolia. Gaxian Ditch is 0.5-2 kilometers wide, the water flow is clear, the sun is very cold, the surrounding forests and seas are vast, the peaks are stacked, the ancient trees are towering, and the pine birch covers the sun. The Gaxian Cave hangs high in the middle of the mountainside 25 meters above the ground, and is called "Tuoba Xianbei Old Ruins Stone Room" or "Stone Temple" or "Stone Room" in the Book of Wei. In January 1988, the site was announced as the third batch of national key cultural relics protection units.
Gaxian River (West-East)
About the "Tuoba Xianbei Old Ruins Stone Chamber", the earliest appeared in the Book of Wei, but where is the location of the stone chamber? Chinese and foreign scholars have different opinions and debates. The book "Hulunbuir Zhiluo" believes that the northwest area of Hulunbuir is "the stone chamber of the Wei Xiandi". In the 1930s, the Japanese scholar Shiratori Kuji proposed in the "Examination of the Eastern Hu Nationalities": "The stone chamber of the ancestors of the Taku clan in the northwest of Uluhou must also be in the Nen River basin, and it should be near the Xing'an Mountains." "After 1949, archaeological work provided clues for the search for the Xianbei stone chamber. In particular, since 1959, the Inner Mongolia Cultural Relics Task Force has discovered the Xianbei tomb group in Hulunbuir Zalainuoer, believing that the tomb group may be the remnants of Tuoba Xianbei's southward migration. In the 1960s, Professor Ma Changshou published the book "Wuhuan and Xianbei", in which he said: "The Marquis of Wuluo is very clear in the Nen River basin of present-day Heilongjiang Province. To the northwest of the Nen River basin is the Erguna River, and the stone chamber of Wei's ancestors was within the Daxing'anling Mountains of the Erhe River. In the 1970s, Mr. Su Bai published an article entitled "Xianbei Ruins in Northeast China and Inner Mongolia", which presumed that the tombs of Zhazhan Nuoer were the remnants of Tuoba Xianbei culture, and then discussed the origin of Tuoba Xianbei and its migration to the south and into the Central Plains, and plotted and pointed out its migration route. In 1979, Mr. Mi Wenping, the director of the Cultural Relics Station of Hulunbuir League, began to look for the stone room of the Xianbei Old Ruins on the basis of analyzing the research results of his predecessors. With the help of his compatriots in Orunchun, he visited the Gaxian Cave many times and wrote the article "Tuoba Xianbei Ancestor Stone Room Examination" on the basis of field investigation. His views attracted the attention of the archaeological community in Inner Mongolia, and scholars such as Wang Yuping, Meng Guangyao, and Cao Yongnian came to Gaxian Cave to investigate with Mi Wenping, during which they finally found the inscription of the Fourth Year (443) of the Taiping Zhenjun of the Northern Wei Dynasty on the afternoon of July 30, 1980. It is basically consistent with the record in the Book of Wei that the envoys of the Marquis of Wuluo "claimed that there was the old ruins of the former emperor of the state in the northwest of his country, ninety steps north and south of the stone chamber, forty steps from east to west, and seventy feet high", and the Taiwu Emperor Tuoba Tao sent the Zhongshu attendant Li Chang to sacrifice and "published a blessing text on the wall of the room and returned".
The entrance to The Cave of Gaxian Cave
Part of the mouth of the Gaxian Cave
Originally a natural granite cave, The entrance is slightly triangular, 12 meters high, 20 meters wide, and 30° south-west. The cave is wide and grand, dark and deep, 120 meters long from north to south, 27 meters wide from east to west, the highest part of the dome is more than 20 meters, the area is about 2000 square meters, and it can be divided into four parts: the front hall, the hall, the high hall and the back hall. On the stone wall on the west side of the front hall, 15 meters from the entrance of the cave, there is an inscription of the fourth year of the Taiping Zhenjun's blessing. The height of the stone carving is about 1.5 meters from the ground, the height is 0.7 meters, and the width is 1.2 meters. The inscription is vertical, a total of 19 lines, the full text of a total of 201 words. The inscription is the Chinese character Wei Shu (魏書), which is still very strong. The discovery of the stone inscription Zhuwen confirms that the Gaxian Cave is the "Old Ruins Stone Chamber" inhabited by the ancestors of Xianbei. The cave is stacked with thicker cultural layers. In 1980, the Hulunbuir League Cultural Relics Management Station excavated and cleaned up the cultural accumulation in the cave, found the cultural accumulation of the Stone Age, the Warring States Period and the Northern Wei Dynasty, and unearthed pottery, stone tools, tooth ornaments, bone tools, iron tools and a large number of wild animal skeleton fossils. Judging from the pottery, they are all handmade sand pottery, the fire temperature is very low, the pottery color is uneven, mostly black brown. The type of apparatus is simple, mainly open cans, and some are straight mouthpieces. The pattern is decorated with convex string patterns and additional stacking patterns. The shape and method of its pottery are similar to the pottery excavated from the completed cemetery and the tomb group of Zagan noor, which should be the early form of the same culture. The remains of the Gaxian Cave culture are known so far as to be early in the Xianbei remnants, and the upper limit is at least as early as the early Warring States period, that is, the 3rd century BC. In addition, due to the discovery of stone inscriptions in the cave, the lower age limit of the remains of the Gaxian Cave culture can be as late as the 5th century AD.
Bone artifacts were excavated from the site of Gaxian Cave
Clay pots unearthed from the site of Gaxian Cave
Taiping Zhenjun four years of congratulations to the rubbing
The discovery of the Northern Wei stone inscription Zhu Wen in Gaxian Cave proves that The Gaxian Cave, that is, the old stone chamber of Tuoba Xianbei's ancestors contained in the Book of Wei, is the birthplace of the Xianbei people, and also confirms the migration process of Tuoba Xianbei. This discovery unveiled the mystery of the origin of Tuoba Xianbei for thousands of years, and ended the long-standing dispute between historians over the birthplace of the Xianbei before entering the Central Plains.
This article was published in the June 2021 issue of Popular Archaeology, which is a librarian of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology
Reprinted from The Public Archaeology public account