Liangzhu Museum
01.
Construction
Liangzhu Museum is located in Meizhou Park in the north of Hangzhou Liangzhu Cultural Village, next to the museum is a huge lotus pond, the waterfront building and the liangzhu civilization that once existed in the form of a water town Zeguo is 5,000 years away.
The overall architectural design of the Liangzhu Museum was written by the British designer Dai Wei Chipperfield, who said that his inspiration came from "a jade stone scattered on the ground", and the Liangzhu Museum is the box that collects treasures, and the material of the façade is made of light and elegant limestone.
From the air, the entire Liangzhu Museum looks like four parallel gray-yellow rectangular storage boxes.
Image source: Photographer Pan Xinrui
02.
Exhibitions
There are three permanent exhibition areas inside the museum, namely "Water Town Zeguo", "Sacred Land of Civilization" and "Jade Soul National Spirit".
As the earliest civilization in China and even In East Asia, Liangzhu has now been recognized as a sacred place to empirically prove the history of Chinese civilization for 5,000 years.
The closer you get to it, the more often you marvel at the fact that in such a long and distant time and space, our ancestors, who have cultural and blood links with us, formed families, united city-states, and created countries in the same land we are stepping on today, and the high civilization they have carved out often makes my little head have a lot of question marks - they did it then? How did they do it? And even if I travel back 5,000 years, it seems like I'm just a waste of wood?
There are many keywords about Liangzhu, which are shown on the "keyword wall" on the right hand side of the entrance door of the Liangzhu Museum, but the key of the key is that I think it is still the three cores - the capital city with a centripetal triple structure, the invincible advanced super dam water conservancy system, and the god Wang Yu engraved with liangzhu identity information.
The discovery of Liangzhu began in 1936 by Shi Xingen, a librarian at the Zhejiang Provincial West Lake Museum, in a frenzied exploration of the relics around his hometown of Liangzhu Town.
Since 1986, with the continuous deepening of archaeological discoveries, the anti-mountain king mausoleum, the Yaoshan altar, and the Mojiaoshan palace area have surfaced in turn, and the Liangzhu civilization can really begin to awaken from the historical burial.
But the real climax came after 2007, the discovery of the ancient city wall confirmed the existence of Liangzhu Ancient City, the "first city in China", and the huge and complex Liangzhu water conservancy system showed the "infrastructure madness" nature of the Chinese nation in the early days, and these two archaeological discoveries also directly laid the foundation for Liangzhu to be included in the World Cultural Heritage List.
The Liangzhu culture appeared around 5300 years ago, at the same stage as the late Yangshao culture in the Yellow River Basin and the Sumerian civilization in the Two Rivers Basin of West Asia.
As the capital of Liangzhu civilization, Liangzhu Ancient City has a centripetal triple structure - the Mojiaoshan Palace District, the inner city surrounded by walls and the outer GuoCheng, which is no different from the urban structure of the subsequent feudal dynasty era.
The houses in the city are framed by wood and roofed with thatch or rice straw, and many of them are made of large wood, and it is difficult to imagine how the ancestors of Liangzhu at that time completed the construction without the help of large machinery.
Liangzhu as a civilization that "thrives on the water", all sides and water are highly related to the water - the city walls and gates are built in the water, the city water network is dense, the main means of transportation and passage are rafts on the water, and the most amazing of all of them is the 11 projects in the west of Liangzhu City that are as grand as the dams in the ancient city.
Typhoons, torrential rains, floods and tides, the people of the southeast have long enjoyed the grace of water, but also against the fury of water, 5,000 years ago, the people of Liangzhu faced a higher sea level than today, and also looked for ways to govern and tame the "water god" on the back of prosperity.
And the dams we see today from west to east, from Wutong Lane to Lion Rock, 11, 4 groups, and different systems of high are the answers that the Liangzhu people told their descendants to leave to history.
The museum displays a kind of building material called grass-wrapped mud that the Liangzhu people used to build dams at that time, that is, wrapping mud blocks with grass stems, in this way to enhance the friction and tensile strength of the soil, which is of great benefit to the waterfront building of the dam.
There is already a distinct class divide in the Liangzhu civilization, the ruling class relies on the supreme theocracy to govern, and the most representative artifact of the embodiment of theocracy and status is the jade in the Liangzhu civilization.
The two royal tombs of Anti-Shan and Yaoshan are both high-grade tombs in the Liangzhu civilization, and the higher the proportion of high-grade tombs using tremolite, yangjurite and other extremely high-tough nephrites.
The jade that represents the divine power, the jade bi that represents the financial power, and the jade that represents the military kingship are the most representative three-piece sets of Liangzhu jade, of which the jade and some jade accessories can only be used or buried by the royal family.
In the entire Liangzhu jade culture system, its unique identity and the soul of the jade, the first face of the gods and people, are the most eye-catching.
The highest-level artifacts that embody the divine power of Liangzhu, such as the Jade Chun and the Ivory Scepter, are important carriers of the face pattern of the gods, men, and beasts.
The statue consists of two parts, gods, men, gods and beasts, and there is a small short video in the museum, which I recorded with my mobile phone for viewing.
Unfortunately, the museum did not exhibit the 13-kilogram "King of Qun" excavated from the Anti-Mountain M12, nor could he see the delicate divine and human beast face pattern on the body of the King of Qun.
In addition, there are some exhibits and popular science in the Liangzhu Museum that are very interesting, and the primitive and simple patterns engraved on the Liangzhu black pottery may have been only in the summer twilight of a certain oblique sun 5,000 years ago, and there was a Liangzhu person who reproduced the scene in his eyes or mind on the artifact, and his artistic creation has helped us to complete the touch and dialogue with that distant time and space again today.
In the second exhibition hall, the multimedia booth about the mysterious "Hui" character of the Yaoshan altar filling the four corners of the ditch and the perfect correspondence with the seasonal season of the festival makes people have to lament the wisdom of the ancestors to find the law in the exploration of nature day after day, year after year.
and a brutal corner of early civilization under theocracy.
There is also the second exhibition hall, the full display of Liangzhu female bones...
Among the early civilizations of the mainland, Liangzhu is the only civilization that I have done a relatively detailed understanding so far, and this trip to the Liangzhu Museum has answered many parts of the books that I have learned but still have questions, and has also deepened a lot of content that I have learned on paper to finally feel shallow.
If you want to have a rough understanding of liangzhu civilization outside the museum, the most economical way I think is to buy a copy of the Liangzhu ancient country album published by China National Geographic's "Chinese Heritage" magazine in 2019, or spend an hour on station B to watch the 3-episode "Liangzhu" documentary.
It's really nice to be able to find our true origins in the traceable history.
Just like the liangzhu people's water conservancy system that defended their homeland against floods, we can also see the attachment of Chinese to the homeland in "The Wandering Earth", when Noah in the West chose to take the ark to go elsewhere, our nuwa was making up for the big hole that poured the water of the Tianhe River after the co-workers knocked down the Buzhou Mountain, and later Dayu used the mortal body to fight the flood unyieldingly.
If Nuwa Dayu is only a later appendage of our own cultural genes, then the Liangzhu civilization has really rooted its roots at least 5,000 years ago.
Finally, end the visit with one of the monographs on display in the Liangzhu Museum, "Ode to Liangzhu", and we will see you at the next museum!