CCTV news: The reporter learned from the State Administration of Cultural Heritage that the final evaluation meeting of the top ten new archaeological discoveries in the country in 2021 will be held in Beijing on March 30. At that time, the selection will be held in the form of "online + offline".
Among the 20 shortlisted projects this time, the ruins of Ming Zhongdu in Fengyang, Anhui, may not be familiar to everyone, but the Nanjing Forbidden City and the Beijing Forbidden City are modeled after it. Fengyang's Mingzhong capital was abandoned before it was built, eroded by wind and rain, and now only the ruins of the broken wall remain, archaeological excavations have made us re-realize its former glory.
At the beginning of the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang ordered the construction of a new capital in his hometown, named "Zhongdu", which was very grand in scale, but when it was about to be completed 6 years later, it stopped construction on the grounds of cost, and in the eleventh year of Hongwu, the status of Nanjing's "Beijing Division" was determined. The capital city that was boycotted was the first capital city built in accordance with the regulations of the Beijing Division in the early Ming Dynasty, and was once known as "the blueprint for the complete palaces of ancient China", which profoundly affected the urban layout of Nanjing and Beijing during the Ming and Qing dynasties. At the time of the strike, it had begun to take shape, and the city walls, palaces, central official offices, altar temples, and kiln sites and stone factories left behind when they were built together constituted a huge mingzhongdu ruins group. Since 2015, the Anhui Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, together with the Palace Museum and Shandong University, has carried out continuous archaeological excavations at the Ming zhongdu site, and achieved important results, especially the layout of the main hall in the former dynasty district of the Ming Zhongdu, and also found the largest stone foundation excavated from the ancient palace base site in the mainland.
Wang Zhi, Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Anhui Province: This stone foundation was found in the part of the front hall close to the center, its volume is huge, the length of the material side reaches about 2.8 meters, the base surface is about 2.5-2.6 meters, and the diameter of the raspberry reaches 1.8 meters, which should be the largest stone foundation excavated in the ancient palace base site of the mainland.
Due to the brief historical records, the shape of the main hall of the former dynasty of the Ming Dynasty has always been a mystery. After 7 years of archaeology, the cumulative excavation area reached more than 9600 square meters, clarifying the layout of the main hall and ancillary buildings of the former Ming Dynasty. The palace is generally in the shape of an I-shape, consisting of a front hall, an apse and a piercing hall, the front hall and the apse are nine rooms wide and four deep, and the palace pedestal is high and low, similar to the practice of the Beijing Taimiao Temple. At the beginning of the design, ming and zhongdu strictly followed the traditional principle of symmetry, focusing on the architectural layout of the palace on the central axis. The size of Miyagi Is 840,000 square meters, which is 120,000 square meters larger than the 720,000 square meters of the Forbidden City in Beijing.
Wu Wei, Palace Museum: On the west side of the apse, we also found the architectural base site of the connecting corridor, gatehouse and corner tower, which is also very similar to the architectural combination of the Ming Dynasty location of the Forbidden City in Beijing today.
At present, through archaeology, it has been clear that there are three castle walls in the Ming Dynasty, the innermost is Miyagi Castle, the second is the Forbidden Wall, and waiguo City is the outermost city, with an area of 50 square kilometers and a circumference of about 30 kilometers. Originally planned to have 12 gates, it was later reduced to 9. In the middle and back part of the front hall of the palace, a loess platform with very pure and special soil was also found.
Wang Zhi, Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Anhui Province: This loess platform is located in the geometric center of the entire palace, if the palace is pulled by two diagonal lines, its intersection will fall on the loess platform, which is the location of the emperor's dragon chair throne, which should be symbolic. Therefore, its appearance should be closely related to the concept of site selection and concentration of the whole city.
Ming and Zhong were the first capital cities in the Ming and Qing dynasties that truly embodied the system of the Beijing division. Excavations of sites related to the central axis of the Ming Dynasty have revealed that the Song Kaifeng, Jin Zhongdu, Yuan Dadu, Ming Nanjing and Ming Beijing City have been linked together to fill the key gaps, which also reflects the characteristics of the inheritance of Chinese cultural genes from generation to generation and the continuous chinese civilization. At present, the Ming Zhongdu site is already a national archaeological site park, accompanied by excavation and protection, so that the world can once again feel the grandeur of this imperial palace that has disappeared in the long river of history.
(CCTV)