Qingming Festival, for the contemporary fast-paced working people, means the first small holiday after the Spring Festival that can relax and rest. In this small long holiday, those who are closer to home will choose to go home to worship their ancestors and visit the grave, while the wanderers who go out do not want to feel the congestion on the highway, and can only hide at home and play with mobile phones. However, in ancient times, this festival in the spring was particularly important, and it was a festival that could not be disappointed, and we can also see from many cultural relics left in ancient times that the ancients attached importance to and cherished the Qingming season.
(1) Han copper drum shellfish container
Shellfish containers can be understood as the piggy bank of the ancients, which was a storage container used in the early days when shellfish was used as a trading currency. This shell vessel from Shizhai Mountain, Jinning, Yunnan, is a work of the ancient Dian kingdom of the Bronze Age in China, depicting the shangcang map, praying for the new year, sowing seeds and so on.
In fact, in ancient times, although there was no definite Qingming Festival, there was already a custom of celebrating the spring of farming, and in the Western Zhou Dynasty, the spring outing was already part of the ceremonial system. According to the Book of Rites and the Order of the Moon, "On the day of the establishment of spring, the Son of Heaven personally marshaled the three dukes, the nine secretaries, the princes, the doctors, and even the eastern suburbs of the spring." "During the Spring and Autumn Period, the Qingming Festival has not yet taken shape, and the important seasonal festival about spring is the Shangwei Festival, commonly known as the Third of March, on this day people will come to the water's edge to bathe, called "祓 (fú)禊(xì)", which means to wash and remove dirt and eliminate ominousness.
In the Qin and Han Dynasties, in addition to following the spring customs of the previous generation, from the emperor and hundreds of officials to the common people, they all had to go out to the spring, and the emperor was the first to set an example, to persuade the peasants to "spring", and to sacrifice the land, praying for the wind and rain to be smooth. The ornamentation on this shell vessel recreates for us a series of scenes of sowing seeds, praying for the New Year, and offering sacrifices. Moreover, this kind of spring ploughing sowing, depicting the picture of nongsang, appeared in large quantities on the cultural relics of this period.
Han portrait brick sowing map Unearthed in Xindu, Sichuan
Han portrait brick sowing diagram excavated in Deyang, Sichuan
(2) Wei Jin Wang Xizhi's "Orchid Pavilion Collection"
Jin Wang Xi's Travels Book Lanting Preface (Chuan Tang Chu Sui Liang Facsimile) Partial Collection of the Palace Museum
"Yonghe Ninth Year, The Age is ugly, the beginning of the twilight of spring..." On the third day of the first month of March in the ninth year of Jin Yonghe, Wang Xizhi called his friends Xie An, Sun Qi, and forty-one other small friends to come to the small river bank of Huiji Shanyin to carry out the traditional activity of the Shangwei Festival, "Qu Shui Liu Qian", and afterwards Wang Xizhi gathered everyone's inspiration when he was stepping on the green into one episode and made a preface, which was the birth of the world's first line of books "Lanting Collection Sequence". No one would have thought that this spring activity would leave an artistic event for future generations to reminisce about the millennium.
(3) Sui Tang Zhan Ziqian 'You Chun Tu'
Sui Zhan Zi Pian Chun Tu Scroll (Partial) Collection of the Palace Museum
Although Zhan Ziqian's "You Chun Tu" has received a lot of controversy in recent years, the spring tour scene shown in its picture is still very much in line with the Sui and Tang Dynasties's "stepping on the green" tradition. The "Testament of Kaiyuan Tianbao" says: "Every time in the first half of the month, each person rides across the horse for the tent garden or in the countryside, for the feast of exploring spring." Li Nao also recorded in the "Chronicle of the Qin Zhongshi Years": "On the day of Tang Shangwei, he gave a feast to qujiang, and all the people drank in the head of the river, trampled on the grass, and trampled on the green." It can be seen that during the Sui and Tang Dynasties, everyone came to the spring season and walked into the embrace of nature, and the activity of stepping on the green became a momentary beauty.
(4) Northern Song Dynasty Zhang Zeduan's "Map of the Upper River of the Qing Dynasty"
Northern Song Dynasty Zhang Zeduan Qingming Upper River Picture Scroll (Partial) Collection of the Palace Museum
In the Song Dynasty, the tradition of the Shangwei Festival declined, and the Qingming Festival gradually took shape. The "Map of the Upper River of the Qing Dynasty" depicts the bustling and lively scene during the Qingming Dynasty, inside and outside the East Jiaozi Gate of the Northern Song Dynasty capital of Beijing and on both sides of the Bian River. From the spring color of the suburbs to the people on both sides of the Bian River, it fully shows the Northern Song Dynasty, when the spring was warm and blossoming, people poured into the streets and began to work busily, a thriving scene.
(5) Yuan Chun Shui Yu
Yuan Chunshui jade as Shanghai Museum collection
Liaojinyuan is the period under the rule of nomadic people in Chinese history, for the Han people of agricultural civilization, the Qingming season means farming and sowing, then for the nomadic people, this seasonal festival, more performance in travel hunting, in the Liaojinyuan culture there is the term "spring water autumn mountain", the first description is the Liao Dynasty emperor spring fishing and hunting water and autumn hunting mountain. Although the concept of "spring water" is not the same as that of Qingming, the hunting activities held when all things arise in spring have the same significance as the "spring" of the Han family's Tianzi, which has a strong political significance. During this period, there were also a large number of works of art with the theme of "Spring Water Autumn Mountain", "Spring Water" jade is one of them, it is usually based on ponds, the famous Sea Qing Na Crane.
Jin Chunshui jade as Shanghai Museum collection
In each era, there are different customs and characteristics for the activities that greet spring, and the Qingming Festival is also a seasonal festival that has been gradually fixed by different cultures. But no matter what the customs of each time and place, one of them remains unchanged, that is, to encourage people to go out and walk into the embrace of nature. I hope that everyone will not live up to this beautiful spring light.
Article transferred from: Liweiwb's 360 personal library, infringing deletion.