This article is excerpted from the Journal of the Palace Museum, No. 6, 2020
Since the 1950s, the Beijing Municipal Government has successively repaired important ancient buildings of the Ming and Qing dynasties. During the renovation process, some treasure boxes containing money and town objects were found in the temple of the garden and the city gate archway.
According to reports, the treasure box is generally used as the town house of the ancient building, placed in the ridge in the middle of the ridge of the building, and the center of the ridge is called "Dragon Gate" or "Dragon Mouth".
When the ancient building picked the ridge, the craftsmen built the ridge from the two ends of the ridge to the middle, and reserved a piece of the ridge in the middle that was temporarily not sealed, and during the dragon period, the treasure box was put into the positive ridge and sealed with the ridge tile. The "Helongmen" sign project is nearing completion, and the building is completed.
When the palace is repaired, it is first necessary to remove the treasure box from the dragon mouth and properly preserve it, commonly known as "please dragon mouth" or "ying long mouth". The retrieved treasure box was invited to the Ministry of Works to be enshrined, and after the restoration work, the treasure box was returned and a sacrifice ceremony was held.
In September 2018, during the renovation of the Yangxin Hall, the Palace Museum found a treasure box stored on the roof ridge. (The main hall Longkou tile is the most central tile on the main ridge of the main hall, which can be said to be the central position of the entire building, and the treasure box of the town house is often placed under the longkou tile.) ）
This treasure box is marked with the inscription "Jiaqing 6th Year, July 22nd", and the treasure box contains scripture scrolls, gold, silver, copper, iron and tin, five kinds of yuan treasures, five colored gemstones, five colored satin, five color silk thread, five spices, five medicines and five grains. Each of the five small stones has drill holes, the yellow, brown, blue, and green gemstones are made of glass, and the purple stones are crystals. But the scrolls, the five-colored satin, and the five-colored silk threads had decayed and were faintly visible; the five spices, the five medicines, and the five grains were rotten and difficult to distinguish.
In addition to these town objects, twenty-four gold Tianxia Taiping coins were found in Manchu and Chinese. Through research and comparison, these gold World Taiping coins should have been made by the craftsmen of the Qing Dynasty Manufacturing Office through the technique of making and engraving, and the production era was initially judged to be the Yongzheng to Qianlong period.
After 2 months of research and repair by the Cultural Relics Department of the Forbidden City, these precious coins finally revealed their true faces. These twenty-four "Tianxia Taiping" Han and Manchu gold coins, the detection and analysis results show that the material of the gold coins is 16K gold, and we will appreciate the amazing charm of these coins according to the detailed research of the Cultural Security Science and Technology Department of the Palace Museum on the production process of the "Tianxia Taiping" money.
First, non-destructive component analysis
Second, microscopic observation
Through the laser confocal microscope of OLYMPUS, the researchers conducted a surface microscopic observation of the selected 4 coins (numbers: 1, 5, 16, 20), and through the microscopic photos, they found that there were obvious traces of polishing and processing in the inside and outside of the coins, the ground seal, the Chinese and Manchu characters.
Third, when the staff studied the treasure box gold coins, in order to give the 24 coins a generation and research purposes, they used the Jiaqing Tongbao to back the Taiping Palace money to compare.
Jiaqing Tongbao "World Peace" Coin 1. Front 2. back:
The Qing Dynasty numismatic scholar Bao Kang said in the Catalogue of Great Money (also known as "Great Spring Tuquan"), "The four corners of each of the four corners used in the Fengxian Hall fell into this coin, and when it was listed in the holy ascension, it was easier to create a new yuan mint." This means that this kind of money falls in the lower corner of the curtain in the Fengxian Temple, and whenever the former emperor dies and the new emperor takes the throne, the new money is recast and replaced with the old money. Due to the certain quality of the coin, falling it in the lower corner of the curtain can play a role in pressing.
This Jiaqing Tongbao "World Peace" coin is speculated to be this kind of baggage money
"Jiaqing Six Years" Treasure Box "World Peace" Coin 1. Front 2. back:
The gold coins in the chest do not have an era number.
Bao Kang's "Catalogue of Big Money" records: "The curtain is made of gossip. Case: In the event of repairs, the treasures (boxes) are placed on the beams of each palace, and the money is stored in the middle. ”
In addition, some records of the repair of the Yangxin Hall also provide very important clues: in September of the sixth year of Jiaqing, the Yangxin Hall Meiwu added a platform veranda, and the east and west enclosures were renovated and the beds were decorated. Since the Jiaqing Dynasty, the architectural layout of the Yangxindian District has basically remained unchanged, and most of the construction is basically the daily maintenance and repair of the building body and auxiliary structures. Therefore, the staff speculated that the "Jiaqing Six Years" treasure box of the Yangxin Hall may have been placed at this time.
Taiwanese scholar Wu Hanru believes: "The most common example of the use of 24 Shangliang coins in the treasure box is that in addition to the above-mentioned Zhaode Gate, there are also Chengqian Palace, Shouhuang Hall, and Beijing City Bell Tower, and the treasure box contains 24 Shangliang coins." The number of twenty-four should be related to the twenty-four solar terms, so the 24 chests of the upper beam coins are applied."
Although the above records suggest the rationality of the "Tianxia Taiping" coin as the "Shangliang Coin" in the "Jiaqing Six Years" treasure box of the Yangxin Temple, this shangliang coin has neither an era number nor other patterns, and the Shangliang coin with Chinese characters on one side and Manchu on the other side is rarely mentioned in the relevant literature.
The staff deduced that the Jiaqing Tongbao "Tianxia Taiping" coin should be the baggage money used by the royal family, and the coins in the treasure box were the upper beam coins used by the royal family.
4. About the Manchu on coins
Consulting the "Manchu-Han Dictionary" edited by An Shuangcheng, it was found that the four characters of the Manchu text were not the translation of the four characters of the Chinese character "Tianxia Taiping", if the Manchu-Chinese translation was carried out, in fact, only the Manchu words "Tian", "Xia" and "Taiping" were needed, and the coins in the treasure box had an extra Manchu "big" character, whose part of speech was an adjective, and the Chinese translation was "big, huge, huge", so the Manchu of the coin should be translated as "The Great Taiping of the World".
Mr. Cheng Shiqiao once mentioned, "The Manchu text of these two coins is the same up and down, 'heaven and down', and one is arranged left and right as 'Taiping Lai', and the other is 'Ping Taiping', which means the same.". In Manchu, "Taiping" is actually a word and cannot be split, but on the coins, the text is mostly arranged in four characters, so the Manchu language must add one more word, so there is a Chinese translation of "Tianxia Taipinglai", "Tianxia Pingping Taiping", "Tianxia Taiping" and so on.
Fifth, the production process of treasure box gold coins
Through the observation of the microscopic synthesis photos of the coins in several treasure boxes, it can be found that whether it is the Chinese characters on the front of the coin or the Manchu on the back, there are obvious differences in the thickness of the text structure and strokes; the artistic level and visual effect presented as a whole are not the same; the text mouth, the ground seal and the inner and outer contours on the coin have obvious marks and irregular processing traces; the seal of the coin is significantly higher than that of other coins, and the treatment of the edges is also very irregular, like an unfinished semi-finished product.
The coins stored in the "Jiaqing Six Years" treasure box of the Yangxin Hall have more radial abrasions on the inside and outside contours and the surface of the text, and the part of the earth seal is densely covered with small pits, and the traces of human processing are obvious.
The text and inner and outer contours of the Jiaqing "Tianxia Taiping" coin are relatively regular, and the land seal has a large area and uneven distribution of many particles, and there are no notchs and fine burrs at the mouth, which has a very distinct sand casting characteristic.
The following partial pictures show that these coins are not based on a mother coin as a sample, first minted after the finished product and then manually trimmed, but directly engraved, including text, seal, inner silhouette, outer contour, are made by different craftsmen
And interestingly, the tools and engraving techniques used by each craftsman are also different. Compared with the full text of coins, in addition to different processing methods, the tools used in the production are also different, such as the numismatic traces in the following figure are round (upper row), and some coin marks are triangular (lower row):
At present, dozens of temples with treasure boxes have been found: Taihe Gate, Taihe Hall, Bohol Hall, Kunning Palace, Tiren Pavilion, Wuying Hall, Chuxiu Palace, Changchun Palace, Xuan qiong treasure hall, Fengxian Hall, Shufang Zhai, Body and Hall, Huangji Hall, Ningshou Palace, Yihexuan, Cining Palace, Baohua Hall, Yuqing Palace, Wenyuan Pavilion, Xihua Gate, Southeast Chonglou, etc.
Of course, not all temples can ask out the treasure box, such as in May 2017, when the body yuan hall was repaired, the square ridge cylinder tile was opened and the treasure box was not seen.
According to the Palace Museum, the Palace Museum respects history, acts strictly in accordance with the Law on the Protection of Cultural Relics, and will repair it with the purpose of "complete protection and overall maintenance", and return the treasure box to its original place on this principle, so that the authenticity and integrity of this splendid architectural complex can be effectively protected and continued.