Sanlian Taofen Bookstore (ID:slbook1996)
When the city enters midnight, the bookstore is lit
The camel bell is leisurely The Silk Road stretches
——The grand Tang Dynasty weather witnessed by the Tang Dynasty Three Colored Camel Figurines
The Sancai Camel Figurines consist of a group of 10 pieces, namely: The Sancai Camel Figurines, the Sancai Camel Figurines, and the Musician Kabuki (7 musicians, 1 Kabuki). In the front left of the camel's head stands a camel-drawn figurine, which is 29 cm tall, wears a skull, and wears a lapel-collared beard, although its image is different from the common bearded person with a high nose and deep eyes and a beard, but wearing a lapel-collared bearded costume still indicates its ethnic identity, and it belongs to a complete combination with the camel carrying the trick. The camel is 48.5 cm tall and 41 cm long, and has a neck hissing. The hunchback is placed as a platform, and the countertop is paved with a checkered blanket; the figurines on the hunchback are all male, a total of 7 people, all about 11.5 centimeters high, and 7 male musicians all wear a bow head, wear a round-necked robe or a beard, sit with their backs facing around, holding sheng, zhen, pipa, basket, flute, clapping board, and flute playing music, with a focused look and different postures; in a circle of musicians, a female figurine stands, the left hand is hidden in the sleeve and raised to the chest, and the right hand is swung back, slightly raising the head, making a song and dance. The female player standing in the middle should be a kabuki who sings to the music, not a maiko. Judging from the scale of the musical instruments held by the musicians and the number of musicians, it belongs to the mixed musical style of Hu and Han, and should belong to the small music and dance team that is outside the Court of the Tang Dynasty and has carried out folk activities in fangs.
The Sancai Camel Figurine belongs to the first-class cultural relics, is one of the 18 pieces (groups) of national treasure-level cultural relics in the collection of the Shaanxi History Museum, and in 2013, it was listed in the "Third Batch of Cultural Relics Catalogue Prohibited from Exporting for Exhibition" by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage.
The discovery of the camel figurines of the Three Colours
Between 1952 and 1959, the Xi'an area carried out large-scale industrial infrastructure construction, and the main project sites were concentrated in the eastern, western and southern parts of the ancient city of Xi'an. As the ancient capital of the 13th Dynasty, Xi'an has a great density of cultural relics on and off the ground in the urban area, and the ancient tombs and cultural relics that are constantly discovered in the boom of national capital construction are dizzying. As it was still in the initial stage of archaeological investigation and excavation in New China, lack of manpower and material resources, and insufficient knowledge and technical capabilities, the emerging archaeological discoveries made the cultural relics cleaning task force of the Northwest Engineering Region and the cultural relics management committee of the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Relics Management Committee who was shouldering the protection and excavation of cultural relics in Shaanxi and Xi'an at that time both excited and struggled. According to statistics, from 1952 to 1959, a total of 3,055 excavation sites and tombs were cleaned up in Xi'an, of which 2952 were tombs. In February 1955, the Cultural Relics Cleanup Task Force of the Northwest Engineering Region was merged into the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Management Commission, and the excavated cultural relics were kept by the Shaanxi Provincial Museum (now the Forest of Steles Museum in Xi'an), and most of the texts related to archaeological excavations during this period, tomb-shaped line drawings, photographs, rubbing materials, etc. were preserved in the Shaanxi Provincial Cultural Management Commission (now the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics Protection). In 1991, the Shaanxi History Museum opened, except for cultural relics such as epitaph stones, most of the other cultural relics were handed over to the Shaanxi History Museum, and the Sancai Zaile camel figurines and other cultural relics excavated in 1959 in the Tang Tomb in Zhongbao Village, the western suburbs of Xi'an, were also among them.
The "Briefing on the Cleaning of Tang Tombs in Zhongbao Village, a Western Suburb of Xi'an", published more than 60 years ago, has this account of the excavation of the Sancai Zaile Camel Figurines: In late June 1959, a Tang tomb was found in Zhongbao Village, a western suburb of Xi'an. Part of the roof of the Tang tomb has been excavated, but most of the artifacts in the tomb are relatively well preserved. The remaining two walls of the burial chamber are 80 cm high, and some of the artifacts in the tomb have changed their original position due to the impulse of silt. The town tomb beast and the heavenly king figurine are symmetrically placed inside the tomb door, and in the south of the tomb there is a pair of horse figurines and a pair of camel figurines, and the leading horse and the camel figurine each stand in front. In February 1957, archaeologists had unearthed a sancai zaile camel figurine with 5 people on the back of a camel in the Tomb of Xianyu Tingyi in Nanhe Village, a western suburb of Xi'an, which was the first time that sancai Zaile camel figurines were found in tang dynasty tombs in the suburbs of Xi'an, so it received great attention from experts from all walks of life, and was soon after the excavation, it was requisitioned to Beijing for research, and then it was put into the Chinese History Museum (now the National Museum of China) and became an important exhibit of the permanent exhibition. After two years, also in the western suburbs of Xi'an, the tomb of Zhongbao Village once again unearthed the cultural relics of the Camel Figurines of Zaile, and the level of shape and craftsmanship exceeded the former, so after the 1960s, this Three-Colored Camel Figurine became a star cultural relic comparable to the Sancai Camel Figurines excavated from the Tomb of Tingjie. In recent years, due to the heating up of silk road research, the highly acclaimed and concerned Zhongbao Village excavated the Zaile camel figurines and many other pottery figurines with the exchange of foreign cultural relics and exhibitions, bringing a lot of imagination space through time and space to reminisce about the prosperity of the Tang Dynasty, and showing a beautiful picture in the long river of ancient Chinese and foreign cultural exchange history.
The pottery figurines unearthed together with this group of camel figurines in Zhongbao Village are also very exquisite, such as the Sancai Huren Horse Figurine and the Sancai Female Standing Figurine, which are favored by the audience because of their unique shapes, vivid expressions and accurate portrayals. The horse leader of the Sancai Hu people is the image of the Hu people, with a wide nose and a large mouth, the middle part of the hair, the back of the bun and the ears, the face is plagiarized, wearing a narrow sleeve robe, the right arm is rolled up, the blue half-sleeved short coat is worn on the left and the right side, the waist is tied with a weed belt, and the comb and scraping tools used to wash the horse are hung on the belt, and the fists are clenched with both hands, and the force is pulled. The three-colored horse behind it is different from the common three-colored horse with all-over glazing, the horse breed is excellent, the red mane is white, only a layer of white makeup soil is hung, the saddle is complete, the tweezers and other ornaments are decorated with green apricot leaves, the head is backward and unwilling to move forward, and the Hu people who seem to lead the horse form a competitive scene, which is the leader in the Tang Dynasty's such pottery figurines that vividly and vividly show the Hu people driving horses. Several of the three-colored female figurines are by far the most exquisite works of art in the ceramic figurines that have shaped women in the Tang Dynasty. Among them, the three-colored female figurine with the head bowed is the most evocative. The woman's face is round, red lips are ready to open, her head is combed in a black bun, her posture is plump, she is wearing a long skirt with a high waist, her hands are gently arched in front of her abdomen, her head is slightly raised to the upper left, her eyes are slightly squinted, the shawl on her right shoulder is wrapped around her from her chest behind her, and her graceful body adds a little sense of visual rhythm, and her smiling expression and soft eyes are full of expectation and yearning, which is a perfect portrayal of the female spiritual outlook in the leisurely and beautiful life of Chang'an in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. The details of the interstitial comb painted on the bun of the figurine make the costume of the "small comb full of heads" in the Tang poem confirmed in addition to the Paintings, Murals and Line Depictions of the Tang Dynasty. In addition, a group of three-colored courtyard buildings excavated from the tomb, consisting of a rockery, an octagonal pavilion, a four-corner pavilion and eight houses with hanging mountain roofs, are excellent materials for us to understand the tang Dynasty Chang'an City officials and eunuchs in the construction of mansion compounds in Lifang. The three-colored camel figurines excavated from the Tang Tomb in Zhongbao Village bring us a group of three-dimensional sculptures representing the cultural exchanges between China and foreign countries on the Silk Road, which are composed of chinese and foreign lower-class people from different regions, different nationalities, different skin colors and different occupations. Historical materials and excavated cultural relics have proved that the Tang Dynasty government and the people generally hired Hu people to drive camels, which may also be a certain social natural division of labor that existed in the Tang Dynasty. In the Han Dynasty, there was already an official system of domesticating camels, and in the Tang Dynasty, it developed into the main breeding areas of camels, horses and sheep in Guannei and Longyou, and the Pastoral Supervision of the Tang Government stipulated that each camel herd was seventy heads, and there was a pastoral chief or shepherd, and the most common images of Xi officials, camel trainers and horse trainers in the Tang Dynasty "Horse Herding Map" and excavated pottery figurines were mostly "Hu people" in Central Asia and the Western Regions. Du Fu's "Fables" poem Yun: "A county grape is ripe, and there are many alfalfa in the autumn mountains; Guan Yun often brings rain, and the water is not a river." Qiang women lightly burn, Hu'er made camels. Self-injury is twilight, and the funeral is full of passing. "It is a generalization of the universal phenomenon of Hu people driving camels.
The Camel Figurines of Sancai Zaile belong to the glazed pottery products in ancient pottery sculptures, and the Tang Sancai ware is a new process and product in the history of the development of the handicraft industry in the Tang Dynasty, which is an important supplement to the pottery that has existed for thousands of years and the porcelain that has appeared for a short time in terms of craftsmanship and categories, and is the performance of the development and progress of the Tang Dynasty's craftsmanship level. The advent of Sancai has made the porcelain used in the daily life of the Tang Dynasty society more of a competitive partner, but the Sancai utensils seen so far are mostly tomb burial supplies, and its emergence has added a bright color to the ancient Chinese funerary culture, making the Tang Dynasty people have a new choice in the already rich funerary burial utensils.
In the face of the three-colored camel figurines, people's thoughts have begun to fly through time and space to the long Silk Road between Chang'an and the Western Regions more than 1,000 years ago, imagining the images of those envoys holding festivals or government documents walking on this road connecting trade and culture between the East and the West, hu merchants carrying camels, religious believers, and travelers, rangers and camel caravans. Their different purposes, persistent beliefs, and arduous treks led to a land passage opened by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty more than 100 years B.C. to strengthen the political and military alliance with the Great Moon Clan, and gradually evolved into a commercial route connecting the East and the West, involving dozens of countries and regions in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and lasted for thousands of years. The related history of Sino-foreign exchanges and the precious cultural relics left along this road attract endless reverie and exploration by the world.
The Yellow River civilization in a national treasure
Zhang Deshui, Wu Wei
Elephant Press 2022-3