The old Beijing dialect has the so-called "boiling swim bladder", which is now rarely spoken or heard. The original meaning of the word refers to the slow boiling of the maw into a kind of glue, describing someone focusing on one thing, repeatedly, sticky, soft and hard, entangled, and "clinging" is a bit synonymous but pejorative.
It is okay to use the term "boiling maw" on a small citizen who is a little "shaft" and a little dead-eyed, but if it is used on dignitaries and even relatives of the emperor, it is not shameful. Empress Dowager Cixi, who was in charge of the country at the end of the Qing Dynasty, did such a file of things, and "boiled a swim bladder" with a white fruit tree endlessly.
1. Come to the dragon's positive vein, the point point is the best
There is a "Tomb of the Seven Kings" next to the Miaofeng Ancient Xiang Road in Bei'anhe Township, a western suburb of Beijing, where the father of the Guangxu Emperor, Yizhen the Prince of Alcohol, is buried.
The tomb of the Seven Kings was first called "Perfume Temple", built in the fifth year of Jianwu in the Eastern Han Dynasty (29 years), changed to "Fayun Temple" in the Tang Dynasty, and was named "Perfume Temple" during the Yan Jing period of Jin Zhangzong. In the Ming Dynasty, Liu Tong and Yu Yizheng co-authored the notebook "Imperial Jingjing Scenery And Material Strategy": "Small peak screen cluster, a peak pierced into the air, Miao Peak." At the fayun temple under the peak, the temple has double springs, singing on the left and right, and the temple gate is a square pond. The temple leans on the stone, and the two springs of the stone root originate: the west spring is out of the tea stove, and it slips around the middle; Dongquan out of the rice stove, around the outer wall; Confluence in Fangtang, the so-called perfume has been. Jin Zhangzong set up six courtyards to tour, and this one of them. The grass is broken, and the three characters of the perfume courtyard are preserved. ”
In the eleventh year of Xianfeng (1861), Cixi launched the Xin You coup d'état, eliminating the eight ministers of Gu Ming, headed by Su Shun, and beginning to take charge of the qing dynasty. In this coup d'état, Yi Zhen firmly sided with Cixi, personally led his troops to capture Su Shun, who was escorting the Xianfeng Zi Palace, at Banbidian, and made great contributions, and has been promoted ever since. In the third year of Tongzhi (1864), at the age of twenty-five, he was given the title of prince, and in the eleventh year of Tongzhi (1872), he was even the Prince of Jin. In his youth, Yi Zhen was quite ambitious, with the ideal of training an Eight Banner Soldier who could fight a good battle, but over time, he gradually found that he had a limit. And the sister-in-law who listened to the government was also a politician with a strong desire for power and excellent political skills, so she became worried and fearful, cautious, a little windy and sloppy, nervous, and her body was getting worse and worse.
In the summer of the seventh year of Tongzhi (1868), Yizhen went to the Weixiuyuan Villa in the western suburbs of Beijing to recuperate. In the meantime, he was worried about the location of his garden bed, so he took a feng shui gentleman named Li Yaomin to Visit Miaofeng Peak, and Li Yaomin praised the feng shui in the area of the perfume courtyard, believing that this place was "the best place to come to the dragon's right vein and point the hole". Therefore, this place was selected as the base site for the garden, and it was not completed until the twenty-fifth year of Guangxu (1899), which cost more than 276,000 silver.
The white fruit tree of Cixi's "boiling maw" is located just outside the wall on the south side of the cemetery. The reasons for this are complex. In 1874, the Tongzhi Emperor died of illness, and when choosing a successor to the imperial throne, Cixi, in order to continue to control the imperial government, chose Yi Zhen's second son, Zai Xiang, who was only four years old at the time, to take the throne, which was the Guangxu Emperor. It is said that when the Holy Decree came to the Palace of Prince Shuo, Yi Zhen was so frightened that he passed out and complained of misfortune one after another, because he knew that as the "biological father" of the emperor, he must objectively challenge the legitimacy of Cixi's power. According to the rules, the son is called the emperor, and his "biological father" is reasonable in both regency and deliberation, and YiZhen knows that he is definitely not the opponent of Empress Dowager Cixi, and he will definitely be jealous of Empress Dowager Cixi, so it is difficult to save the head on his neck in his lifetime. Therefore, in the following years, Yi Zhen has been cautious and does not dare to speak and act arbitrarily, so as to save his life.
There is one thing that can prove how far yi zhen is afraid of disasters. In May of the twelfth year of Guangxu (1886), the Beiyang Marine Division held a large military parade and was inspected by the imperial court. Li Hongzhang, the minister of Beiyang, asked the imperial court to send a minister to read it, and Empress Dowager Cixi sent Yi Zhen, who was then the premier's minister of the navy, to the Beiyang military parade. Wang Zhao, a scholar at the end of the Qing Dynasty and a minister of the restoration faction in the "Penghu Reform Law", wrote in his notebook "The Testament of Emperor Dezong": YiZhen, the prime minister of the navy, was originally arranged by Cixi to build the Summer Palace in order to facilitate the embezzlement of funds from the navy, and Yizhen never dared to violate Cixi's orders. When he heard that Cixi was going to send himself to a military parade, this matter involving "military power" was the most sensitive, and Dengshi was not lightly frightened, and what frightened him even more was that "Yi Zhi gave him an apricot yellow palanquin, and the king did not dare to take advantage of it and was more than happy." In order to cope with Cixi's temptation, Yi Zhen "urged Li Lianying to be sent out of Beijing with him, and then every time he saw the civil and military personnel, he ordered Lian Ying to accompany him", which was nothing more than to avoid the suspicion of unauthorized power.
2. The addition of white on the king is the word of the king
Despite his caution, Cixi was relieved of Yi Zhen, and it was not until his death in the sixteenth year of Guangxu (1890) that Cixi was relieved.
In the matter of making Cixi worry, Guangxu can really be regarded as "father's inheritance". After Guangxu took power in the fifteenth year (1889), he often had friction with Empress Dowager Cixi, who continued to interfere in the affairs of the dynasty in the open and in secret, especially after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the twentieth year of Guangxu (1894), China's fiasco made the Guangxu Emperor more aware that the biggest obstacle to a strong country did not come from Japan, but from the feudal conservative forces at home. Therefore, the Guangxu Emperor began to gradually brew and promote reforms, which was bound to cause hatred and dissatisfaction among the conservative forces led by Empress Dowager Cixi.
Among them, there was a man named YingNian, who was the right attendant of the Ministry of Works, who was a good hand at speculating on his intentions, and he sensed the discord between the empress and the empress, and after thinking about it for half a day, he actually came up with a bad idea. The "Testament of Emperor Dezong" says: "In front of the tomb of Prince Shuoxian, there is a white fruit tree, and its tree is eight or nine, and its tree is tens of thousands of years high. Empress Dowager Cixi said, "The royal feng shui is all occupied by this branch, please cut it down to benefit this branch."
It is said that what provoked Empress Dowager Cixi to cut down the tree was this sentence: "The white fruit tree covers the tomb of the prince, and the white on the king is the word 'emperor', which should be on the current emperor." As we all know, the Guangxu Emperor inherited the throne because of the early death of Cixi's own son Tongzhi, and Cixi could not have no doubts in her heart, and now Guangxu is pro-government, so that she, who has a strong desire for power, "retreats to the second line". It turned out that all this was because Yi Zhen's cemetery was well chosen, and when she thought of it, how could Cixi not be annoyed. But after all, cutting down trees was to move the soil on the grave of the Guangxu Emperor's own father, and it could not be done arbitrarily. So she asked the Guangxu Emperor for advice, but she did not expect that the Guangxu Emperor, who had always been gentle and gentle, burst out in anger and said, "Er, whoever dares to cut down this tree, please cut off my head first!" ”
Empress Dowager Cixi was not only vicious, but also good at fighting, and one move could provoke the opponent, which just proved that it hit the opponent's "life gate". One day, the Guangxu Emperor had just retired from the dynasty, and "after hearing the words of the internal attendants, the empress dowager took the people of the Internal Affairs Office to sleep in the Xianwang Garden at dawn." The Guangxu Emperor knew what Cixi was going to do, and quickly ordered the imperial driver to leave the city and go to the western suburbs, and when he reached the Red Mountain Pass, he suddenly cried in the imperial car, because in the past, whenever he walked here, "that is, the pavilion was like a white fruit tree covered, and now there is nothing."
Guangxu cried for ten kilometers, and finally came to his father's cemetery, "The empress dowager has gone, the tree is lying down", hundreds of internal servants dug a large pool of "more than ten zhangs in the zhou ring", and then "irrigated its roots with more than a thousand bags of lime fertile water, worried about reviving the buds". Guangxu asked the people present with tears in his eyes, and someone told him that the empress dowager first took an axe and cut down the white fruit tree three times, "and ordered everyone to cut it down, so they did not dare to violate it." The Guangxu Emperor had nothing to say, and could only "walk around the tomb three times and return with tears in his eyes."
This happened in the twenty-second year of Guangxu (1896). "Chunming Recounts the Past" has a record, from the root saw off the white fruit tree, the trunk bleeds, the cutter panic, and later fang knows that dozens of snakes are entrenched in the tree burrow, "tree blood" is actually snake blood, who knows just planed the roots of the tree, irrigated lime water, the next year in the spring, the same place actually grew a number of new strips, Cixi was half dead, the order will be the tree stump rooted out of the pit, by several horses out of the pit, once again filled with lime, the white fruit tree "cut off the children and grandchildren".
3. The symbol of immortality, still cut down
As a kind of "longevity tree", the white fruit tree has been revered by people since ancient times, and some people call it "Gongsun Tree". It means that the grandfather planted the tree, and the grandson can eat the white fruit, which will benefit future generations. Therefore, there are many supernatural legends about white fruit trees.
On March 9, the fourteenth year of Jiaqing (1809), a large white fruit tree in the courtyard of Changzhou Fuxue "suddenly burst into flames in its belly", bursting out of the crevices of the trunk of the tree, and four or five small snakes escaped from the tree hole. Although it burned for such a long time, the great white fruit tree was not much harmed, and it was "lush as ever".
He did not expect such a thing, but it aroused the interest of the historian Zhao Yi, the author of the "Miscellaneous Records of eaves exposure", who once saw an allusion in the book "The Old Man's Pen of the Jie'an Old Man" written by the Ming Dynasty scholar Li Xu: "On the twenty-first day of the first month of the first year of Ming Jiajing, the Changzhou government learned a branch southwest of the ginkgo tree, and suddenly the fire was fired, the flames in the trick were flames, and the water could not be irrigated, and until the twenty-second day, the tree was harmless. Zhao Yi thought, maybe this is two fires that occurred on a big tree a hundred years apart, "Unknown to the tree of fire, that is, the tree of fire in Jiajing"? As for the signs, Zhao Yi believes that it is a good thing, "or it is said that this is a sign of civilization, the first year of Jiajing, and the government has a Key to The Solution." However, the fourteenth year of Jiaqing is not the year of the test, in the end this fire indicates which reader's literary fortune is booming, "to be tested later".
There is a large white fruit tree in the Yangzhou Banknote Customs Bureau, "In the winter month of the forty-eighth year of Qianlong, there was an observer who dreamed of the night, with a long body and jade standing, holding a paper of the eight characters of the book 'Jia Yin Peng Chen Jia Zi 癸酉', known as 'Wu Shu Shen Ye, living here for more than fifteen hundred years, xingzhi is often seen, and I know what I care about?' Later, I don't know why it suddenly caught fire, "every day and night is extinguished", but soon the white fruit trees are green again.
Since it is a symbol of "immortality", there must be a divine blessing in it. In the "Chibei Occasional Talk", it is recorded that one year, "Jingkou made a warship", "There is a ginkgo tree in the Liu Family Garden in Jiangdu, and the things that have been more than a hundred years have also been cut down". Who knew that after the workers sawed off the tree, they found that "the texture of the wood has the image of Guanyin Dashi II, and the miao is natural" Subsequently, the workers reported to the officials in charge of the manufacture of the battleship, "the crowd was horrified", and quickly carved out the statue of Guanyin according to the texture, "Shi City Nanfuyuan Anzhong".
After the failure of the Penghu Reform, Wang Zhao fled to Japan; Later, during the Boxer Rebellion, he secretly sneaked back to China. In the twenty-sixth year of Guangxu (1900), Yingnian was "beheaded in Xi'an because of the boxing bandits". In the spring of the 28th year of Guangxu (1902), Wang Zhao lived as a "Zhao Juren" in the Tangshan area of Beijing, "traveling to various villages every day". One day, he "wandered west with short coats", passed by the tomb of the Seven Kings, and talked to the villager Ye Lao about the white fruit tree, and saw and heard about each other. Villagers said that when digging up tree roots, "hundreds of thousands of large and small snakes appeared, and the snakes were large and long", Wang Zhao sighed with emotion, and cixi's fierce cutting of trees that day was actually a kind of "witchcraft" that wanted to exterminate the Guangxu Emperor. It is reasonable to say that the white fruit tree itself is a longevity tree, but also a "symbol of immortality" auspicious object, and there are all kinds of "god textures" that are easy for people to wear chisels or yearn for, so it is a very ominous move to cut down a "thing of ten thousand years" and dig up roots to fill in ashes. But Empress Dowager Cixi did it, and judging from the series of heart-wrenching actions of Cixi in the late Qing Dynasty, especially before and after the Gengzi State Revolution, for the sake of power, she did not care at all about the rise and fall of the country, even if she let the whole country bury herself—let alone a white fruit tree.
(Source 丨 《Records of Ancient Chinese Strange Stories》 Author 丨 Hu Yanyun Zhejiang People's Publishing House 丨 Publishing)