The Old Summer Palace is the largest garden museum in the world in the Qing Dynasty, known as the "Garden of Nations", originally covering an area of more than 5,200 acres, with the merger of Eastern and Western cultures, and the north and south mountains and rivers, which is equivalent to a large-scale "government affairs and leisure park".
It integrates island groups, art gardens, tea houses, museums, horse riding tracks, grand theaters, museums, art galleries, etc. around the needs of royal spiritual life, and nails the best feng shui treasure land in Beijing with high or low tenon styles.
After the well-known plunder in the 19th century, the Old Summer Palace fell from a dream builder in the clouds to a mountain cement bricklayer, and did not see the luxury and drunken gold fans of the past, but left the unyielding half-bowl of nobility after being bullied, splashed with the remnants of the mountains and water, and the clouds shining in the evening and sunset, which makes people still miss it incomparably.
Since 1996, the national archaeological department has excavated the Old Summer Palace three times and found many rare collections, among which, in 2014, a mud pimple of unknown shape was accidentally dug out of the river at the gate of the palace, and after restoring its original appearance half a month later, it was found to be a rare and unique product.
No one would have imagined that nearly 160 years later, it would still be more colorful and craftsmanlike than the zodiac, and that it would eventually be housed in a museum.
Its appearance once again evokes those exclusive memories belonging to the Old Summer Palace.
The royal power was centralized in Shengjing
Shengjing here does not refer to the old Shenyang, but to Beijing, the most prosperous and prosperous capital during the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty.
At that time, the Old Summer Palace was a good place for Yong Normal to take his concubine Zhen Huan for a walk.
At this time, it was also the heyday when the Old Summer Palace integrated Eastern and Western garden villa art museums and became the world's largest amusement park. At that time, Western designers such as Lang Shining often served in the Old Summer Palace, and these Westerners were really fascinated by the infinite and mysterious architectural art of the East, and they took a book and copied it around every day, amazed.
The Old Summer Palace was like a noble son who was rich and rich and looked better than Pan An, standing there until after Yongzheng's death and Qianlong succeeded to the throne.
When we open the book "Who Collected the Old Summer Palace", we will find that the author has carefully counted the existing cultural relics in the Old Summer Palace, the number is about 700, most of which are distributed in the museums of the three major countries that recognize their ancestors in Britain, France and the United States.
However, according to the number of historians, the actual number of cultural relics in the Old Summer Palace should be at least 1.5 million or more.
Where did the rest of the artifacts go?
Experts have judged that some of them should be in the hands of private collectors in various countries, and some are still hidden underground in the Old Summer Palace and need to be excavated.
Most of the artifacts placed in the museums look elegant, which were the favorites of Kangxi, one of the designers of the Old Summer Palace and Yongzheng, the main designer. They are brilliant and reverie, and it can be inferred that when the Yongzheng Emperor was still the Prince of Yong, he traveled everywhere with his father Kangxi and had a lot of ears and eyes.
However, Hongli, also known as the later Qianlong Emperor, wanted to follow his grandfather Kangxi Emperor to play and play in the peony terrace and ink washing pond of the Old Summer Palace, but he did not have the calm and concise of his father and grandfather, until he became the emperor, he still liked to take the aesthetic route of "small broken flowers on a red background", and created an aesthetic school with complexity and noise as the mainstream.
Most of the five-color large porcelain vases and calligraphy and paintings "covered with various royal seals", as well as the same aesthetic chariots, walls, cabinets, murals and other large artifact decorations, were planned and filled in by the Qianlong Emperor, the third generation designer of the Old Summer Palace, in the later process of adding belongings to the Old Summer Palace.
This is where most of the cultural relics of the Old Summer Palace come from.
It can be imagined that the Qianlong Emperor of that year, standing in the Old Summer Palace founded by his ancestors, looked at the scenery strangely, full of poetry, and would be vomited by the birds of the ministers in the court, imagining that the descendants of all generations have such a spring and autumn to see every year, and those palaces and halls and boats are always protected by guards.
Where will you think of what eight-nation coalition army in later generations?
It will not be known that future generations will painstakingly dig up the bits and pieces that were buried in the ground later, and take them out to carefully rub and see, just because they are relics of the ancestors and the civilization bearers of China's great power.
The so-called royal centralization, one moment after another, for hundreds of years, everything was reduced to ashes in the hands of a group of robbers. Therefore, future generations can only restore the heyday one by one in each precious artifact that has been excavated, to continue the prosperity of that time, and to continue to write the regrets of the past.
Qianlong died in 1799. It was only more than 200 years ago.
In the 61st year after his death, the eight-nation coalition army marched into Beijing and ransacked the Old Summer Palace, and the Great Qing Dynasty almost fell into ruin, and in the 215th year after his death, the Old Summer Palace became a historical site, and archaeologists and cultural workers found a beautifully patterned artifact at the old wall of the Great Palace Gate, and carefully salvaged it from the mud.
What kind of story did it have?
The elephant head is out of the gate of Narumiya
After half a month of cleaning and restoration, archaeologists found that this was an elephant head with a copper base and gilt surface, so they called it "copper gilt elephant head".
This beast head, apparently used as a large decorative utensil, and once inlaid on other larger objects, its grandeur and exquisite workmanship, corresponding to the ancients who respected the elephant, the elephant head is the most noble and auspicious meaning.
Its overall form is realistic, with a long elephant trunk, slightly upturned ivory, and companions, elephant eyes and elephant ear lines are clear, vivid, and the eyebrows are delicate, exuding a unique glow of gold ornaments.
Copper gilt this process, to be precise, is the process of mercury gold plating, belongs to a mature in the Warring States and Han Dynasty of a high-level handmade craft, in the Han Dynasty, people called it "gold coating" or "yellow coating", and later there was the term gilt.
The reason why the ancients loved copper with ornaments was because the nature of copper itself was simple and simple, isolated from nature, and its sound could penetrate the world and be clear and far, so copper was a common royal vessel, especially used in sacrificial ceremonies.
And the reason why copper is decorated with gilt is because it is connected with the color of gold, in order to make the ornament look more colorful, the color is more superior, the ancients will gild it, gold jade is the first of the artifacts, after gilding, it looks more expensive.
It is conceivable that this bronze-gilt elephant head was polished and rebuilt after being built back and forth many times through gold plastering, gold opening, color finding, etc., and then set in a place - it may be a prominent chariot placed in the palace gate, or it may be a sacrificial offering of the Great Ding, or a blast furnace with incense and prosperity.
If it were embedded in the chariot, it must have been ordered to be placed in the place of guardianship in all directions, and its elephant should first raise its head to the east, and with its noble allegory, it would be demonstrated, along with the heads of other beasts distributed in the other triangle of the chariot, towards the barbarian drums in the distance.
The kingdom of the Son of Heaven, good at surrendering soldiers without fighting, serving the people with virtue, the elephant head here is the meaning of high virtue, guarding the royal city, summoning the four directions to bow down, just as the ancient gods of the East are using long roars and chirps to summon that he will always guard the fruits of war.
At this time, the Qianlong Emperor was either wearing battle armor and standing on the chariot, watching the guards stage a "broken formation song", ordering the elephant head to be aimed at whichever side, which side was the attacking side, and could only move forward, not backward.
Or let the soldiers demonstrate the exquisite operation of the chariot for him, occasionally touch the elephant's head, thank the ancestors for their kindness, and the soldiers are not easy, so that the hundred miles of barbarians dare not point fingers at the Great Qing Dynasty and act rashly.
He used to stand in front of the Houwu Hall for a long time, and when he was tired, he went to rest.
There was a warm pavilion in the Houwu Hall, and in the warm pavilion lay a pastel tile that could warm up, which was also reserved for the royal family, and they were later excavated from the Old Summer Palace like the elephant head and found to have the function inside: there was dry sand in the bricks, because the heat and heat dissipation were relatively even, so the emperor used them for heating.
But what if the bronze-gilt elephant head is set on a top or furnace? They certainly won't be alone, because then there will never be just one, but at least four gilt bronze heads—in fact, imagination aside, such elephant heads rarely appear alone.
The ancients have always had strict regulations on the application of these beast head ornaments, and their cultural relics value lies in what kind of history they carry, and which application regulations correspond to history.
Among the artifacts similar to the bronze-gilt elephant head in the Old Summer Palace, the more famous is the zodiac.
In the export film of the 12 zodiac signs in the Old Summer Palace directed and acted by well-known martial arts actors, the regulations corresponding to the 12 zodiac signs are used in the ceremonial system to represent the hours and so on in accordance with royal regulations, so the 12 zodiac signs are actually the "water clock" in the Old Summer Palace, and their specific utility is used to tell the time, corresponding to the twelve hours.
But compared to the bronze statue of the head of the zodiac beast, the craftsmanship value of the bronze gilt elephant head is more than the former.
Although the zodiac signs are cast in copper, they do not have complex processes such as gilt and huge costs, and later include higher cost maintenance.
Although the shape of the zodiac is realistic enough and the lines are very smooth, it is an important water vessel arranged by Lang Shining and others when they built Haiyan Hall, but the fineness should be reduced by one grade.
It's just that in terms of the value of cultural relics, they do not distinguish between high and low.
The 12 zodiac signs of that year, as water heavy weapons up to 50 centimeters high, could never be the first Chinese cultural relics that the coalition forces wanted to loot, and they decided to take them away together when the coalition forces could not rob them.
So, how did the gilded bronze statue sink into the river and get stuck in the mud?
We can open the notes of a Frenchman named Drisson who served as a translator in the French army called "Translator's Handbook" - he once personally entered the Old Summer Palace and witnessed the process of robbery by the eight-nation coalition army, and wrote down various scenes of how the Chinese disappeared and destroyed the garden:
I was stunned! Here there were a large number of robbers who suddenly lost their minds, who would have thought that they would have been polite a few hours ago ...
This is a large group of people of all skin colors and uniforms in the world, and I don't need to count them to understand that they are not speaking the same language, because they are fighting.
These people rushed up and pounced on the sky-high treasures here, shouting and insulting each other in their respective languages, and if someone was crowded, then someone would throw their fists, and if someone could not move something as heavy as a large wine vessel, there would be companions to join the scuffle.
I saw that after some calligraphy and paintings were torn, the crowd threw them aside, and some porcelain was difficult to handle, so it was broken or disassembled, and only the intact part was taken away... In short, it looks like a trampled ant nest.
From such a handwriting, it can be imagined that the copper-gilt elephant head of the year or the robbers were taken away after prying open, and accidentally fell into the river on the side and washed away while fighting with each other; Or they are arbitrarily discarded because their target is the subject, and the elephant head is the part that is thrown away under the trade-off, because the subject can be sold in exchange for a higher price.
In short, it was humiliated and abandoned until one day it was covered in thick silt, and there was no need to worry about leaving the country until it dried up, but decades later, no one remembered it.
Hundreds of years later, it finally saw the light of day, but it became another mystery in people's eyes.
For nearly 160 years, from 1860 to 2014, the bronze-gilt elephants were reborn, and their secrets would one day be fully revealed – and at the same time, they were looking forward to the day when their "brothers and sisters" in a foreign country would soon return home, because they share the same roots.
Cultural relics are expected to be handed down to new generations
On August 30, 2023, a video short drama called "Escape from the British Museum" filmed on a short video platform caught fire, which personified Chinese cultural relics and transformed them into a beautiful little girl who described her desolation as a deplorable and miserable one, and her greatest hope was to escape the British Museum and embark on the road home to China.
As of September 14, 2023, the video has more than 8 million likes, more than 700,000 comments, and 1.75 million retweets, and multiple platforms for public welfare publicity and promotion.
Behind it is the "expectation of brothers and sisters returning home" for cultural relics such as the gilt elephant head, or in other words, the expectations of the whole people for cultural relics in exile.
They tell you what has happened in the environment they have lived in, what kind of experiences they have had, or what kind of enthusiasm and deep hope they carry, and they will not just die everything, but have always been pinned on far-reaching expressions.
End
Today's Old Summer Palace site, in addition to the regular excavations arranged by the state by archaeologists, is also a famous patriotic education base. After entering the 21st century, the patriotic education of cultural relics has not only looked back at history and been brave after shame, but also transformed into strengthening our sense of national pride and honor while looking back at history.
This may be why "Escape from the British Museum" resonates with many young people: history is not the same as the past, and more young people will join the new heritage of the world of antiquities.
Bibliography:
"The Old Summer Palace exhibits for the first time 106 excavated cultural relics including gilded bronze elephants", Beijing Youth Daily [Weibo], reported by Li Mengting, 20170611
"The Archaeological Site of the Old Summer Palace: 50,000 Cultural Relics Excavated, All of which Are Incomparably Precious", People's Daily Overseas Edition, 20170718
Forty Years of Research on the Old Summer Palace, edited by Wang Daocheng, 2020