If you have the opportunity to travel to Canada, be sure to miss the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
Walk in there and you'll be amazed.
Because in the exhibition hall of Chinese cultural relics, there are an astonishing number of precious cultural relics on display.
There is everything, and the variety is colorful.
According to statistics, the Royal Ontario Museum has a collection of more than 35,000 Chinese cultural relics.
Among them, there are more than 2,200 treasures on display alone.
Among these national treasures, the most amazing is a mausoleum of high-ranking officials in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Finely carved stone gates, imposing stone carved figures.
There are also stone carvings of octagonal skirts more than one meter high, all of which show the noble status of the owner back then.
Look carefully at the introduction board, which reads "Zu Dashou".
This is the owner of this mausoleum.
Who is Zu Dashou?
This "Zu Dashou" is a great character!
is not only a famous general in the late Ming Dynasty, but also the uncle of the "traitor" Wu Sangui.
At that time, Nurhachi wanted to attack Ningyuan City, but was personally supervised by Zu Dashou and bombarded fiercely.
As a result, the prestige spread all over the Guanwai, and he became a famous generation of anti-Qing generals in the Ming Dynasty.
However, as soon as Huang Taiji ascended the throne, how could he forget that Zu Dashou had taught his own Lao Tzu a hard lesson?
So he personally supervised the formation and launched the "Battle of the Great Ling River".
Zu Dashou's troops were surrounded by regiments,
Huang Taiji issued a favor several times, but Zu Dashou ignored it at all.
However, the food and grass in the city were limited after all, and Zu Dashou tried to break through several times without success.
Seeing that food was running out, there was even a tragic situation of cannibalism in the city.
There is no choice but to surrender to Huang Taiji.
Huang Taiji saw Zu Dashou go out of the city in person, and he was about to jump with joy.
On the spot, a grand welcome ceremony was held outside the city.
Sure enough, it didn't take long for him to return to Jinzhou and continue to fight.
1641,
Zu Dashou still couldn't hold on, and the two sides fought like this for a year.
Eventually, the city was once again filled with a hellish scene of cannibalism.
I believe that the general trend of the Ming Dynasty has gone, so I can only open the city gate and surrender.
A hard bone, several times I planned to fight to the death, but in the end I was cornered by Huang Taiji.
However, this so-called "grace" did not change Zu Dashou's loyalty to the Ming family.
Except for the useless letter that persuaded his nephew Wu Sangui to surrender, he never really served the Manchu court.
In that turbulent era, even a figure like Ancestor Dashou was very difficult to get out.
No one thought that
What's going on here?
The age of slaughter
At the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, China was an era of poverty and weakness and slaughter by others.
Like hungry wolves, the great powers covet the wealth and resources of the Chinese nation, and they are even more coveted over China's cultural relics and historic sites.
It's a pity that the Chinese people at that time were confused and lacked awareness of their own cultural treasures.
The streets are full of digging and digging,
William, on the surface, is elegant and elegant, and has a strong interest and obsession with ancient Chinese civilization.
He dreamed of collecting a tomb of an ancient Chinese aristocrat to satisfy his own desires.
To do this, he found a so-called "businessman" as a partner.
The businessman's name was Crofts.
He ran a small fur business in China, and on the surface he was an ordinary trader, and he presented himself with an affinity for the Chinese.
But in reality,
In 1918, these two ill-intentioned fellows met with each other.
They soon colluded and began to plot how to excavate China's cultural relics.
Shipped back to Canada for profiteering.
With the help of the informant, a treasure was quickly locked: it was the mausoleum of Zu Dashou, a famous anti-Qing general in the late Ming Dynasty.
The greedy antiquities dealer soon found a poor family surnamed Zu.
In order not to be hindered by others,
Since then, no one has cared about his desecration of his ancestors and theft of cemeteries.
Seeing that the ancestral tomb was gradually demolished, those poor poor people were still smiling for a few copper coins.
In order to take away all the cultural relics in the mausoleum, this dealer can be described as a painstaking worker.
He specialized in several large cars.
Several of them were specially modified to barely fit these heavy relics.
That's it
Packed trucks from Beijing all the way to Tianjin.
The "Treasure of the Town" of a Foreign Country
When the Republic of China was first founded, that period of turbulent times,
Especially in those years, the Beiyang government only divided one side.
It is this rare opportunity that allows traffickers to steal with impunity.
After hundreds of years of wind and sun, the stone gate statue in the mausoleum is well preserved, weighing more than 150 tons.
In this way, these precious cultural relics were sold by the traffickers as if they were selling groceries.
After these cultural relics were transported back to Canada, the local museum built according to the drawings, which consumed a lot of manpower and material resources.
Finally, they were assembled into a magnificent landscape of ancient mausoleums.
Stone gates, stone tables, stone carvings, mounds, you name it.
The craftsmanship is exquisite, the spirit is majestic, and it is breathtaking.
When you look closely at the majestic stone gate, the front is carved with a pair of auspicious linings, lifelike.
Looking back, the back of the stone gate is a two-headed male moose, heroic and extraordinary.
This is clearly the expectation of the sages of the Ming Dynasty for "literature" and "martial arts".
On both sides of the stone gate, there are also carved two portraits of a writer and a martial artist.
An elegant scribe, a heroic general, both physical and spiritual.
In front of the stone gate, there are several beautifully carved stone camels, which are the symbols of the burial of prime ministers and generals in the Ming Dynasty.
It can be seen that the owner of this mausoleum was of extraordinary status back then.
On the opposite side of the stone gate, there is a stone table still standing, looking from afar, solemn and magnificent.
The layout of the whole mausoleum is still well preserved, composed of stone gates, stone carved walls, stone tables, tomb mounds and other parts, vividly reproduce the majesty of the tombs of the nobles of the Ming Dynasty.
A closer look at these exquisite stone carvings makes people sigh at how powerful the Ming Dynasty was.
In recent years, there have been some new speculations and doubts surrounding the "Mausoleum of Zu Dashou" in the collection of the Ontario Museum in Canada.
Some people based on physical clues such as unearthed epitaphs.
Whether it is Zu Dashou or his descendants, as a heroic general who resisted the Qing Dynasty at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
His tomb was stolen and excavated by traffickers, and he was exiled from his homeland.
It has become a treasure for the pleasure of the Gentiles, which is really deplorable.
Over the years, the state has worked hard to recover the national treasures and cultural relics that have been lost, and hopes that one day the mausoleum of Zu Dashou will be able to return to the embrace of the motherland.
We should witness the legacy of the sages and write this history of humiliation into textbooks.
A warning to future generations to never allow the same tragedy to happen again.