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Text: Cui Xinhang
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introduction
Today, with the rapid development of technology, people's travel is becoming easier and simpler.
You can choose a variety of transportation methods such as car self-driving, trains, high-speed rail, etc., and the navigation APP on the mobile phone makes travel more convenient.
Even the phenomenon of getting lost is rare.
However, hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago, the ancient Chinese ancestors did not have such convenient conditions, let alone high-precision auxiliary equipment.
So how did they get out of the house?
(Dunhuang mural travel map)
First, the safest way - take the big road
The "big road" here is a popular saying, and in the ancient language environment, it refers to the "official road". That is, roads built by official organizations.
For example, in the Qin Dynasty, if people wanted to go from Xianyang to the Great Wall, their choice of walking must be the Qin Straight Road. This road was built during the reign of Qin Shi Huang and was gradually abandoned until the Qing Dynasty.
The Qin Dynasty built a long pavilion every ten miles and a short pavilion every five miles to provide a resting place for travelers.
Walking on this ancient "highway" that was compacted and does not grow grass today, of course, will feel at ease.
And the purpose of conscription in all dynasties was also to build roads.
Through the development and expansion of successive dynasties, China's roads were gradually completed, and a transportation network consisting of land, water, and sea routes was formed.
The land route has the official road represented by the Chi Road, the Wuchi Road, the Plank Road, and the "Silk Road"; the waterway has the Hangou, the Lingqu and the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal; and the sea route has the feats of Xu Fu Dongdu, the Maritime Silk Road, and Zheng He's voyage to the West.
(Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal)
After the establishment of transportation routes, service facilities to facilitate passenger and freight transportation were also developed.
During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, around the main transportation routes in each country, there were hospitality places such as Lushe Waiting Hall to receive envoys and government personnel from various countries.
The guarantee of the official road comes from these post stations set up along the way.
(Station)
The ancients also left a large number of written records about the ancient traffic situation, which provided important historical materials for the study of ancient traffic history, such as "Marco Polo's Travels" and "Xu Xiake's Travels".
Almost all of these traffic history books are the testimony of the author's footprints, the result of their field investigations, and a strong proof of road travel.
Second, the unusually popular method - buy a map
In ancient China, due to the needs of war and the development of drawing technology, maps appeared very early.
The earliest map of China was unearthed in the Fangmatan cemetery of the Western Han Dynasty.
(Map of Fangmatan)
On this map, mountains, rivers, cliffs, and roads are drawn in ink, and it is considered to be the world's earliest paper map.
In ancient times, people definitely couldn't count on mobile phones and electronic maps when they went out, like the map unearthed in Fangmatan, which was the choice of long-distance travelers.
However, due to the limitations of early cartographic technology and paper-making capabilities, most of the maps were still used in warfare.
In ancient times, there were three main ways to draw maps:
The first takes the county seat and other cities as the center point, then draws the surrounding mountains and rivers, and finally outlines the road between the city and the mountains.
(Maps drawn in ancient times)
The second method is to take a boat along the water transport route, drawing the mountains and rivers along the way on both sides of the river;
The third method is military map production, which is drawn on paper in strict accordance with the scale conversion after field surveying and mapping, which can minimize the error.
The first type of cartography developed during the Song Dynasty, giving rise to maps for the common people.
At that time, the commodity economy was already very developed, and merchants liked to use this kind of map in order to travel from south to north in order to do business. In addition to these maps for merchants, the Song Dynasty also had a type of map for officials to report on work or official trips to Beijing.
During the Song Dynasty, the post house specialized in selling the "Chaojing Mileage Map", and when the scholars went to Lin'an City, they would definitely buy a copy.
("Mileage Map of Chaojing")
This phenomenon was recorded in Li Dongyou's "Miscellaneous Records of Ancient Hangzhou" in the Yuan Dynasty, which shows that at that time, the use of civil maps was very frequent.
It is the popularization of maps that will make it more convenient for the ancients to travel.
3. Not an easy way to look at the stars
When the ancients went out, they used to go by land or by sea. Although the sea route is also called a "road", there is no doubt that there is no official road on the sea.
When the ancestors traveled on the sea, they used a method of "relying on the sky" - looking at the stars.
(Zheng He's Voyage to the West)
The Western Han Dynasty's book "Huainanzi" mentions the method of "sea people's occupation", which is the earliest record of navigators relying on the stars and moon in the sky to discern the direction.
This earliest method of nautical orientation has its roots in ancient astrology. To put it simply, it is to use the positions of the planets in the solar system visible to the naked eye and their changes to predict the future of people or things.
Although this technique has a certain superstitious color, the direction of the celestial bodies summarized in the process of its development is very helpful to travelers on the journey.
In the Ming Dynasty, the "astrological technique" appeared, and it was widely used in the process of Zheng He's voyage to the West. Astrology is to determine the position of a ship by observing the position of celestial bodies in the sky at different seasons and times and measuring the height of celestial bodies on the sea surface.
(Star Drawing Aid Plate)
The use of these maritime positioning technologies shows that in their time, looking at the stars was also an important way to determine the direction of travel.
During the day, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and at night, the Big Dipper points north. The determination of these directions is necessary for those who go out.
Although it is simple to look at the stars, it is not a simple method to guide the way in combination with various auxiliary measurement methods.
epilogue
From official roads to astrology, from land to water, the travel of the ancestors was not as easy as we imagined, but it was not as dangerous as we imagined.
(Tang Dynasty travel map, there are men and women)
Of course, if the ancients wanted to travel without getting lost, in addition to judging the direction, they also needed to use various means to locate them.
And the popularization of these methods has avoided the situation that the ancients got lost when traveling.
It is precisely the reduction of the risk of travel that will allow exchanges between various parts of the mainland to continue, so that the footprints of many literati and artists are all over the country.
Only then will there be "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" to reflect the ancient traffic conditions; "The Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty" tells the prosperity of the transportation between China and the West in the Tang Dynasty; through "Marco Polo's Travels", we can understand that the transportation in the Yuan Dynasty was very developed, and "Xu Xiake's Travels" and "The Water and Land Distance of the World" reproduce the traffic situation of the Ming Dynasty in front of our eyes.
This is the reason why the ancients did not get lost when traveling.
(Transportation)
Resources:
百度百科.放马滩汉墓. [OL].
百度百科古杭杂记. [OL].
Gong Lehan.Guide to preventing getting lost in ancient travel[J].Inside and outside the classroom:Science Fans, 2022(1):81-83.