Look for Yao Shun in the ruins of the Tao Temple
Speaker: He Nu Speech Venue: National Museum of China National Expo Lecture Hall Speech Time: July 2021
He Nu, a researcher at the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the leader of the Shanxi team, is mainly engaged in archaeological excavation and research at the site of Xiangfen Tao Temple in Shanxi, and has presided over a number of national scientific research projects. He has published more than 200 papers in academic journals at home and abroad. He is the author of "How to Explore what the Ancients Thought: Exploration of the Theory and Practice of Spiritual Culture Archaeology".
Today, I would like to report to you on the work and harvest of the Tao Temple site in Xiangfen County, Linfen City, Shanxi Province over the past 40 years, including my personal harvest and related research experience in participating in the tao temple site work in the past 20 years, as well as some inferences we have made about the Tao Temple site and the capital of Yao Shun.
Where is the capital of Yao Shun
As everyone may know, before the Xia Shang Zhou, there was an era in our history called the "Legend Era", that is, the Yao Shunyu Era. For a long time in history, scholars at home and abroad believed that Yao Shunyu was an era of legends. Whether this era is a history of Chinese faith is worth exploring.
If we want to explore whether Yao Shunyu exists, first of all, we must have a breakthrough point, that is, where is their capital city? Regarding Yaodu, we have records in the literature, but there are many theories, of which several claims have been more recognized, one of which is that the "Notes on the Water Classics" mentions Yaodu Pingyang. Where is Binh Duong? This is more consistent with everyone's understanding, and Pingyang is now the Linfen area of Shanxi. There is also a saying that Shundu Pusaka. Where is Kasaka? There are also many specific place names, among which the theory of Jinnan is also highly recognized. Of course, Yaodu Pingyang and Shundu Pusaka are not the only theories recorded in the literature, and there are many other theories, such as Dingtao in Shandong and Tang County in Hebei Province, which also have the theory of Yaodu, and the theory of Shundu in southeastern Henan, and so on. From the perspective of literature, it is difficult to determine where the capital city of Yao Shun is.
Archaeologists examine the site of a rammed-earth building in Miyagi Castle, the site of the Temple. Xinhua News Agency
Regarding the archaeology of Yaodu, our approach is as follows: first conduct an anthropological archaeological exploration, that is, first explore a site, is it a capital city? At this time, we will not associate this site with the literature. After determining that it is a capital city, that is, after answering the archaeological question of anthropology, the next question we have to ask is, whose capital is this? This enters the category of archaeology in the discourse system of historiography. How do you argue next? We will form a set of evidence chains of archaeological data and relevant documentary records from these excavations, and at the same time combine local anthropological materials, including local folklore, legends, dialects, local chronicles, place names, genealogies, etc. These three chains of evidence are twisted into a rope, pointing to the same trend, and finally concluding whose capital it is.
In the process of such a search for Yaodu, the ruins of Tao Temple gradually entered our field of vision. In the 1980s and 1990s, many scholars recognized this problem, such as the famous archaeologist Mr. Su Bingqi, who raised the tao temple site to the height of "China" and related to Yao, who related the status of the tao temple site to the Jinnan region, believing that the concept of "China" had already appeared at that time, and it should be in the Jinnan region. He came to this conclusion because in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, there was a huge breakthrough and harvest in the excavation of the Tao Temple site.
We judge a capital city from archaeology there is a set of methods, this method is called capital archaeology, which is a set of theoretical methods that we have gradually summarized through the archaeological practice of the capital city in the past 70 years since the founding of New China. This method of judging the capital city we have the following elements: as a capital city, we must first have a city wall, we mean the outer wall of the capital city. The second is to have Miyagi, where the ruler lives. Third, as a capital city, it is also necessary to have ceremonial buildings that sacrifice heaven, earth, and ancestors, which we call large religious ceremonial building areas. Fourth, in the prehistoric capital, there should also be a royal cemetery or a royal tomb area, which was often located next to the capital or on the outskirts of the capital in the prehistoric period. Fifth, the capital also has an officially managed workshop area. Sixth, there must be a national treasury, and each country must have a storage area with royal power or direct control of the state power. The seventh point is that the capital city should not only have rulers and craftsmen, but also ordinary citizens and ordinary residential areas.
With this methodology in place, let's apply it to the ruins of the Tao Temple to see if it is a capital city.
Three phases of the tao temple ruins
The ruins of Tao Temple are located in the Hedong area of the middle reaches of the Yellow River, which is now the Jinnan region, which belongs to Xiangfen County, Linfen City, Shanxi Province. During the cultural relics census in the 1950s, several small ruins of the Yongsan era were found in tao temples. By the 1960s, the restoration of the Tao Temple site was not only a few small sites, but also a series of large sites. Because some scholars at that time believed that Erlitou in Henan was the capital of the late Xia Dynasty, they wanted to find the capital of the early Xia Dynasty in the Southern Jin Region. In search of the capital of the early Xia Dynasty, from 1978 to 1985, the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Cultural Relics Bureau of the Linfen Municipal Administration at that time cooperated in large-scale excavations of the site. Excavations at this stage were concentrated in the northeast of the site, revealing a large area of ordinary residential areas. A large area of royal cemeteries was also found, including 6 royal tombs, and many representative burial items with royal spirit were unearthed, such as dragon plates, pottery drums, wooden tools, etc., and since then the tao temple culture has received more attention.
According to archaeological excavations, the Tao Temple culture is divided into three phases: early, middle and late. The early period is 4300 to 4100 years ago, the middle period is 4100 to 4000 years ago, and the late period is 4000 to 3900 years ago, the division of these three periods is not only reflected in pottery, but also the rise and fall of the tao temple capital.
The early ruins of the temple were not large, and there was a miyagi castle. The miyagi castle did not initially build a city wall, but dug a rectangular ring trench to enclose 130,000 square meters of space and play a role in protecting the rulers. Later, the city wall was built in the location of the lower noble residential area, and the lower noble residential area was also protected, which can be called "lower city", with an area of nearly 100,000 square meters. At this time, the ring trench of Miyagi Castle was filled in and the city wall was built. On both sides of Miyagi are ordinary residential areas. There is also a large storage area directly controlled by the ruler. The early royal cemetery was in the southeast corner of the site, and it was already in use in the early days of the Tao Temple. An important structure was also found on the north side of the site, which was built in the early days of the Tao Temple and continued until the middle and late period, but unfortunately the damage was very serious. We currently know that it was a square altar built in a watery environment. You may have been to the Temple of Earth in Beijing, which is called "Zezhong Zhongqiu", which is the Temple of Earth used for sacrifice, so it is inferred that this is a ceremonial building. Although the early capital of Tao Temple is not very large, with a total area of about 200,000 square meters, the total area of the ruins is 1.6 million square meters, which was also a super large central settlement more than 4,300 years ago. Through the functional divisions at that time, we can see that Tao Temple already had a certain eyebrow as a capital city at that time. Another commendable place in the early days of the temple is the Great South Ditch, which was originally a road, which was later washed by rain and turned into a ditch, which led from the early royal cemetery to the northwest to the direction of the Temple of Earth, passing in front of Miyagi Castle. In terms of function, it is equivalent to a memorial avenue in the early days of the Tao Temple.
In the middle of the Tao Temple, as the settlement form of the capital city, there was a huge change, this change began from 4100 to 4000 years ago, mainly the early lower castle in the south was abandoned, and the miyagi continued to be used, the north wall and the western wall of miyagi were repaired or expanded, forming a huge outer city, which formed a twin-city system, which was the mainstream form of a capital city of later Dynasties in China, that is, Miyagi and Waimiya castle (sometimes adding an imperial city), Miyagi is equivalent to the Forbidden City in later generations. The outer circle wall is equivalent to the outer GuoCheng of Beijing. During this period, the area of the Tao Temple City site reached 2.8 million square meters, which is still the most conservative estimate. In the middle of the Temple, the original treasury storage area continued to be in use. A very important building appeared, that is, the Temple of Heaven ceremonial building, which also has the function of viewing and timing. We call it the Observatory Altar, which is located southeast of Waiguo City. The original temple of earth in the northwest continued to be used, and was expanded during this period. In the south of the city there is a handicraft workshop area, and a new ordinary residential area has been opened in the northwest area of Waiguocheng. At that time, there was a large blank space between Miyagi Castle and these functional districts. These blank areas are distributed with a lot of water surfaces, open spaces, and forest belts, and as a whole, they have a strong green space function for urban planning. In the middle of the Tao Temple, there was still a road, now Zhao Wanggou and Zhonglianggou, this monumental avenue divides the whole city into two parts, the important area is in the upper city, and the handicraft area and the civilian area are in the lower level, and its planning is very disciplined.
In the late Tao Temple, there was a long period of social unrest at that time. Through archaeology, we found that in the middle and late period, the entire Tao Temple City was completely destroyed once, and it is inferred that the rule of the Tao Temple civilization was subverted at that time. Subsequently, between 4,000 and 3,900 years ago, the temple was colonized by foreign forces for most of its time. At this time, the outer wall of Guocheng disappeared, and the area of 3 square kilometers was full of people, the population was very dense and disorganized, and there were many remnants of dismembered people in many ash pits. This shows that in the late stage of the Tao Temple, the Tao Temple was in a state of social unrest and chaos for a long time.
However, our archaeology found that in a certain period of late Pottery Temple, in a very short period of time, the then Tao Temple Palace Castle was rebuilt, the east and south walls were restored, and there were some palace buildings in the late Tao Temple in Miyagi Castle, and the altar on the north side of the Tao Temple was also rebuilt in the late Tao Temple. Extrapolating from all this series of reconstructions, it is possible that sometime in the late Tao Temple, the descendants of the former rulers carried out a restoration of power. But this restoration was short-lived, and was soon again suppressed by foreign forces. After this failure, the residents of the Tao Temple at that time moved away, and the ruins of the Tao Temple ended.
Several details of the ruins of the Tao Temple
The bottom of the walls of Tao Temple Palace Castle was built layer by layer with rammed earth, or divided into plates or rammed, and the quality of rammed earth was very poor. Most of the rammed earth quality of the Tao Temple site is very poor, and the key is that neither the Miyagi city wall above the surface nor the outer wall of the outer kuo has found a surface wall of more than one centimeter, which is a great doubt in the academic community. Later, through research, we believed that the main purpose of the rammed earth of the Tao Temple was not to load, but to block the surface water from penetrating into the ground, because the local loess collapse strength of the Tao Temple was super, especially afraid of water, so as long as the water was blocked, the foundation would not sink, and the foundation rammed soil at that time was mainly to solve this problem. However, if the rammed soil in the foundation part is of high quality, it will lead to heavy self-weight, which will aggravate the loss of the land. Therefore, the so-called "poor quality" is likely to be the self-weight of the rammed earth foundation and wall at that time. We once found that the temple had some adobe blocks, from which we deduced that the walls at that time were adobe walls. Referring to the case of the ancient Egyptian Edford Temple, the part of the wall above the surface can be made of sandwich adobe walls. Such a city wall can be 10 meters high and 10 meters wide, which can fully block the role of foreign enemies. This also explains that the walls above the surface of Miyagi and Waiguo Castle at the tao temple site have disappeared, because it is sandwich adobe, and when the city is destroyed, these parts of the sandwich adobe wall are pickpocketed and disappear.
There are four corner gates in each of the four corners of Miyagi Castle. At the northeast corner gate we also found a site, which was supposed to have a boardwalk, and we suspected that it might be a watchtower tower. We also found a palace gate with a gate to the east of the south wall, and unfortunately only the basic part remains. This palace gate was built in the early days of the Tao Temple, and began to be built when the walls of the Tao Temple Palace Castle were built. It was destroyed in the middle of the Temple, and the gate was rebuilt during the late Restoration of the Temple. The gate is about 6 meters wide and the piers on both sides are very large. 50 to 80 centimeters of pillar foundation stones were found in the late ash pits that destroyed the piers, proving that there was a building above the gate.
There are currently more than a dozen rammed earths of all sizes protruding inside the palace walls, one of which is the largest numbered house abutment platform FJT3, with an area of more than 8,000 square meters. From 2003 to the end of June 2021, we finally got the building roughly clearer on a stagnant basis. We know that its basic layout is a large platform, on which there are several groups of hall-like buildings, there are front squares, back squares and pools, and in general, it has formed a pattern similar to the three halls of the Forbidden City in Beijing, which we call the palace system.
In the southeastern part of the large building, a kitchen was also found, called the East Kitchen. In addition, we also found an outbuilding under the large platform base that may be the ice cellar of the ancients, which we call "Lingyin". Its discovery reflects that the early court life of Tao Temple has reached a very high level.
During excavations in the temple palace area, many pottery wedges similar to today's pizza-shaped pottery were found (Fig. 1), with ornamentation on one side of the bottom of the wedge. Through restoration, we find that these pottery wedges can be built together, speculating that they belong to the symbols of ancestor worship of the ancients, each piece of pottery wedges represents a small family, and several families form a common ancestor of their own. This is a patriarchal system, and its appearance proves that there is an ancestral temple in Tao Temple Miyagi Castle.
Figure 1: Pottery wedge excavated from the tao temple site
The architecture of the aristocratic residential area in the lower city is also more exquisite, two double-open semi-crypt houses, forming a suite, with an aisle in the middle, each house has a single room with a braised earth surface or a white ash floor, as well as a stove, and the rest of the outer circle of the house is the movable surface.
Ordinary people's dwellings are not so exquisite, often digging a pit in the ground, a single room of the crypt type or semi-crypt type, white ash face or red burnt earth surface. There is also a kind of person who lives worse, obviously of lower status, who lives in cave dwellings. The size of the cave dwellings is similar to that of ordinary dwellers.
The form of residence of the Tao Temple, from the underground to the semi-crypt type to the double-open crypt with the foundation pit, and then to the foundation, has formed a complete set of living hierarchy from the underground to the ground, which is also a manifestation of the social form of the country.
As a very important functional area of the capital, the handicraft workshop area of Tao Temple has about 200,000 square meters. The area is very strictly managed and the zoning is very regular. A trench divides it into east and west parts, and this trench may be closed. This area is strictly controlled by a separate small town, which is the area for the production of painted pottery. The larger area can be divided into six hand industrial parks. Each handicraft industrial park has an official rammed earth foundation site (i.e., management housing), several handicraft workshops, and the residence of ordinary craftsmen. These three elements make up the handicraft industrial park in the handicraft industrial park. There are two major industrial types in the handicraft zone, one is pottery and the other is stone tool manufacturing. All the handicraft parks are managed by a large rammed earth foundation site with an area of 1400 square meters, which is a large building with a patio and a gatehouse and doorway, and we infer that it is an important institution for the management of the handicraft area by the industrial workers.
The cave area of the Tao Temple is in the southeast of the Tao Temple Palace Castle, there are more than 1,000 square meters, and the area is all cellar caves, mainly used in the early and middle period of the Tao Temple, and there is no late period. These cellars were filled with grass mud, which was inferred to be the topped of the granary. So they are all grain cellars. The diameter of the pit is four or five meters, the large diameter is more than ten meters, with a spiral ramp, the bottom of the pot structure is adopted, and many of the pots have stones under the bottom, which is basically consistent with the structure of the later Tang Dynasty Luoyang Hanjiacang granary. One of the special things about this cellar is that its doorway is door-opening. There is a small white gray surface on the inside of the ground of the exit of the door that can stand alone as a guard post. We deduce that these caves are the treasury under the direct control of the crown.
In addition, the temple also found the world's first observatory, not only for suburban festival days, but also for the development of a 20-season horizon calendar. The Tao Temple site has a complete water supply and drainage system.
Now let's sum up everything, tao temple as an ancient capital city has all the functions, and it should be a real city that appeared more than 4,000 years ago.
In addition to the capital city, we currently know that Tao Temple has a national administrative system, a regional survey from 2018 to 2019, covering an area of more than 1,000 square kilometers west of Ta'er Mountain, east of the Fenhe River centered on Tao Temple. We found that with the Tao Temple as the center, there are two major site groups in the north and south that form an arch guard for the Tao Temple ruins. Each site group has a super-large site, which can be regarded as the equivalent of today's "provincial city", and as soon as they appear, they are super-large central settlements, and they are not developed from small sites to large sites. There are no ruins within two kilometers of the Tao Temple site, and this distribution situation is a bit like the current urban centripetal pattern. There is also the Zhouzhuang ruins, very small, only more than 1,000 square meters, but we found that its garbage pit unearthed a lot of cooking utensils, so it is speculated that it is likely to be a post site, responsible for ushering in the delivery, the floating population is very large, the permanent population is very small, basically does not have a production function, it should be directly supplied by the government, located in the road from Houma to tao temple, can be regarded as a transit station. The appearance of the station can also explain the existence of the relationship between the central and local governments at that time, which is extremely important in archaeology and is one of the evidences that we judge that the Tao Temple culture has entered the country.
Within the cultural scope of tao temple, in addition to the posture of arching and guarding, three to four levels of social organization have also been formed, that is, hierarchical social organizations such as capital cities, "provincial cities", townships, and villages. In addition, in terms of resource supply, there is a Dongdeng site on the east bank of the main Hongdao of the Fenhe River, which is the outlet wharf of the Tao Temple capital, and the bulk transportation at that time was to use the main waterway of the Fenhe River to enter and exit through the wharf of Dongdeng. In addition, the Xiangfen Shanugou Dagudui Mountain Quarry specializes in providing the Taosi Capital city with special metamorphic sandstone for the production of three-sided arrowheads.
Tao Temple is not Yaodu
Above we have answered the question of anthropological archaeology of the Tao Temple site, that is, the Tao Temple as evidence of the ancient capital, and the following we will face the historical question, that is, is the Tao Temple a Yaodu?
Scholars have long put forward this view on the Tao Temple, but there is a lack of systematic and strong argumentation, and we need to establish a complete set of evidence chains to argue this problem.
First of all, the text is self-evidence, the Tao Temple site has also found words, such as the excavated clay pot on the two characters written in cinnabar, of which the word on the left (Fig. 2), some people think that it is the word "昜", and I think this word is the word "Yao", because it is a figure above it that may represent the city wall, is a block of soil, and below is a person, and the middle one is horizontal as an indication.
Figure 2: Writing on utensils excavated from the Tao Temple site
We can look for evidence that the word "Yao" may be from archaeological findings at the site of the Tao Temple. "The fortress soil is a fortress" is the method of building the walls of the Tao Temple (Figure 3), and the outer outline of the Tao Temple site is indeed this rounded square. A bar in the middle of this word is used to indicate that the rammed earth plate wall is above the head of the person, and this phenomenon can only occur when the person stands at the bottom of the ditch of the loess mound (Figure 4). The ancients may have noticed this phenomenon with geomorphological characteristics, so they called the big city made of rammed earth plates on the loess mound "Yao". By extension, the great founder of the construction of this capital city was "Yao", so this word was created for Yao, and later the word "Yao" became the name of the royal family. From the perspective of the development of Chinese characters, the Yao (Fig. 5) of the oracle bone is very similar to the "Yao" character of Tao Temple. Some people also think that this word should be the sun's "昜" (yang) character. However, I think that the upper part of the character should be round, rather than a rounded square or diamond shape like the Tao Temple "Yao" and the oracle bone Yao character.
Fig. 3: Blocks of earth clearly visible in the walls of the tao temple ruins
Figure 4: "The city wall is above the head" in the ruins of the Tao Temple
Figure 5: Oracle "Yao" character
In addition, we believe that a series of archaeological evidence found at the Tao Temple site is twisted with some records in the literature.
For example, there is a passage at the beginning of the "Shang Shu Yao Dian": "Yue Ruo Gu Di Yao, Yue Fangxun, Qin, Ming, Wen, Si, An An, Yun Gong Ke Rang, light is four tables, gridded up and down." This "four tables" are the four banks, and the ancients called the edge between the continent and the sea, between the sea and the ocean, as the bank. The lacquer ruler excavated from the tomb of the king IIM22 in the middle of the Tao Temple, the wooden tire paint painting, a green section and a black section, the middle is painted with a lever in red as a scale, of which the 11th scale is extremely important, it shows the shortest shadow length of the theoretical summer solstice, according to my research, if 25 cm is the Tao Temple one foot to calculate, the length of the 11th scale is one foot six. The Zhou Hip Arithmetic Sutra mentions that the standard shadow of the summer solstice is one foot six, but it does not explain what the significance is. The Zhou Li says that the summer solstice shadow is one foot and five feet long, but it is luoyang data. From the geographical latitude point of view, Luoyang is in the south of Jinnan, of course, it is one inch shorter. Based on this, we infer that the 11th scale of the Tao Temple Gui ruler is one foot and six inches, which should be a standard in the ancient Jinnan region, which has the Tao Temple Middle Table. Therefore, we use the Tao Temple as the middle table to make four table measurements, that is, to measure the four to the end points of the East Asian continent where the Tao Temple is located, that is, the four tables of the Tao Temple. The specific method is that the time point of the summer solstice shadow to reach the Tao Temple in the east is earlier than the standard time of the summer solstice in the Tao Temple, and the reverse is later in the west. The northern measurement point is that the summer solstice shadow length is longer than the standard shadow length of the Tao Temple, and the south side is shorter than the Tao Temple. Use such a set of methods to make large astronomical measurements, so as to measure the position of the four tables of the Tao Temple. According to this set of operating principles, we found the Moon Bay in Yangxisha, Guangdong, which basically coincides with the longitude of the Tao Temple site, which is called cross-toe in ancient times. North table, according to the Tao Temple site of this ruler, the summer solstice can measure the Arctic Circle, the ancients called this the capital, that is, the sun fell to the ground and did not come out, the weather is very cold. At the east table, we found the Chaoyang Mountain Mouth Jitou in Huangdao, Qingdao, Shandong, where the latitude and Tao Temple are exactly the same, and this area was called Qingzhou Shengyi in ancient times. The ancients in the west said "west to quicksand", and the record of this aspect is not very clear. Here I would like to emphasize that there is no archaeological evidence for the estimation of the four tables of the Tao Temple, but it is interesting that in the pre-Qin period, there is a set of popular data on the distance within the four tables, saying that the distance within the four seas is 28,000 miles, the north and south are 26,000 miles, according to the current distance unit conversion is about 7,000 kilometers from east to west, and the north and south are 6,500 kilometers. According to the results of our investigation of the actual distance of the four tables speculated by the Tao Temple, the data of the four tables of the pre-Qin Dynasty and the distance error rate of the "Tao Temple Four Tables" speculated by us are 6% from north to south and 7.4% from east to west. Therefore, we believe that this set of data within the four seas inherited by the ancients in the pre-Qin period is likely to be measured. Through our verification of the meridians and latitudes of the Tao Temple, the base point of the middle table measurement is likely to be the Tao Temple.
The Analects mention that when Emperor Yao Zen gave Shun the throne, he instructed him: "The calendar of heaven is in Erzhu and is allowed to cling to it." The first half of the sentence may be understood as Yao instructing Shun to say that you must master the astronomical calendar; and the "middle" of "allowing it to be adhered to" is the gui ruler, and the reason why the gui ruler is important in the minds of the ancients is because it can be used to determine the middle of the earth, and the king in the middle requires the ancients to choose the middle of the land if they want to establish the capital and the capital of the country, and this must rely on the gui ruler to judge. The second is that a set of tables can make a calendar. The third is that astronomical geodesy can be made using this watch, and then we can know how big the territory of the rule is and what the "world" is like. Therefore, before the invention of the national seal, "Zhong" became a symbol of authority of ancient state power, and the succession passed on this "Zhong", which was called "allowed to cling to it".
In addition, there are some things unearthed in the ruins of the Tao Temple, which we think can be found in the Yao Shun related content of ancient texts. We also found relevant clues in the local legends and folklore of the Tao Temple.
In our opinion, the evidence of the Tao Temple as the capital of Yao is increasing, but the Tao Temple is not only in the early days, but also in the middle of its period it became a larger capital. If the Tao Temple was Yaodu in the early days, then whose capital was it in the middle period? There are records that "Yao Shun and Duzhi". The Preface to the Book of Shang mentions that Shun's birth is related to the rainbow, which is depicted in the oracle bones as a two-headed dragon or snake, and the double-headed dragon jade pendant (Figure 6) excavated in the middle of the Tao Temple site IIM22 corresponds to it.
Fig. 6: Two-headed dragon-shaped jade juan group excavated from the tao temple site
And the "Shuowen" said: "Shun, Shun also ... Mandala. Pictographic. "We found a pattern of laxities on the amphora excavated in the middle of the Tao Temple, and it may be speculated that this pattern is the symbol of the Shun royal family.
Literature records that during Shun's reign, there were wells, warehouses, cattle and sheep, and palaces, and these have been archaeologically found in the ruins of the Tao Temple. The Shundian also mentions the system of weights and measures, and according to my research, the length of the Tao Temple is one cubit, which is equivalent to 25 centimeters today, which is about the average length of the Han male ulna. The literature records that when Yao Shun was present, there were already eight tones, namely gold, stone, earth, leather, silk, wood, dagger, bamboo, and so on. The musical instruments excavated at the tao temple include pottery drums (soil), shrew drums (leather), stone chimes (stones), red copper bells (gold), and wooden drums (wood).
Based on the above archaeological findings and documentary records, we believe that the Tao Temple era already had the concept of the earth, and the Tao Temple culture at that time had formed a national form, and the Tao Temple site was also the capital of a country, and it is likely to be the legendary capital of Yao Shun. From this point of view, the Tao Temple can be called the earliest "China" of Yao Shun.
(The materials and pictures of this edition of the speech are provided by the National Museum of China Research Institute)
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