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Text: Zhu Xiaohong (Professor, School of Philosophy, Fudan University)
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Mr. Chen Rudong in the article "From the ancient ruins of the bridgehead, a brief discussion on the origin of the name of Wuzhi County" [Click to read: viewpoint | Chen Rudong: From the point of view put forward in the ancient ruins of Qiaotou and the origin of the name of Wujiao County, I very much agree: the "Wujiao" that is circulating in the anecdote comes from the unreliable classic of "Yanwu", which is the cultural construction after the unification of the Qin and Han Dynasties; the place name can be understood from the perspective of the sun worship of prehistoric culture. He believes that after the Qin and Han Dynasties, the construction of social ideology was subordinated to the needs of the empire, and the Han Dynasty "deposed hundreds of families and respected Confucianism alone", deified the autocratic monarchy with the Confucian culture of loyalty and filial piety, and attached "Wu Wounds" with the saying of "filial piety and filial piety", which is the embodiment of this mechanism. He pointed out that there have been many researchers in Yiwu, such as Mr. Feng Zhilai and Mr. Ding Lie, who have similar reflections, believing that the name of Yiwu Ancient County "Wu Wound" should have an earlier history, and the linguistic phonology and archaeological discoveries have confirmed that "Wu Wound" is the remnant of the sun worship of the ancient Yue ancestors. He also analyzed the relationship between the pottery motifs of the Qiaotou site and the sun worship and the ancient name of Yiwu from the perspective of Yixue Bagua, which is very critical and enlightening.
From the Ninth Five-Year Plan to the present, the research results of the state-supported multidisciplinary research projects of "Xia Shang Zhou Dynasty Project" and "Chinese Civilization Exploration Project" have deepened the understanding of the origin of Chinese civilization; this discussion on the name of Yiwu Ancient County is undoubtedly a very local discussion on the origin of culture. The reason why Mr. Ru Dong's related articles have aroused the interest of local readers, with high network click rate and forwarding volume, shows the relevance of this way of discussion and the attention of the Yiwu people to the issue of local cultural construction.
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The criticism of the phenomenon of treating fiction as historical reality, such as Mr. Dong, is profound. The phenomenon of "once a dynasty has been approved, a hundred generations dare not argue" is a product of a special era, and the materialist view of history inspires us that historical research should pay attention to the relationship between concepts and specific history, society and politics. As early as the early years of the Republic of China, scholars of the "Doubtful Ancient School" dismissed the legends of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, Yan Huang, and Yao Shunyu as myths, and deeply criticized the practice of replacing historical origins with myths. Nowadays, many local governments like to hold public sacrifices in front of a certain emperor's mausoleum, although out of the goodwill of publicizing local culture, their mentality and vision are problematic, and their blind dependence on ancient history is also reflected in their thinking consciousness.
Recently, the hypothesis of "Chinese civilization in the West" and "the origin of Western civilization in ancient China" have become very popular, which represents people's mentality of not wanting to repeat the mistakes of the traditional view of history. It is just that historical and cultural research requires a reasonable critical spirit and imagination, and it needs to find a balance in the traditional "double evidence method" (that is, literature and archaeology). Since the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Yellow Emperor has been regarded as the common ancestor of the Chinese nation, and the "descendants of Yanhuang" and "five thousand years of blood" have become cultural symbols to promote national identity. However, people have also found that among the four ancient civilizations, the other three major civilizations have a history of more than 5,000 years, while China's recorded history from the Shang Zhou Dynasty is only about 3600 years, and because of the lack of direct archaeological evidence to confirm the existence of the Xia Dynasty, our so-called "five years and a thousand civilizations" is highly questioned; in addition, the bronze masks excavated at the Sanxingdui site, their artistic expression and production techniques show homology with the West, which provides imagination space for the long-existing "Western Speaking" The five-thousand-year-old civilization of China seems to have been vigorously challenged.
However, with the progress of the source exploration project and the discovery of archaeological culture in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, the Central Plains are regarded as the origin of Chinese civilization, saying that they are descendants of Yan huang and that the Yellow River is the cradle of the Chinese nation... These solidified cognitions loosen. There is now a general consensus in the academic community that Chinese civilization has a pluralistic parallel origin. Mr. Su Bingqi, the predecessor of the archaeology field of Peking University, once proposed that "the sky is full of stars" and said that he divided the Neolithic culture in China into six major departments, each of which constituted the brilliant starry sky on the eve of the birth of Chinese civilization, and the Central Plains was only a star in the starry sky; of course, with the development of history, the Central Plains region absorbed the fruits of the development of civilization of various communities, became the core area of Chinese civilization, and a unified empire appeared. Mr. Zhang Guangzhi, a Chinese-American, also pointed out that Chinese civilization does not have a unified center, and he regards the Neolithic culture before 4000 AD as a "Chinese interaction circle" composed of nine cultural systems. It can be said that "pluralistic integration" and "parallel origin" are the latest summaries of the origin model of Chinese civilization.
Unearthed pottery
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In the origin of this pluralistic and integrated Chinese civilization, there are indispensable ancient cultural stars in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River: Sanxingdui culture, Shijiahe culture, Lingjiatan culture, Liangzhu culture, Hemudu culture, etc., which together with the Hongshan culture, Yangshao culture, Qijia culture in the north, constitute the origin of civilization full of stars. The Shangshan culture to which the newly discovered Qiaotou cultural site belongs is undoubtedly one of the stars.
The archaeology of Jiangsu and Zhejiang that emerged after the 1980s not only promoted the change of the unity of Chinese civilization and culture, but also responded to the problem of "five thousand years of history and three thousand years of civilization": the tombs and residences of liangzhu culture reflected strict social hierarchy, and the rich ceremonial instruments such as ding, bean, pot, bi, qi, and chun showed that the "ritual" of society already existed - there is no doubt that Liangzhu culture belongs to "civilization", although it died out around 4300 years ago, its civilization elements are integrated into the body of Chinese civilization. It also has a profound impact on the Yangshao culture in the Yellow River Basin, so the Liangzhu culture is the empirical evidence of China's 5,000 years of civilization.
Experts have found that the Shangshan culture represented by the Yiwu Qiaotou site is 3,000 years earlier than the Liangzhu ancient city civilization, that is, it is a cultural site more than 9,000 years ago; it and the archaeological culture such as jiaxing Majiabang culture and Qingpu Songze culture constitute the source of Liangzhu civilization. But how it relates to today's cultural development has yet to be discovered and explained by scholars. During the Warring States period, wubei belonged to the Yue kingdom, but the relationship between the Liangzhu culture and the ancient Yue people was not clear, let alone the relationship between the Shangshan culture and the Yue people, whether from the perspective of philology or archaeological discoveries. In the pre-Qin literature, the Yu, Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties are often mentioned together, and the Yu Dynasty lasted for more than a thousand years, and some people speculate that the Liangzhu culture is the archaeological culture of the Yu Dynasty. Some Zhejiang scholars have emphasized that Liangzhu culture is the source of Xia culture, believing that "Yue Wei Yu Hou" is not only not the word of Yue Ren Togu, but may even be "Yu Wei Yue Hou". But these are bold hypotheses that lack sufficient evidence.
Regarding the Qiaotou site, there are some reports with very eye-catching titles: "Major Discoveries at the Yiwu Qiaotou Site Chinese Civilization Pushed Forward to More Than 9,000 Years." This statement is too outrageous. Because in archaeology there is a strict distinction between "culture" and "civilization". The three elements of Western definition of civilization are cities, writing, and bronzes, but the archaeological discoveries of Liangzhu have changed the views of Chinese and Western experts: Liangzhu cultural sites have the characteristics of ancient cities and even ancient countries, and the rich jade ceremonial ware can completely match bronzes, and there have been symbols with rich meanings, so Liangzhu culture can be called "Liangzhu civilization". Then, as the source of Liangzhu culture, we also see ring trenches on the Qiaotou cultural site, as well as fragments of faience pottery with a special pattern of "sun pattern", but at present, these discoveries are still far from forming a city, nor do they lack clear ideographic characters or symbols, let alone infer that the faience with the "sun pattern" pattern is a ceremonial vessel of ancestral religious worship, nor can it be said that it is related to the ancient Yue people.
Nevertheless, various bold assumptions and imaginations based on bridgehead culture are worthy of recognition. Because "bold assumptions and careful verification" are the basic attitudes and methods of scientific research. There is nothing wrong with the hypothesis of the correlation between the name of the wounded place, the sun pattern of the bridgehead and the worship of the sun, and even a lot of circumstantial evidence can be found, as the father of religion, Max Müller, said, the earliest form of human worship is the worship of the sun, from the double bird sunrise pattern ivory carving of the Yuyao Hemudu culture, the gold ornament of the sun god bird of the Shang Zhou Dynasty, the circle pattern on the mural painting of the Left River Cliff in Guangxi, to the eagle wing sun wheel pattern of the Sumerians, and various variations of the eight-pointed star pattern... Sun worship can be seen in many cultures or civilizations. But it takes generations of hard work to find out, combing through ancient documents, archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and many others.
Image from the web
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More than a decade ago, the national leader personally instructed that it is necessary to strengthen the research and publicity of the "culture on the mountain". As an organic part of Shangshan culture, the research and publicity of Qiaotou culture is naturally the unshirkable task of the local cultural department. But how to advertise, how to position?
I think Mr. Ru Dong is showing us a possibility, that is, first of all, to combine the study of ancient culture with cultural roots, cultural self-awareness, and cultural self-confidence. In July 2019, the ruins of Liangzhu Ancient City were successfully listed as World Cultural Heritage, and in the process of archaeological research and application for World Cultural Heritage for more than 20 years, Chinese and foreign experts gradually formed a consensus that Liangzhu Civilization is the empirical evidence of Chinese civilization with a history of 5,000 years, and regional archaeological discoveries have contributed to the history of Chinese and even world civilization, deepening the understanding of Chinese civilization. Qiaotou site belongs to the Shangshan culture, is the earliest archaeological culture found in Zhejiang, Mr. Jiang Leping pointed out that the Shangshan culture is the Qiantang River Basin early Neolithic cultural sites, is the source of Zhejiang culture, has been found a total of 18 Shangshan cultural sites, distributed in Yongkang, Wuyi, Jinhua, Pujiang, Yiwu and other places, does not rule out the possibility of more site discovery in the future, its overall characteristics have been further research excavation and collation. The author believes that compared with other Shangshan cultural sites in other places, its uniqueness lies in the fact that it belongs to Yiwu, and there are quite a lot of philological and anthropological materials about the ancient place name of the latter "Yiwu", "Wujiao". According to Mr. Feng Zhilai's dedicated research on phonology and philology of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, "Wu Wound" is the harmonic sound of "Fu Sang", expressing the meaning of sunrise in the East, and the Black Wound was originally on the shore of the water and was the east of the sunrise... Mr. Rudong's article also expresses similar hypotheses and arguments. These preliminary studies show how to break free from the nest of the traditional view of history that takes myths and legends as the truth and uses history to serve the monarchy, to use the ancient literature critically, and to organically use the latest achievements in archaeology and linguistic anthropology. This process is conducive to our removal of falsehood and truth, scientific construction and interpretation of Yiwu's 10,000-year development history, and paving the way for future site applications.
Second, it combines ancient culture research with the construction of new rural culture and urban culture development. From small commodities to international trade, the development of Yiwu is an unprecedented miracle. With the great improvement of material wealth, the great improvement of living conditions and livable environment, the people's requirements for spiritual life and quality of life will also increase, and the external material culture and trend culture will undoubtedly give people pleasure, explore the local traditions inward, the overall excellent intangible cultural heritage, and publicize and promote the bridgehead culture... Undoubtedly, it can also promote the construction of identity in the new era and increase the people's sense of regional pride: we are building a beautiful life in the new era in the land of Wuzhou, which has a cultural tradition of 10,000 years!