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After capturing 71 rhinos during a hunt, a king of the Shang Dynasty left a record in the oracle bones and rejoiced in his "brilliant" hunting achievements.
At that time, in the vast central plains, there were tapirs, rhinos, sambar deer, Asian elephants and other animals that only appear in the tropics and subtropics today, and what the Shang kings and merchants more than 3,000 years ago did not expect was that what they left in the oracle bones would be a species lament about the ecological evolution of ancient China.
5,000 years ago, when China's forest coverage rate was as high as 64%, according to zhu Kezhen and other climatologists, 3000 BC to 1100 BC tribal alliances and the Xia Dynasty Shang Dynasty period, when China as a whole was in a warm period, the northern boundary of the northern subtropical, than now to move north 2.5 latitudes, the temperature is also 2-3 degrees Celsius higher.
But every slight fluctuation in the climate will bring a violent shake to nature and history.
From about 1100 BC, after history entered the Zhou Dynasty, the Chinese climate turned into a cold period again, this time the Xiaoice period spread throughout the Western Zhou Period, which lasted for more than 250 years, for which the "Ancient Bamboo Book Chronicle" records that the seventh year of King Xiao of Zhou (903 BC) "winter, heavy rain and hail, cattle and horses died, (Long) River, Han (River) are frozen."
As the climate turned into a cold period, the ancestors of the Central Plains found that the rhinoceros, elephants and other animals that were widely present in henan and other central plains gradually withdrew from the Yellow River Basin and began to migrate south, for which "Lü's Spring and Autumn Gule" and "Mencius Teng Wen Gongxia" expressed it as King Wu of Zhou "driving away tigers, leopards, rhinos, elephants and far away", but the southward migration of these large mammals, in fact, can not rely on human power alone, and the background of their southward migration is the arrival of the first cold period in the history of China's 5,000-year civilization.
Although from the Western Zhou Dynasty onwards, rhinos and elephants in the Yellow River Basin gradually disappeared, but in the relatively warm, forested Jianghuai River Basin, rhinos, elephants are still widespread, so the ancestors for the rhino southward migration, although not understanding, but also do not think so, in this regard, the Spring and Autumn Warring States Period "Zuo Biao" wrote: "The cow has skin, rhinoceros (pronounced sì, referring to rhinoceros) is still many." Because rhinos were widely distributed in China at that time, rhinoceros armor made of rhino skin in the pre-Qin period even became large-scale war equipment for the Chu and Wu states in the south.
Qu Yuan wrote in the Nine Songs of National Martyrdom: Wu Ge xi was picked up by rhinoceros armor, and the car was wrong and the hub was short. At that time, in the vast southern Jingchu region of the Chu kingdom, "the rhinoceros elk was full of people."
Rhinoceros
In the course of the war between Wu and Yue, the two sides even had large-scale armies equipped with rhinoceros armor, and the "Wu Yue Chunqiu" records that in the decisive battle between Wu Wang Fuchai and Yue Wang Gou Jian, Wu Guo:
"Thirty thousand of the 10,000 men who have sent their clothes and waters will not suffer from the less shame of their deeds, but from the inadequacies of their multitudes."
Although there are exaggerations in historical records, the widespread popularity of rhinoceros armor in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods can also be seen, and against the State of Wu, the army of the State of Vietnam was also wearing rhinoceros armor:
"The Yue king divided his division into left and right armies, and all of them were ordered by the armor and ordered an guang's people, peishi jie's arrow, and Zhang Lusheng's crossbow."
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However, the pre-Qin people also began to observe the climate and species changes in the Central Plains, and Mencius (c. 372 BC - 289 BC) once recalled that when Yao was:
"The grass and trees are lush, and the animals and animals are breeding."
Mencius lived in the Warring States period, when the original forest meadows in the Central Plains had been destroyed by large-scale reclamation, and tropical and subtropical animals such as rhinos and elephants gradually disappeared and migrated to the Jianghuai River Basin and the vast southern region, while the footsteps of the Chinese ancestors migrating with nature and environmental changes have not stopped.
Oracle bones and pre-Qin historical records that during the Xia Dynasty and shang dynasty, the capital of the country was often migrated uncertainly, and the history called the Xia Hou clan ten migrations; the Yin people (merchants) also called themselves "not constantly peaceful" and "not often Yiyi". The most fundamental reason for this is mainly because the ancients were a nomadic agricultural economy, and every few years the local power was reduced, and crop yields would be seriously reduced, so the people had to move elsewhere and set up a new arable land.
In the early days of the founding of the Western Zhou Dynasty, due to the sparse population of the land, a large-scale division of the princes began to expand the territory, even in the early Eastern Zhou Dynasty, when the Capital of the State of Zheng moved to Xinzheng (present-day Xinzheng, Henan), and the Zheng people "cut off the basil and coexisted". Due to the vast wilderness between the various princely states, there were still many "gaps" between the Zheng state and the Song state (located in the north of the present-day Shangqiu in Henan), which showed that the scope of reclamation of the various princely states in the pre-Qin period was still not large, and the natural vegetation was still well preserved. However, in the early warring states period, there was already a situation of "Song Wuchangmu".
With the widespread use of iron during the Warring States period, coupled with the competition of various countries to change the law, develop farming, and encourage reclamation, so in the Warring States period, today's Henan region has "no long wood", the Surabaya River Basin of Shandong Hill West Road has "no forest", and in today's Hebei, Shandong, Henan provinces junction, as early as the Warring States period, there was a lack of wood for fire.
▲Map of forest change in China
The result of this large-scale destruction of forest vegetation by chinese ancestors was the gradual emergence of the "Yellow River" in the Warring States period.
In the pre-Qin and early Qin and Western Han Dynasties, the ancients called the "Yellow River" "River", because the water quality of the Yellow River at that time was clear, and there was no problem of large-scale carrying sediment.
"Cankan is barren, leaving the river dry." The river is clear and watery. ”
In the pre-Qin period before the Warring States, when there were still vast primeval forests in the Yellow River Basin, the ancestors cut down large trees such as sandalwood trees here, and the clear water quality of the "river water" became the object of praise for the poetry of the ancients, but in the late Warring States period, with the impact of human reclamation and war destruction, the forests in the middle reaches of the Yellow River began to experience the first large-scale destruction.
Taking the Jing River as an example, the sand content of the Jing River in the late Warring States period has been very high, with the Qin and Han Ding capital Guanzhong, the increasingly prosperous population activities and the management needs of the Guanzhong area, so that large-scale deforestation and land reclamation continue to appear, so, in the middle of the Western Han Dynasty, the Jing River is more turbid, there is a "Jing water a stone, its mud bucket" characteristics.
As the first major tributary of the Wei River, the largest tributary of the Yellow River, the water quality of the Jing River originating from the Hetao Plain and the eastern foothills of Liupan Mountain in Ningxia became turbid and deteriorated, which was also the result of the influence of human activities in the Spring and Autumn And Warring States periods, under the impact of a large amount of sediment in itself and its tributaries, in the late Warring States period, the Yellow River began to be called "Turbid River", and in the Tang Dynasty, the name of "Yellow River" began to be fixed.
▲ The Yellow River did not begin to gradually become turbid and yellow until the late Warring States period
At first, the Yellow River flowed through the Hebei Plain into the sea before the middle of the Warring States period, that is, before the fourth century AD, there was no embankment on both sides, and in the fourth century BC, that is, in the middle of the Warring States period, the various princely states began to build embankments in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, so the Yellow River channel began to be fixed, at the beginning, due to the sparse population in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, the embankments on both sides reached 50 Han Li and 20,000 meters wide, so the Yellow River was able to wander freely in the lower reaches, and the flood storage capacity of the river was also strong.
However, with the continuous increase of the population in the downstream areas, the Chinese ancestors began to reclaim the river trough beaches in the Yellow River embankment, and constantly reduced the Yellow River embankment, which made the riverbed in the lower reaches of the Yellow River shrink day by day, coupled with the bending of the river, so that the downstream rapid siltation increased, and the dangers were repeated.
Thus began nature's revenge on humanity.
Due to the large-scale destruction of the forests in the middle reaches of the Yellow River, coupled with the excessive content of cement and sand in the river under soil erosion, by the Western Han Dynasty, the Yellow River had ten large overflow diversions, which was the beginning of the large-scale flooding of the Yellow River.
In view of the frequent overflow of the Yellow River, in the Eastern Han Dynasty, from 69 to 70 AD, the Eastern Han government mobilized hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians to comprehensively rectify the lower reaches of the Yellow River under the auspices of Wang Jing, and for about 800 years, the lower reaches of the Yellow River showed a relatively stable situation and did not undergo major diversions.
But the process of human governance of the Yellow River is also laying hidden dangers for the next disaster.
Taking the governance of the Yellow River during the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty as an example, in order to control the river, Emperor Wu of Han ordered the large-scale bamboo forest in Qi County, Henan Province, in the Yellow River Basin, to cut down the large-scale bamboo forest in The Yellow River Basin, "the bamboo of the Lower Qi Garden is the rafter", "the bamboo of the Qi Garden is cut off from the River", and in the period of the Guangwu Emperor of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the Han army in order to fight the rebels, is even more "the bamboo of the Qi Garden is more than one million... Under the large-scale destruction of the river and war and human activities, by the Northern Wei period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, when the large-scale bamboo forests in Qi County, Henan had disappeared, the Northern Wei geographer Li Daoyuan said with emotion in the "Notes on the Water Classics":
"Looking at the Qichuan River today, there is no such thing."
Although during the Spring and Autumn Warring States and Qin and Han Dynasties, the original forest vegetation of the Yellow River Basin was destroyed on a large scale, and large-scale flood disasters were caused in the early Western and Eastern Han Dynasties, after history entered the Wei and Jin Dynasties, due to the large-scale southward movement of the northern nomads and the conversion of a large number of cultivated land in the Yellow River Basin into pastures, the vegetation part of the Yellow River Basin was restored.
However, with the cold and drying of China's climate during the Wei and Jin dynasties, it was impossible for the forest vegetation in the Yellow River Basin to return to the pre-Warring States situation.
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After history entered the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the Five Dynasties and the Two Song Dynasties, the footsteps of the Chinese ancestors once again moved north to the west.
During the Wei and Jin Dynasties, when due to the southward movement of the northern nomads, China's agricultural and animal husbandry junction was once moved south to the Yellow River Valley, and with the rise of the Sui and Tang Empires, the agricultural peoples of the Central Plains once again moved north to the west, and the Chinese agricultural and animal husbandry junction once again advanced to the Yinshan area. At that time, during the reign of Emperor Xianzong of Tang alone (806-820), the Tang Dynasty had more than 8,800 hectares of Tuntian in the Hetao Plain, and then opened Tuntian in northern Shaanxi and the Yinchuan Plain, resulting in large-scale destruction of the forests in the middle reaches of the Yellow River.
It was in the context of this ecological destruction that during the Tang Dynasty, due to the popularity of officials at that time to take a rhinoceros belt on their belts, coupled with the intensification of large-scale reclamation during the Tang Dynasty, this brought almost destruction to the rhinos in the Jianghuai River Basin and the vast southern region. Therefore, after the Middle and Tang Dynasties, rhinos were difficult to see in the vast southern regions of China, so when the countries in Southeast Asia offered tribute to the Tang Empire, they even regarded the rhinoceros, a large animal that was originally widely distributed in China, as a rare bird and beast.
The famous poet Bai Juyi (772-846) once wrote in the poem "Taming the Rhinoceros - Feeling the Difficulty of Politics at the End":
"The taming of the rhinoceros is the heavenly rhinoceros, and the body is terrifying."
The sea barbarian smells that there is a child of tomorrow, and the rhinoceros is driven by thousands of miles.
Once the Emperor was in the Palace of the Ming Dynasty, he cheered and danced to discuss his own merits. ”
▲ Stone rhinoceros of Tang Xianling in Sanyuan, Shaanxi
Bai Juyi records that the rhinoceros, which originally lived in tropical Southeast Asia and paid tribute to guanzhong, died a few years later during the first year of Emperor Dezong of Tang (785 – August 805) in a cold winter in Chang'an.
By the time of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (reigned 846-859), when a rhinoceros was captured in Quzhou (present-day Quxian County, Sichuan, Dazhu, etc.), the rhinoceros at that time was already very precious, so the rhino was specially sent to Chang'an City for tribute, considering that the rhinoceros in the previous imperial palace could not adapt to the climate of the Guanzhong region, and was frozen to death, Tang Xuanzong, who was "worried about physical properties", later ordered it to be "put back in the wilderness of Quzhou".
The increasing preciousness of rhinos in the land of China reflects the deterioration of the ecological environment in northern China during the Tang Dynasty.
Taking the Guanzhong region as an example, the result of the Sui and Tang Dynasties' capital Chang'an was that by the time of the Tang Dynasty, the entire Guanzhong region was "full of mountains and valleys, and the mountains were full ... By the time of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang, the most prosperous tang dynasty, there were no giant trees to supply for logging, so that lumberjacks had to travel from Shaanxi to Lanzhou (present-day north of Lan County, Shanxi Province) and Shengzhou (northeast of present-day Zungar Banner in inner Mongolia Autonomous Region) to obtain the giant trees used for the construction of palaces.
In this regard, the Tang Dynasty poet Du Mu once pointed to the ancient in the "A Fang Gong Fu" that satirized the Qin Dynasty, and also revealed it in words:
"Shushan Wu, A Fang out."
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At the same time as the forest resources are becoming more and more exhausted, the forest conservation has been lost, the water resources in the Guanzhong area have also been increasingly depleted, and the ecological environment of the former Guanzhong area "eight waters around Chang'an" and abundant water has gradually disappeared, and by the end of the Tang Dynasty, the flow of rivers such as Jingshui, Weishui, and Bashui has become smaller and smaller, and artificial channels such as the Longshou Canal and the Qingming Canal have also dried up one after another; in the Northern Song Dynasty, the water flow in the "Eight Waters" is even smaller to the point where it can cross the river.
According to statistics, starting from the Tang and Song dynasties, there were 22 records of clear water, drying up, and broken flow in the Guanzhong area. Among them, in the 45 years from the 22nd year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1683) to the 6th year of Yongzheng (1728), as the most important river that nourished Chang'an, the Wei River and its tributaries, there were as many as six recorded interruptions.
With the deforestation, soil erosion in the Guanzhong area has become more and more serious, which has increased the frequency of natural disasters in the Guanzhong area: flooding when there is rain, and drought without rain.
According to statistics, in the more than 100 years from the seventh year of Wude in the Tang Dynasty (624) to the twenty-ninth year of the new century (741), a total of 20 large-scale natural disasters occurred in the Gyeonggi area around Chang'an. There were 10 droughts, 7 floods, and 3 locust plagues.
According to the statistics of the Shaanxi Meteorological Bureau according to historical records, from the Qin Dynasty in the 2nd century BC, floods and droughts in the Guanzhong area became more and more frequent with the passage of time, of which in the middle of the Tang Dynasty, in the eighth century AD, there were 37 droughts, an average of one every 2.7 years.
This frequent natural disaster in the Guanzhong area has also made Chang'an City gradually enter an environment of ecological collapse.
After the middle of the Tang Dynasty, there were more and more records around Chang'an City about "famine in Guanzhong", "drought and flood in Guanzhong", "locust plague, flying sky to cover the sun", "serious famine, hunger on the road, cannibalism".
▲ In many parts of northern China, after a long drought, it is often accompanied by large-scale locust plagues
In this case, as early as the pre-Qin period, the Guanzhong Plain, which had the reputation of "the country of heavenly capital" because of its fertile wilderness, with the deterioration of the ecological environment, by the middle and late Tang Dynasty, it had become a poor place where "the land was forced to be poor, and the soil was poor".
Due to the large-scale deforestation that aggravated soil erosion, caused the increasing sand content of the Yellow River, and made it difficult to silt the waterway, which made it increasingly difficult to supply materials from the Jianghuai region to the Guanzhong region, and in the second year of Tang Dezong's reign (786), because the waterway transporting grain to Chang'an was blocked by the fanzhen, the entire Chang'an City fell into a grain shortage, resulting in a riot in the forbidden army. At this time, just 30,000 pieces of rice were transported to the surrounding area of Chang'an, and when Tang Dezong heard about it, he almost shed tears and said to the prince:
"The rice has arrived in Shaanxi, and my father and son will be born."
However, the ecological deterioration of the Guanzhong area has accumulated a lot. In 907, after the warlord Zhu Wen usurped the Tang Dynasty to establish Later Liang, he moved the capital east to Luoyang and Kaifeng, which were closer to the Jianghuai River Valley, and since then, the capitals of The Five Dynasties of Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han, and Later Zhou have all been Luoyang or Kaifeng, and one of the important backgrounds for the migration of the Chinese capital from west to east is the deterioration of the ecological environment in the Guanzhong region.
▲The deterioration of the environment and ecology in the Guanzhong region and the western region is an important background for the migration of the Chinese capital from west to east
After entering the two Song Dynasties, because the Northern Song Dynasty confronted the Western Xia and the Southern Song Dynasty confronted the Jin Dynasty, the Guanzhong region as the front line of the war was also greatly affected, and at that time, the "livestock production around Chang'an was exhausted... Ten rooms and nine empty spaces", the entire Guanzhong region in the Song Dynasty, eventually fell into a "bad land" of "thin soil" and "sparse soil".
Later, Li Xianfu, a person from the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote in the "Chang'an Xing", the Chang'an and Guanzhong Plains, which had already declined:
"There are no pedestrians on Chang'an Avenue, and the yellow dust does not produce thorns."
The mountains have peaks and are no longer dangerous, and the waves of the big rivers have been flattened. ”
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Before the ecological transformation of the Guanzhong region, the ecology of the Longyou, Hetao Plain and Hexi Corridor in western China also gradually deteriorated.
In the historical records, during the Western Han Dynasty, the Yinshan area of Inner Mongolia, the Hexi Corridor and other areas were still full of large-scale forests, but by the Three Kingdoms period, under the influence of long-term drought and man-made reclamation, these places were already full of Gobi Desert.
Taking the Tianshui and Longxi areas of Gansu as an example, during the Western Han Dynasty, "mountains and trees, the people used the board as a room house", but three or four hundred years later, in the fourth year of Cao Wei Jingyuan (263), when Sima Zhao led an army to conquer the Qiang people in the west, Lingzhou (present-day Lingwu County, Ningxia) and other places were already "north of the desert", and the vast Hetao area changed from the original land of abundant water and grass to the land of the Gobi Desert.
Take Ulan Bu and the desert as an example, here was originally located in the western part of the Hetao Plain in Inner Mongolia on the Yellow River alluvial plain, before the Han Dynasty Wei Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties, there was even a large lake Tu Shenze, Qin and Han Period, when the central government in order to resist the invasion of the Xiongnu, in the Hetao Plain large-scale reclamation, after the Eastern Han Dynasty, due to the Xiongnu southward, these Tun reclamation areas were abandoned one after another, due to the destruction of the original grassland vegetation, which made Ulanbu and the area of the cultivated topsoil gradually become quicksand, Eventually spreading into today's Ulan Bu and the desert, at the end of the 10th century, the Song Dynasty envoy Wang Yande sent an envoy to Gaochang (present-day Turpan) through the Ulan Buhe region, and saw this original grassland "three feet deep in sand, horses can not walk, walkers are riding camels."
Under the background of large-scale destruction of forests, grasslands and ecology in the middle and middle reaches of the Yellow River, China's political and economic centers eventually gradually migrated from guanzhong, Longyou, Hetao and Hexi in the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River to the lower reaches of the Yellow River.
The Yellow River, which lost its forests and grasslands in the upper and middle reaches and was increasingly depleted by soil erosion on both sides, began to roar at the Chinese ancestors after about 800 years from the early Eastern Han Dynasty to the general calm of the Sui Dynasty.
According to statistics, in the more than 400 years of the two Han Dynasties, the Yellow River only overflowed 9 times, an average of 1 time per 40 years; and in the 290-year history of the Tang Dynasty, the Yellow River overflowed a total of 24 times, an average of 1 time per 12 years, and the frequency was greatly improved.
▲ The frequent overflow of the Yellow River, its background is the expansion and reclamation of human beings
In the context of the deteriorating ecological environment in the middle and upper reaches of the Yellow River, with the gradual southward shift of China's economic center of gravity, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty was also moved east to Kaifeng in the lower reaches of the Yellow River in order to receive the wealth of the Jianghuai region nearby, but the serious erosion of the Yellow River made the Kaifeng section of the lower reaches of the Yellow River gradually form an above-ground hanging river, and it was several meters higher than the villages along the river.
From 1048 in the middle of the Northern Song Dynasty, the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River broke through frequently for decades, with a major breach every two or three years, and a major diversion every thirty or forty years. This makes the ecological environment of Kaifeng increasingly severely tested.
In addition to the natural frequent overflow of the Yellow River, in 1127, 1232 and 1234, the Southern Song Army and the Mongol army opened the Yellow River levee three times as a weapon of war, and after the frequent bursting of the Yellow River, it also led to the desertification and salinization of the soil in the flooded area, which further aggravated the ecological environment of the lower reaches of the Yellow River.
In this case, with the demise of the Northern Song Dynasty after the Jingkang Rebellion in 1127, China's political center finally swung from west to east for more than 2,000 years along the Chang'an-Luoyang-Kaifeng and other places in the Yellow River Basin, marked by the Southern Song Dynasty's capital Lin'an (Hangzhou) and the Yuan Dynasty's Jiandu (Beijing), which began the following 1,000 years of north-south fluctuations, and this change in the west-east, south-north of China's political center was undoubtedly caused by the deterioration of the ecological environment in the Yellow River Basin and the north.
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Under the impact of the deteriorating ecological environment in the north, natural disasters have also taken the lead in tearing open the mouth in the Loess Plateau region, where the ecological environment is the most fragile.
During the Chongzhen period (1628-1644), the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty, under the impact of climatic disasters in the late Ming and Xiaoice periods, there were 14 major droughts in the country in 17 years, so that the records of "starvation and death" and "cannibalism" in various places are endlessly in books.
In the second year of Chongzhen (1629), Ma Maocai, a Ming Dynasty official from Yan'an Province in northern Shaanxi, specifically described to the Chongzhen Emperor the natural disasters and famine situation in northern Shaanxi in the "Beichen Great Famine". Even if he was captured by the government, he did not regret it, and publicly stated: "Died of hunger and death of thieves and so on!" Instead of sitting and starving to death, if he dies for thieves, he will be full of ghosts. ”
In this situation, in the first year of Chongzhen (1628), Gao Yingxiang first led the people to revolt in northern Shaanxi. At that time, the regular army of the Ming Dynasty could maintain its advantage in the face of the uprising in the early days, but whenever the victory of the bandits was in sight, the cold and its concomitant famine would push more people in ecologically fragile areas such as Shaanxi and Henan who had no way to go, to the lineup of the rebel army, forming a trend of "wildfire burning inexhaustibility".
▲ The Loess Plateau region, where the ecological environment is most fragile, was the flashpoint of the Great Uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty
Under the successive blows of this 14 major droughts in 17 years, the northern part, which was already fragile in the ecological environment, eventually formed a situation of uprising and fire, and finally in 1644, Li Zicheng's peasant army invaded Beijing, the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself, and the Ming Dynasty collapsed. Considering the large-scale drought at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the fragile ecological environment in the northern region, under the heavy disaster that lasted for 17 years, the collapse of the social material foundation in the Yellow River Basin such as northern Shaanxi and Henan was undoubtedly an environmental factor that led to a large-scale uprising.
Just two years before the fall of the Ming Dynasty, in 1642, a tiger suddenly appeared outside the city of Guangzhou, and the last time a tiger appeared in Guangzhou City was more than 100 years ago in 1471, perhaps sensing an atmosphere of dynastic mourning, perhaps the death of the country, the mourning of its people, after the final capture of this tiger, the residents of Guangzhou City released the tiger.
No one mentioned the reason why the Guangzhou officials and people released the tiger this time, but perhaps in the dark, they felt some kind of power from Providence, as Zheng Guoming Xiangzi said in 540 BC:
"The god of the mountains and rivers, then the disaster of water and drought, the plague, is revered."
The god of the sun, moon, and stars, the snow, frost, and wind and rain from time to time, is revered. ”
In the midst of severe natural disasters and national disasters, people in the chaotic world suddenly have a sense of vulnerability, powerlessness and accidental awe in the face of nature.
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With the evolution of the northern climate and ecological environment, after the rhinoceros, elephants have also begun to retreat south in China.
Archaeologists have unearthed a large number of elephant bones in the Yin Ruins in Anyang, Henan, and the oracle bones have also recorded that the Shang King once captured 7 wild elephants at a time on the south side of the Taihang Mountain. However, with the Cold Period of the Yellow River Basin in the Western Zhou Dynasty, elephants gradually disappeared in the Yellow River Basin, and after the Southern and Northern Dynasties, elephants gradually disappeared in the Huainan and Jiangbei regions, and their activities were basically in the south of the Yangtze River.
After the Jing kang rebellion in 1127, Chinese Kou once again set off a large-scale wave of southward migration after the Wei and Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Anshi Rebellion, in this case, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in 931 AD, there were still records of elephant hunting in Quzhou, Zhejiang, but this was close to the northern boundary of elephant distribution, and after that, the northern boundary of Chinese elephant distribution further retreated to Wenzhou, Fujian, Guangdong and other places in Zhejiang.
At that time, with the rapid expansion of the population in the south, the ecological environment in Zhejiang and other places also suffered large-scale damage, and by the Song Dynasty, the Huijishan District of Zhejiang was already "with mountains and no wood"; In the Qianlong period, Zhushan County in Hubei Province was even more "reclaimed by the mountains and had nothing to hide"; the originally remote Wuning Valley area in Jiangxi and other places was also "reclaimed all over the countryside, and the children of Wanshan were bald"; Guidong County, Hunan, which was close to the Nanling Mountains, was also "growing teeth day by day, making a living, and planting miscellaneous grains in the deep mountains and high mountains, with almost no gaps".
With the continuous southward migration from the north and the population explosion, almost all the provinces south of the Yangtze River have been reclaimed, and the elephants that are gradually retreating south are also increasingly conflicting with humans. As early as the Northern Song Dynasty, the literati Peng Cheng recorded in the "MoKe Xingxi":
"(Fujian) Zhangpu County, Zhangzhou Dilian (Guangdong) Chaoyang, suduoxiang, often a dozen for the group, but not harmful. But the one who encounters the people is destroyed until the flesh and bones are crushed. The gaidu elephant is the fiercest of the elephants, and is not tolerated by the elephants, so it is harmful to people when encountered. ”
Southern Song Dynasty theorist Zhu Xi (1130-1200), when he was the prefect of Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, at that time, due to the increasing invasion of elephant territory by human reclamation, the elephant herds often came out to ravage crops to retaliate against humans, for this reason, Zhu Xi specially wrote "Persuasion to Farmers" to encourage villagers to hunt and kill wild elephants:
"There are many wastelands in honshu, there are disturbances in the gaiyuan lawsuit, and elephant beasts have the trouble of stepping on food. It is to cause people to dare not reclaim... The state has also issued a list to advise people to kill elephant beasts, and restrain lawsuits from pursuing the horns of teeth and hooves. Now don't set up a reward of thirty consecutive dollars, if someone who kills an elephant comes to ask for a reward, he will give it immediately. ”
Under the advance of farmers and the encouragement of government funds, by the time of the Song and Yuan dynasties, elephants eventually disappeared in the Fujian region.
▲ Asian elephant
Behind the disappearance of elephants in Zhejiang, Fujian and other places is the continuous expansion of Chinese mouth.
In the second year of the first year of the Western Han Dynasty (2 AD), when the Chinese population was 59.59 million;
In the fourteenth year of Emperor Xuanzong of Tang (755), when the population was 52.91 million, considering the problem of population escape, demographers estimated that the Chinese population had reached 80 million at that time;
By the fourth year of the Southern Song Dynasty (1193), when the Southern Song Dynasty plus the Northern Jin Dynasty and the Western Xia, Dali and other countries, demographers predicted that the Chinese mouth had exceeded 100 million people at that time;
Demographers speculate that after recovering from the wars of the late Song and Yuan dynasties, by the end of the Ming Dynasty, the actual population of China at that time had exceeded 100 million;
In the first year of Yongzheng (1723), the Qing Dynasty began to widely implement the "spreading of ding into acres", officially abolishing the poll tax that had been implemented for more than 2,000 years, after which the Chinese quickly exploded, and exceeded 100 million from the sixth year of Qianlong (1740), to the fifty-seventh year of Qianlong (1790) exceeded 300 million, and then to the fourteenth year of Daoguang (1834) exceeded 400 million.
Against the backdrop of this Chinese explosion, by the beginning of the 19th century, the wild elephants that remained in the Dongguan region of southern Guangdong also sang the final lament. At that time, wild elephants in the Dongguan area of Guangdong "every autumn there are flocks of elephants eating field grass", in the context of the increasing population expansion of the Pearl River Delta region, the villagers began to continue to hunt wild elephants, after that, The records of wild elephants in Guangdong eventually disappeared, and the elephants continued to retreat to Guangxi, Yunnan, and eventually only remained in the border areas of Yunnan and Myanmar.
The Chinese rhinoceros, on the other hand, struggled in the Yunnan region until the 20th century. According to statistics, in the last years of the Chinese rhinoceros, only from 1900 to 1910, the number of rhino horns that were jointly hunted and then offered by officials and people in Yunnan and other places reached more than 300.
Later, in 1922, the last small one-horned rhinoceros (Javan rhino) in China was killed. So far, there is no record of Chinese rhinos being killed, and with it is the eventual extinction of the rhinoceros species in China.
▲ Bronze ware made from rhinoceros as a prototype in the Western Han Dynasty
At this point, after 5,000 years of civilization reclamation, the Chinese ancestors advanced step by step from north to south, eventually forcing rhinos and elephants into a desperate situation, and in the process of the gradual deterioration of China's ecological environment from north to south, large animals such as the South China tiger also followed the lead in the rhinoceros and eventually became extinct.
In this 5,000-year-long epic journey of man and nature, man and animal in China, we were bound by various forces such as climate, ecology, famine, plague, war and manpower, but to this day, we still do not understand nature, do not know reverence.
Cosmic stars, mountains, rivers, sun and moon, birds and insects, where do we go?
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Yang Xinguang et al., "A Preliminary Study on the Causes, Effects and Countermeasures of China's Ecological and Environmental Changes", Pratacultural Science, No. 5, 2006
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