As a Taoist monk, he originally had no chance to enter history.
But history gave him a chance.
This opportunity pushed him to a crossroads in his life, some saying that he was a protector of culture, and some saying that he was a sinner of culture.
What it was, he didn't know it himself.
If you ask him, what is your identity?
There is only one answer he can give you: "I'm just a Taoist!" ”
This Taoist monk, Wang Yuanzhen, a farmer in Macheng, Hubei Province, fled to Gansu and became a Taoist monk.
There were many Taoists in those years, but only one was recorded in history.
In 1900, Wang Daoshi, who had just eaten a full meal, inadvertently opened a door, and the door was thick and with a certain powerful cultural atmosphere, which made him very intoxicated, as if he had drunk two or two red stars and two pots before dinner, making him faint.
What kind of mysterious and mysterious feeling made him eager to go inside, through the morning sun, he saw the scriptures that he had never seen in his life, neatly stacked in the cave, as if waiting for something?
Wang Daoshi did not read much, he could not understand more than three thousand words, and he could barely read only one reader's level, as if this carried the big brick of historical and cultural records, he naturally could not understand it.
He didn't understand it, but he said he didn't understand their value at all.
Through the questioning, Wang Daoshi had a very clear answer in his heart - this is a cultural relic.
As the first Wang Daoist (Wang Yuanzhen) to discover the cultural relics of dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, his first thought was not to sell cultural relics to make money, but to protect cultural relics. You're not wrong? The answer is no. Wang Daoshi maintained a consciousness that Chinese should have, and the first thought of reporting to the public, on the same day he walked 50 miles on foot, rushed to the county seat to find Dunhuang County Ling Yanze, and presented two volumes of scriptures taken from the Tibetan Scripture Cave. His purpose is very simple, the county commander, I found cultural relics in the stone wall of the Mogao Grottoes, this is a sample of cultural relics, you look at it first, and then send someone to collect it later. Unfortunately, this Zhixian lord surnamed Yan did not pay enough attention (or rather, he did not have the ability to appreciate and identify these cultural relics at all, and his cultural level and literacy were not as good as that of a Taoist priest. He simply glanced at the two volumes of scripture that were somewhat yellowed on the desk as two yellowed pieces of waste paper.
A pile of waste paper, what's there to protect.
What the county makes the adults think in their hearts is all displayed on the face.
The request made by Wang Daoist naturally did not have the following. Two years later, Yan Xianling's term of office expired, and a New Zhi County came to Dunhuang. Xinzhi County was a reader and knew how to appreciate, and when he saw that he was a professional, he immediately reported the situation of the Tibetan Scripture Cave to the New County Order. Upon hearing that it was a cultural relic, Wang Zhixian was not ambiguous, and immediately took a group of people and horses with him, personally went to the Mogao Grottoes to inspect, and picked up a few scrolls of scriptures to take away.
When you leave, leave a word for the Taoist to keep on the spot and look after the cave.
Artifacts are gone!
Good villains also give some guard fees.
Taoist monks also want to eat.
Unfortunately, the county commander did not have this realization, in his view, guarding the cultural relics was only a matter of convenience for Wang Daoshi, and there was no need to pay wages.
He had nothing to do anyway. In his view, these things are the state, and as a qualified Chinese citizen, he has the obligation to return them to the state. Instead of waiting here for someone to come to the door, it is better to send it yourself. The county commander did not understand the value of cultural relics, and the prefect and the prefectural government must have known that based on this purpose, Wang Daoshi picked two boxes of scripture scrolls from the Tibetan scripture cave and drove the donkey to Suzhou (Jiuquan). He ate and slept alone, risking wolves and bandits, and traveled more than 800 miles before reaching his destination and finding Daotai Tingdong, who was then an Ansu soldier. This Tingdong official did a good job, and his talent was also superb, just because he took a few glances at Ganzhou, he left a good poem that people praised.
Weak water flows out of the west to the border Han, and the green poplar shade is a fishing boat.
This country fish rice can be hidden, and the warblers are everywhere.
The glass wine garden vegetable village guests are drunk, and the peach creek willows are late spring smoke.
When to disassemble and come to the lake, cook the knots of the lyre bottle.
The only drawback was that he was too egotistical, very comfortable with the little writing kung fu in his bones, took the scriptures of Wang Daoshi, browsed through it, and finally came to a conclusion that made people want to break their mouths and scold: the words on the scriptures were not as good as his calligraphy, and that was it.
If things stop here, then Wang Daoshi's life will inevitably be much more stable.
But history has no ifs.
The news of the discovery of scrolls, prints, paintings, and bronze Buddhas in the Dunhuang grottoes soon spread throughout China.
For ordinary people, this may just be a surprising good news, and for Wang Daoshi, this means that trouble will come one after another.
In fact, a few years later, Ye Changchi, then a scholar of science and politics in Gansu, learned about the cave, Ye experts were knowledgeable, saw the cultural relics through Wang Xianling, and he quickly realized the value of this batch of cultural relics and asked Wang Xianling for a batch of cultural relics on the spot.
hand in!
Sorry, you think too much.
Possession.
Ye experts were satisfied with the cultural relics and seemed to be afraid of falling into the reputation of asking for Dunhuang cultural relics, and after obtaining the cultural relics, Ye Daren, who was both an official and an expert, did not issue instructions on the protection measures of the Tibetan Scripture Cave.
This result made Wang Daoshi very helpless, you said that you have seen it, and the cultural relics have also been taken, and it is also meaningful to be good.
Unfortunately, Ye Expert did not mean this.
Everyone seems to have come just to take away some of their favorite artifacts, and then shirk the responsibility on the spot and walk away.
Looking at the experts and officials who came and went in a hurry, Wang Daoshi sighed heavily, he really couldn't imagine, why was he not willing to protect this batch of high-grade cultural relics?
It's not worth it!
It doesn't seem to be!
Is the value not enough, obviously not.
Puzzled, wang Daoist in addition to stubbornly believe that it is too few people who know, this is a cultural relic has not attracted enough attention.
After some thought, he made the biggest decision of his life, and he, who was not very literate, wrote a letter to Lafayette in the palace by consulting the dictionary, and the letter was written sincerely and anxiously.
Wang Daoshi carefully affixed Dunhuang's stamps and stuffed the letters into the green mailbox with his trembling right hand.
However, the result was a stone sinking into the sea.
The stormy situation made Lafayette have no heart to pay attention to such trivial matters, and from the moment he wrote the letter, he was doomed to be an unanswered email.
Wang Daoshi was desperate.
Is this batch of artifacts really no one either?
The answer is no.
Soon, an Englishman named Stein arrived, but this unfriendly foreigner had a Buddhist heart, and he heard from a Uighur merchant from Urumqi, Sahibok, that the Mogao Caves had been discovered, and unlike the indifference of the Qing officials, although he had not yet seen the relics of the Mogao Caves, he maintained great enthusiasm.
On March 16, Stein made a hasty visit to the Mogao Caves, when the Taoist monk who was in charge of the key to the door of the cave was out of the house, and Stein saw a written Buddhist scripture from another young monk. The content of the Buddhist scriptures and the sense of historical heaviness aroused his great interest, and he decided to conduct a systematic investigation of the manuscripts here, so after inspecting the historical sites around Dunhuang, he came to the Mogao Grottoes again. Through contact, Stein found that Wang Daoshi and these cultural relics still have a certain cognitive ability, at least not as waste paper, in the process of conversation, he found that Wang Daoist is not very good at talking.
So he found Master Jiang to negotiate with Wang Daoshi and asked to read all the manuscripts of the Tibetan Scripture Cave, but Wang Daoshi refused. But Stein did not give up on this, through contact he found that Wang Daoshi liked Tang Monk very much, so he compiled a set of Stories for Wang Daoshi that Tang Monk Xitian took from the Scriptures and he came from India today to find Tang Monk's testament.
The story is clumsy and doesn't even stand up to scrutiny.
Wang Daoist believed it to be true, and under the repeated persuasion of Master Jiang, he secretly took out a bundle of manuscripts and handed it to Master Jiang that night.
History has left us with a scene of gritted teeth.
With the help of Master Jiang, Stein spent seven days examining the manuscripts and silk painting fabrics held by Wang Daoshi one by one in the Yongdao outside the Cave. He picked out what he thought was good rolls and paintings, bought them for 40 horseshoe silver equivalent to 500 rupees, and then used a year to slowly transport them back to England. No one stopped me throughout the whole process, and no one felt inappropriate.
The Taoist priests worship Xuanzang, and the paintings on the newly built veranda opposite the Grotto Temple have clear evidence, and the paintings are some very absurd legends... I told Wang Daoshi in my very limited Chinese language about my own admiration for Xuanzang and how I had followed in his footsteps from India across the mountains and deserts, so that he was obviously touched by me. That morning a door to the stone chamber where the treasure was hidden opened... The scrolls were piled up tightly layer by layer, up to about ten feet high, and since the Daoist priest had been enlightened by me, he enthusiastically took out the rolls one by one. --Stan Young
A few years later, Paul Bo xihe of France also came to the wind and fraudulently bought six thousand volumes of writings, prints, scriptures, documents, and Buddhist paintings with 500 taels of silver, and took 376 pictures of the Mogao Grottoes.
Not long after, the Japanese also hurried to the Mogao Caves and used three hundred and fifty-two pieces of silver to buy more than four hundred volumes of the Scriptures.
Seeing that there were more and more foreigners coming and going, and his appetite was getting bigger and bigger, Wang Daoshi was a little sad, these precious cultural relics, for many years, had never been lost for no reason during his custody, and now they were almost about to be emptied.
Even if it is sold for better protection, this batch of cultural relics can be completely sold, so what is the purpose of protection?
In those days, Wang Daoshi had been wondering whether his decision was correct.
Like a businessman who is in a dilemma, he does not know whether anyone will curse him in the future, let alone know that in a few years, he will be nailed to the pillar of historical shame because of this batch of cultural relics.
But a Chinese background tells him that these things belong to China after all.
If they are all sold, what is the point of discovering him?
Based on this, he began to hide some privately and leave them for posterity.
In 1914, after Stein's second visit to the Mogao Caves, Wang Daoshi said a thought-provoking remark to him, which was recorded in the Archaeological Records of the Western Regions of Stein: "Speaking of the damage caused by the government's handling of his beloved Chinese scrolls, he expressed regret that he did not have the courage and courage at that time, obeyed Master Jiang's words, accepted a large sum of money from me, and gave me the entire collection of books." After being harassed by the government, he was so frightened that he hid his Chinese manuscript, which he regarded as particularly valuable, in a safe place. ”
However, he forgot that once many things were started, it was impossible to take them back.
The cultural value that history itself has given to scriptures has long predestined them to become sought-after goods.
History has an insurmountable scene: dozens of caves have been carved into passages, connecting the caves, and a large number of murals have been destroyed.
The cultural relics that were treasured by Wang Daoshi for life were eventually destroyed because of his discovery.
This was the result that Wang Daoshi didn't want to see the last thing, but it happened all.
Leave him helpless.
At the end of the story, we talk about the end of Wang Daoshi, because he sold a lot of scriptures, he still could not escape the investigation, in order to survive, he had to pretend to be crazy and stupid, and finally built a Taoist tower in his later years, and died in poverty, he used all the proceeds of the collection to repair the temple, and personally never spent a penny of silver in it.
He did his best for this batch of cultural relics, although the results were not satisfactory, although the final result was that these precious cultural relics were sold little by little from his hands, to the hateful British, the French, the Japanese, so that when we consulted the Dunhuang materials, we had to look at Britain, France, and Japan again and again, but I still think that he tried his best. In that era, he was just an ordinary person, standing in the middle of the crossroads of history and culture, he tried his best to let himself take a path that seemed right, but unfortunately history did not give him this opportunity...