In the name of the country, a century of heritage, bank of China, to build a new era of global first-class bank. Bank of China Jiangsu Branch takes you on a journey through 101 museums and legends in Jiangsu.
To use the current Internet vocabulary to describe, abacus is a Chinese invention with explosive wisdom. Abacus is Chinese original method of calculation, known as the fifth largest invention in China, and has a history of more than 1800 years. Until the 1980s and 1990s, its use was quite common. Going to school with an abacus on your back is a childhood memory that many Chinese. Now the situation is different, abacus not only faded out of the field of practical computing, but also basically withdrew from the primary school mathematics syllabus in 2001.
At the end of 2013, the abacus application was successful, becoming China's 30th World Intangible Cultural Heritage Project. On the night of the announcement of the selection results, the abacus that appeared in the CCTV news screen came from the China Abacus Museum, which is also the world's largest abacus museum.
The China Abacus Museum is located in Nantong, Jiangsu Province, visiting the Abacus Museum, the most attractive of course is the abacus.
However, the most cultural relics in the museum and the abacus of mathematical research value are a bit unsurprising. It was two wooden abacuses, collectively known as the "Ziyu Abacus". The name comes from its designer, the Qing Dynasty Sipin official Zhou Maoqi, the trumpet Ziyu. After the Second Opium War, the Westerners built the first naval shipyard in modern China, the Fuzhou Shipping Bureau, and Zhou Maoqi was the commander of the ship administration, commanding the manufacture of China's first steel-armored cruiser, the "Pingyuan", these two sub-jade abacuses were made for the calculation of a large amount of data when building ships. The two abacuses have two peculiarities: one is that the beam and border of the abacus are engraved with very detailed measurement units, carry relationships and calculation methods, such as the 49-file abacus of one of the upper two and lower five beads, engraved with ancient counting units such as "Tai Chi, Tai Chu, Tai Shi, Tai Su"; the second odd of the Ziyu Abacus is another 25-file abacus, which is a 4-up and 5-abacus abacus, which is very rare. How to use the abacus of the four beads on the beam is still a mystery.
Wooden, silver jade ceramic, abacus of various materials are available. Long, square, round, Tai Chi Bagua octagonal, Beijing Temple of Heaven look... Strange.
Among them, there are specially made for blind people, in order to prevent the beads from sliding at will, the beads are made into flattened rectangles. The smallest abacus was only a few millimeters, and the eyesight was almost invisible. The largest one is tall, 7.8 meters long, 1.8 meters high, weighing up to 3 tons, made of precious rosewood.
Founded in 2004, the China Abacus Museum came 80 percent of its original collection from a Shanghai-based calculator collector, Chen Baoding. Mr. Chen Baoding, an old accountant and one of the founders of Shanghai Lixin School of Accounting, donated many of his collections to the Abacus Museum before his death. Not only that, but there is also an abacus that he personally designed and produced, which is also very special, and the old man condensed the history of abacus into an abacus. The abacus of this abacus is rectangular, in the shape of a piece of mahjong card, and each card is engraved with words, and the content is related to abacus. For example, "Western Zhou Abacus", which hints at the origin of abacus, and then "Qingming On the River Map", which means that at least in the Northern Song Dynasty, the abacus has been widely used, because on this famous painting by the Northern Song Dynasty painter Zhang Zeduan, there is a medicine shop at the far left end of the scroll, and there is an abacus on the counter of the medicine shop.
The China Abacus Museum, taking people through, is a wonderful abacus cultural journey.
Author | Chen Jing