Cover photo: Chen Hao
The biggest special thing about this oriental port and cultural city is that it has always stood at the intersection and highest point of China's marine civilization and Confucian civilization.
Ningbo Hemudu Ruins (Wu Weichun/Photo)
Ningbo is one of the first places where the bright morning light arrives on the coastline of the East China Sea.
Here the mountains and the sea lean together, the shoreline is tortuous, the bay is deep, and the scenery is beautiful. Here the people are brilliant, the great thinkers, the business giants are generations, and the academic, bibliophilic culture, southeast Buddhism, and Shang gang culture in eastern Zhejiang are flourishing here, and the weather is endless.
The biggest special feature of this oriental port and cultural city is that it has always stood at the intersection and highest point of China's marine civilization and Confucian civilization in the long river of thousands of years of history. The fusion and convergence of the two is the root of Ningbo's civilization.
Jingtou Mountain: The Dawn of Marine Civilization
In 1973, villagers in Mudu Town, Yuyao, Ningbo, planned to build a drainage station at a low-lying location when they discovered a secret that shook the world.
Here, a large number of plant remains, animal remains, wooden architectural remains and components from 7,000 years ago have been found, as well as thousands of pottery, bone, stone, wood and so on.
The dietary uses unearthed from Hemudu include kettles, pots, bowls, pots, plates, bowls, etc. The emergence of cooking utensils such as kettles and koshiki shows that human beings have gone from raw food to cooked food, from fishing and hunting to settlement, from barbaric evolution to a new historical stage of civilization, which is an epoch-making symbol of human history.
The discovery and naming of the Hemudu culture broke the historical limitations of the Yellow River center of The Prehistoric Chinese Civilization, incorporated the Yangtze River civilization into the core position of the origin of Chinese civilization, and further established the consensus of the multi-source origin of Chinese culture.
40 years later, in 2013, not far from the Hemudu site, Sanqi Town, Yuyao City, Ningbo Province, explored a sensational new group of new sites. It is named after Jingtou Mountain in the remnants of the nearby Siming Mountains, and is known as the "Jingtou Mountain Ruins".
From September 2019 to August 2020, the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, together with the Ningbo Municipal Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and the Hemudu Site Museum, excavated the site, and unearthed a wealth of marine shells, fishing and hunting animal skeletons, pottery, wood and other artificial products, showing a strong marine cultural characteristics.
After research, experts believe that the current site area is a corner of the Coastal Plain of Ningbo at an altitude of only 2 meters, 8,000 years ago, it was the slope of a small hill with high west and low east, facing the ancient bay, and the village where the Jingtou Mountain people lived witnessed the ebb and flow of the East China Sea every day. Only later experienced rapid sea level rise and silt deposition, and the top of the mountain was covered by thick silt.
The ancestors living here should be the earliest fishermen along the coast of China, creating the earliest marine culture on the southeast coast of China, and may be an important source of Austronesian language culture in the western Pacific region.
This is a major breakthrough in the study of Chinese marine culture archaeology and marine environment, and also pushes the starting point of Ningbo's marine civilization forward by another 1,000 years. Every shell and piece of pottery unearthed at the Jingtoushan site shows how the ancestors of China and ningbo took a firm step to embrace and explore the ocean 8,000 years ago.
Mingzhou Port: Witness the era of China's great navigation
In the last years of the Western Jin Dynasty, the Central Plains was in turmoil, and the unprecedented scale of immigrants flocked to eastern Zhejiang; the most famous were the two major families of the Langya Wang clan and the Chen Junxie clan. Because of their move in, eastern Zhejiang became a cultural highland for a while.
In that era of indulging in landscapes and the prosperity of metaphysics, the eighteen eastern Jin dynasty scholars, led by Wang Xizhi and Xie An, as well as the eighteen senior monks such as Zhi Daolin and Zhu Daoqian, who traveled with them, had long been in the mountains of eastern Zhejiang. In a beautiful mountain, they found the "Four Window Rock" of the immortal cave "Zhongtong Sun and Moon Light", so they renamed the mountain "Siming Mountain", and "Mingzhou" became the original name of Ningbo.
After the unification of the Sui and Tang dynasties, eastern Zhejiang, where wei and Jin celebrities gathered, became a major place for rediscovering Chinese culture. Literati and scholars came along the Zhejiang East Canal, east to Donghai Zhoushan, south to the Cao'e River, Xixi to Tiantai, Linhai, or from Xinchang along the Creek to Fenghua Xikou and Ningbo, tour the southeast landscape, trace the wei and Jin relics, and form a splendid "Zhejiang East Tang Poetry Road".
In his lifetime, Li Bai once entered Zhejiang and witnessed the splendid world of "four ming and three thousand miles, towards the Chicheng Xia" and "the red light of the sunrise scatters, and the light shines on the snow cliffs". The great poet He Zhizhang even called himself the "Siming Fanatic". Today, on the Moon Lake in Ningbo, there is also a He Secret Prison Shrine commemorating the two great poets Li Bai and He Zhizhang.
The fusion of northern and southern cultures has also enhanced the creativity of regional cultures. Ningbo Shanglin Lake Yue Kiln has a super high porcelain production technique, of which celadon is the most respected for its transcendent exaltation and natural elegance.
The famous Yue porcelain directly contributed to the rise of Mingzhou Port. During the Tang Dynasty, Mingzhou was the main export port for Yue kiln products, directly exporting to Japan, the Korean Peninsula and Southeast Asian countries.
By the two Song Dynasties, mingzhou's civil maritime trade entered a golden age. Especially in the Southern Song Dynasty, the rapid development of the commodity economy in Jiangnan with the Yangtze River Delta as the core formed a strong market expansion force, and The port of Mingzhou became a bridgehead for the expansion of the commodity economy from inland to the sea, from the regional market to the offshore market, witnessing the era of great navigation belonging to China at that time.
Lu You once described the grand scene of trade in Mingzhou Port: "Only the four Ming, the great state of the sea ... The Ship of Thousands of Miles, the Jia of the Five Directions, the Nanjin Dabei, the Weiji City, and the Uncountable. "From the port of Mingzhou, not only tea, porcelain and silk fabrics are exported, but also a large number of Buddhist paintings, books and so on. Ningbo Tiantong Temple became the ancestral court of Zen Buddhism in Japan, and even craftsmen such as shipbuilders and carpenters and statue carvers traveled far and wide to spread culture overseas. It is no exaggeration to say that Ningbo at that time was an important town of East Asian culture.
Due to the prosperity of the Maritime Silk Road, Ningbo is also the main creation of the sea gods in the East China Sea. The Mazu faith has gradually spread to the whole country because of Ningbo, and folk beliefs such as Maitreya and Guanyin have also gone to the world with the maritime merchants and fishermen.
Ningbo out of Da Ru
During the Northern Song Dynasty, the "Xingxue Movement" enabled the rapid development of local official studies in Ningbo and gave birth to a number of famous educators.
During the Qing calendar of the Northern Song Dynasty, five scholars, Lou Yu, Du Alcohol, Yang Shi, Wang Zhi, and Wang Shu, known as the "Five Gentlemen of the Qing Calendar", opened the construction of Neo-Confucianism in Ningbo and cultivated a group of civilian students who had begun to take shape.
During the Two Song Dynasties, the Ningbo cultural context continued to flourish. There are 730 jinshi in Yinxian County alone. Among them, the most brilliant is the Shi family - in the 160 years since Emperor Huizong of Song, this family has dozens of high school scholars, three officials to the prime minister, six officials to six Shangshu, more than 200 people to hold official positions inside and outside the imperial court, and ningbo people praised it as "Manchu Dynasty Wenwu, half out of the history gate".
The two major families of Wang and Xie, who moved into the Eastern Jin Dynasty, returned to glory in the Ming Dynasty. The descendants of the family, Xie Qian and Wang Hua, successively became emperors during the Chenghua years, and Wang Hua had a son of the world-famous title, Wang Yangming, the Great Confucian King.
Wang Yangming's life has gone through hardships and dangers, and the official scene has fluctuated, but his original intention of doing "the first thing in the world" has not changed. Everywhere, they studied extensively among Confucians, Buddhists, and Taoists. At the most difficult time in the life of a courtier who lived in Longchang, Guizhou, in the cave of Longgang Mountain, he realized that "the heart is reason", that is, the famous "Dragon Field Enlightenment". Later, he put forward propositions such as "the unity of knowledge and action", encouraging people to go out of the study and improve the world and create the world in practical life.
"Yangming Xinxue" profoundly influenced a large number of Chinese intellectuals such as Zeng Guofan, Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, and Chen Duxiu in later generations. After its introduction to Japan, it directly promoted the enlightenment of the Meiji Restoration, which was described by Liang Qichao as "the Japanese Restoration, also led by Wang Xue". Kazuo Inamori, the "god of management" in contemporary Japan, is also an open admirer of "Wang Xue".
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, Ningbo produced another democratic enlightenment thinker- Huang Zongxi, the Great Confucian.
Huang Zongxi's father, a member of the Donglin Party, died in prison for impeaching Wei Zhongxian. After the unjust case was rehabilitated, Huang Zongxi wrote a letter asking the remnants of the Wei Party to stab the enemy in the sleeve during the trial of the Punishment Department, and spread the word "Yao Jiang Huang Xiaozi" all over the world. After the Qing soldiers captured Nanjing, together with his younger brother Huang Zongyan, he sold his property, recruited hundreds of volunteer soldiers, and organized the "Shizhong Battalion" to resist the Qing Dynasty by King Fenglu, and was born and died at all costs.
After the Qing government pacified Jiangnan, he lived in seclusion for a long time in the "Dragon tiger grass hall" in front of the tomb of his father in Yuyao's hometown, repeatedly refused the qing court's call, and spent his whole life lecturing and writing, and the "dragon and tiger grass hall" also became the ideological holy land that students in eastern Zhejiang aspired to. Here, he wrote such monumental works as "Ming Yi to be Visited" and "The Case of Ming Confucianism", and founded the Zhejiang Eastern Historiography School, which lasted for hundreds of years.
"Quotient and book" are combined
Ningbo people are good at collecting books, and the style of collecting books is the knowledge support behind the brilliant civilization achievements of Ningbo people.
Built during the Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty, Fan's Tianyi Pavilion has a history of more than 450 years, is the oldest surviving library in China and one of the three oldest surviving family library buildings in the world.
The reason why Tianyi Pavilion has stood for hundreds of years and eventually evolved into a legend is due to the sincere love of books and extremely strict management measures of the Fan family.
The founder Fan Qin was a native of Yin County (present-day Yinzhou), Ningbo, ming jiajing eleven years into the soldier, once the official to the right shilang of the military department, after returning to his hometown, built a library building on the east side of the family house on the west bank of Ningbo Moon Lake, taking the meaning of "heavenly life water, 60% of the earth", named Tianyi Pavilion.
Fan Qin and his descendants of the Fan family are extremely rational about the custody of books, not only adopting careful fire and insect prevention and moisture prevention measures such as building buildings around the water, avoiding silkworms in rue incense, and absorbing moisture in quartz, but also formulating a series of strict cabinet prohibition and inheritance systems such as "generation does not divide books, books do not leave the cabinet".
On the one hand, Tianyi Pavilion is extremely private, and on the other hand, it is also committed to the pursuit of practical use. During the Qianlong period, fan qin's eighth grandson, Fan Maozhu, entered the collection of 638 kinds of books in the Tianyi Pavilion, which shook the government and the opposition and became a cultural model in the minds of bibliophiles. Tianyi Pavilion was also selectively opened to scholars—The Great Confucian Huang Zongxi had the privilege of ascending the library, "giving birth to its collection", and writing the famous "Tianyi Pavilion Collection Secretary".
The persistent pursuit of culture embodied in Tianyi Pavilion highlights the importance that Ningbo people attach to cultural values, the pursuit of independent personality and their strong sense of responsibility to society.
After the founding of New China, Ningbo contributed a large number of academicians who made pioneering research to the motherland, such as Tan Jiazhen and Tong Dizhou, and the number of academicians from Ningbo ranked far among the top in the country.
The good reading tradition, especially the Confucian traditional education, also makes Ningbo people good at accumulating wealth, but they are not burdened by wealth, and are committed to "walking the path to benefit the world".
After the opening of the port in modern times, a group of Ningbo people with open ideas have rapidly accumulated wealth and formed the "Ningbo Merchant Gang" because they are good at learning, have the courage to innovate, and with the geographical advantages of the sea. Since then, Ningbo businessmen have traveled all over the country and even around the world, investing commercial profits in emerging industrial fields such as new-style banks, steamship shipping, and modern industry, creating more than 100 "China's firsts" such as the first bank, the first stock exchange, and the first suit.
After the success of Ningbo businessmen, the first thing that comes to mind is often to donate funds to run schools. Yan Xinhou, a famous industrialist and financier known as the originator of the Ningbo Gang, once founded a new-style school "ChuCai Academy"; Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong businessman from Ningbo, once donated huge sums of money to study in the mainland; and Bao Yugang, a Ningbo "World Ship King", returned to his hometown after the reform and opening up to donate funds to establish Ningbo University.
The combination of business and books has given birth to the unique and noble civilization of Ningbo City.
(The author is Huang Wenjie, Deputy Secretary of the Party Branch of Ningbo Cultural Tourism Research Institute and Director of the Policy Theory Department)
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Source: Lookout Oriental Weekly
Editor: Zhou Ziru Second Instance: Zhang Liqu Third Trial: Ye Hong
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