The red bat pattern on qianlong's dragon robe in the Palace Museum symbolizes Hong Fuqitian
Although the animals from which the new coronavirus originated from this heinous catastrophe has not yet been finalized. But the wildlife trade in the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is almost certain, and in the laboratory, experts have also found a coronavirus stored in the body of the "Yunnan Chrysanthemum Bat", which is as similar in genetic sequence as high as 96% to the "new coronavirus" that caused the infection.
Bat-pattern porcelain in the Forbidden City
For a time, the friends who were forced to stay at home to brush the circle of friends in the New Year hugged the bats one after another: such an ugly, dirty, and disgusting animal can still be eaten? Or is it simmering over low heat? Is there also a tradition of eating bats? - Sorry, most of the ancients couldn't actually get their mouths down when it came to eating bats.
In addition to the disgusting nature of this thing, which resembles beasts and birds, in fact, in the eyes of the ancients, bats are the only animals representing China's "Fu" culture and the best symbol of blessings.
Yunnan chrysanthemum bat - this thing really has to eat?
If we look at history, we will find that the popularity of bat ornaments is comparable to the wide distribution of bats: from south to north, from the imperial palace to the people, especially after the Ming and Qing dynasties, according to the concept that "ornaments must mean auspicious", bat patterns appeared in large quantities in people's clothing, food, housing, and travel, which can be called the first choice of mascots of the ancients, carrying the pursuit of Chinese praying for happiness and peace, and celebrating auspiciousness.
Filigree enamel Gou Lotus Bat Pattern Three-legged Smoker Palace Museum
How popular was the bat pattern around the ancients? Taking the Ming and Qing dynasties as an example, it is not too much to say that you can't look up and look down.
According to the Ming "Book of Discretion", on the day of his birthday, the Ming emperor would wear "chess grid as a skeleton, filled with dragon patterns, "swastika", "shou", lingzhi, and red bat clouds, indicating "long life" and "Hong Fu Qi tian".
Outside the government and the public, in the freehand paintings of the literati doctors, all kinds of "Fu" diagrams, "Fu" diagrams given by tianguan, and "Fu" Shou Shuangquan pictures must also have bats, saying that bats are the only symbol of "Fu", it is not exaggerated - the value is so high, who dared to risk bad luck in ancient times to stew it?
Why have bats become the embodiment of "Fu culture"? How did "Fu Culture" appear in China?
Qi Baishi Wufu Xing Cloud Map (Red Bat)
Let's start with the history of bat patterns.
In Beijing, the largest palace you know for sure - the Palace Museum, but what about the largest palace?
It is the Gongwang Mansion - this nearly 60,000-square-meter complex has been used as the residence of Hezhen and Yongxuan, which has experienced the process of the Qing Dynasty from prosperity to decline, so there is a saying that "a Gongwangfu, half of the history of the Qing Dynasty".
Bats in King Gong's mansion
However, Gongwangfu actually has another alias, called "The Land of Ten Thousand Blessings", which is actually "the Land of Ten Thousand Bats", because Gongwangfu is the most typical representative of bat patterns in architectural applications. Its garden is called "Cui Jin Garden", which is almost a Fu Culture theme park, in which it is said that there are 10,000 bats of different shapes, distributed on top of painted paintings, window edges, piercings and gray sculptures. The pools, rockeries and some functional buildings in The Garden have also been designed in the shape of bats. There are even "bat ponds", "bat mountains" and "bat halls" interspersed with them, which can be called an authentic feng shui "bat (blessed) land" - what if the power is tilted over the world and cannot be used with dragon patterns? Washu's answer is: just choose bats.
Bat-shaped windows in King Gong's mansion
Looking at the south, 2100 kilometers away from Beijing, Guangzhou, on the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall, the largest surviving Lingnan Ancestral Hall building, there are also a large number of bats flying with wings outstretched, and there is an old saying called "the inexhaustible Lugou Bridge lion, the countless Chen Clan Ancestral Hall bats", which is the sigh of the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall bats. On the eaves and stone fences of the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall alone, there are about hundreds of bat patterns.
Guangdong Chen Clan Ancestral Hall
It can be seen that at the time of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the bat ornaments that bring auspicious meanings on the vast land of China from Beijing to Guangzhou have penetrated into the body and mind from top to bottom.
If we look back and look back at history, we will find that the story of bats and Chinese is very long....
The Palace Museum houses bat-pattern porcelain
On the surface, bat ornamentation is just a harmonic stem for playing with the word Fu, but if we delve into the essence, we will find that this move is very intelligent - how do we express the abstract "Blessing" with patterns? How do we use visual images to show the complex meaning of the word blessing and the expectation of the arrival of the blessing? Therefore, the bat pattern is essentially an externalization of the concept of fu, and the Chinese of wisdom uses unique Chinese character harmonic techniques to create a representative image to express the prayer for blessing in life.
As an important part of the Chinese tradition, from the perspective of the history of social development, the folk traditional society that was founded by farming Chinese, while forming the idea of material self-sufficiency, art is more advocating practicality, and the art that can bring "Fulu Shou" is good art. Furthermore, under the ideological concept of the unity of heaven and man, according to Mr. Ji Xianlin, "The essence of Chinese culture lies in the unity of heaven and man, and man and nature can only be friends, not enemies." ”
In this way, bats, which were originally fierce animals, gradually became a symbol of blessing.
The Palace Museum has a collection of bat-pattern porcelain
So how did ancient Chinese view bats?
Mingren Feng Menglong's article may be quite representative, he laughed in "Laughing House Bat Riding the Wall", when the phoenix celebrates its birthday, hundreds of birds come to congratulate the worship, but only the bat does not come, and the bat's reason is that he is a bird instead of a four-legged beast. When the beast king Qilin celebrated his birthday, the bat still did not attend, it said that I have wings to fly, so it is not a bird. This story is a bat to mock the political arena of the time.
Cao Zhi, a great talent during the Three Kingdoms period, also wrote a "Bat Endowment": "Call for treachery, give birth to bats." The shape is peculiar, and every variation is constant. Can't help but fly, fly without false wings. Bright and dark, full of rat-like shape. Birds do not resemble bipedal; they have teeth for the sake of hair. The nest does not feed the fish, and there is no milk. There is no room for mao, and the feather tribe is expelled. The lower is not the land, the upper is not Fengmu. ”
It can be said that most people actually dislike its ugly and dirty side. But Chinese culture has never been a one-sided mirror.
On the other hand, the ancients also regarded bats as a symbol of longevity. Ge Hong's Taoist theoretical work "Baopuzi" yun of the Eastern Jin Dynasty: "Chitose bats, color like snow like snow, set is hanging upside down, the brain is heavy." This thing is obtained and dried up and served, and long live now. "There are hundreds of caves under the Danshui Pavilion in Jiaozhou, very deep, and they have not tasted their distance, and the bats in the caves are as big as birds, and they are more upside down, and they are obedient to make people immortal." ”
Eating can prolong life, of course, is just nonsense. In fact, the ancients also knew that bats are purely harmonic sounds, stained with blessings, symmetrical in their own appearance and sufficient recognition, and eventually formed an auspicious bat pattern. In the "Complete Collection of Yiyuan Pavilion • Melon Shed Summer Escape", there are clouds that "the genus of insects is the most disgusting moruo bat, and now the weaving and embroidery pictures are used to homophonize with Fu also." ”
But Chinese the allusion of bats as models and blessings in them is not completely without historical origins.
Jade Bat Collection of the National Museum
In fact, as early as the Neolithic Age, there is such a jade bat sculpture in the Hongshan culture, which is simple and atmospheric, and outlines the basic shape of the bat with a simple shape. From the Shang Dynasty to the Warring States period, bat patterns on bronzes and bat-shaped bronzes are not uncommon, like Shaanxi Baoji, which has unearthed a bronze statue full of bat patterns.
The five blessings on the throne with ivory flowers and fruit patterns inlaid with mahogany gold lacquer
In the Han Dynasty, China unearthed a Western Han bat-shaped persimmon constellation arc mirror. Next to the mirror body is engraved the inscription "Sauvignon Blanc, do not forget, often rich, happy and unfulfilled". It can be seen that as early as the time of the Han Dynasty, the bat character of the bat has been associated with the rich character of the rich. Bats become rich harmonics and figuratives. At the time of the Wei and Jin Dynasties, bat ornaments absorbed the foreign Buddhism and Persian ornaments at that time, and began to appear complex and gorgeous tendencies.
At the time of the Tang Dynasty, there were some bat-related poems and fables, yuan shu's "Jing Mid-Autumn Festival": "Incorruptible fireflies enter, windows open bats fly". The bat pattern in the Song Dynasty completely ushered in a turning point, the emperor was keen on Xiangrui to promote the prosperity of auspicious culture, and the prosperity of civilian culture made the bat pattern ornament gain vitality until it was carried forward in the folk.
The Ming and Qing dynasties became the heyday of bat ornamentation, and it was widely used in all aspects of clothing, food, housing, and transportation, from the shading of the emperor's dragon robe to the carved beams of the Nanyue Ancestral Hall. Bat ornamentation is no longer lonely and lonely, and began to be combined with a large number of flowers, animals, and texts, and in literati paintings, themes such as "Zhong Kui Guiding Bat Diagram" and "Fushou Shuangquan" began to appear in large numbers, and bats became the favorite of the literati, showing a tendency to be gorgeous, complex, and co-matched with a variety of themes such as auspicious clouds and plants.
Usually, during the Ming and Qing dynasties, bats are more common in numbers than one, two, four and five, and three, six and eight are relatively rare, but seven bats have not been seen so far. Although the number "seven" also has auspicious words, but the ancients are more taboo about the number seven, from the perspective of the I Ching, seven is the dividing line between winter and summer, and the ancients associated seven with cut-off, unlucky, funeral and other related things, until July is identified as a ghost festival, is the heaviest yin month, so the number seven essentially contradicts the meaning of bats as the embodiment of blessing.
Let's conclude with a brief introduction to China's fu culture.
In fact, in the Shang Dynasty more than 3,600 years ago, the word "Fu" was already found in the oracle bones, which is the meaning of "pouring wine on the altar with both hands", because the ancients used wine to symbolize life and prosperity. In the pre-Qin period, the word Fu gradually represented the sacrifices and prayer activities of the ancients, and could refer to the offerings offered by the ancients to the gods-after all, there were no certain material conditions that could not support the consumption of these sacrifices of wine and meat.
In turn, the word fu gradually matches the modern meaning of blessing. In the Book of Rites and Sacrifices, it is said: "Blessed ones, be prepared." Prepare, the name of Bai shun, the preparation of everything that is not smooth. "That is to say, everything that is needed can be obtained, and everything is smooth and smooth. Book VI of the Han Feizi says: "The blessing of the whole life is rich." ”
Our current habit of pasting the word Fu in every household during the New Year has also appeared during the Song Dynasty. In the Song Dynasty Wu Zimu's "Record of Dream Liang": "The Shishu family, big or small, sprinkles sweeping the door, going to the dust, purifying the court, changing the door god, hanging bells, nailing peach charms, pasting spring cards, and sacrificing ancestors", of which "sticking spring cards" is actually a red paper with blessed characters written on it in front of the gate.
Eventually, the concept of "Fu" gradually condensed from words to bat motifs. It can be seen that the stewed bat soup has nothing to do with traditional Chinese culture, and most of the ancients not only did not eat this thing, but were more careful for fear of disturbing the "blessing". This part, which has been developed, evolved, and finally extremely colorful and contains Chinese characteristics after thousands of years, is the precious property of Chinese culture to future generations.
If we don't realize this and constantly challenge bats and even countless viruses in nature with our mouths, we can say that this is what the unbless people do - the disaster of the new coronavirus will one day fall on the heads of human beings.