In the treasure house of traditional Chinese culture, especially ethnic minority culture, the "ancient Miao script" is a precious cultural heritage. Preliminary research shows that Hunan Chengbu has a unique large number of physical evidence of ancient Miao characters. The ancestors of the Chengbu Miao people created their own script, "Miao Wen", which is widely circulated and used for a long time, and some commonly used "Miao Script" are still in use today.
There are many empirical evidences of ancient Miao texts recorded and preserved in the historical materials of Chengbu
In the original materials such as the miao ancient models excavated by Chengbu, it was found that there were Miao characters similar to the Han seal script sandwiched inside. According to the book "Chengbu Miao Style" published by Yuelu Book Society, the "Heaven and Earth Origin Paragraph" in the "Miao Model" that has been passed down from generation to generation by the Chengbu Miao people records and preserves 19 ancient Miao square characters. As shown in the following figure:
In addition, at the end of the Qing Dynasty, Lu Yunshi (also known as Lu Ciyun) wrote the "Zhiyu zhizhi zhiyu of the miao", which specially retained the "second chapter of the Miao Book", leaving us with valuable ancient Miao materials. Lu Yunshi said: "The Miao people have books, not Ding Zhong, nor tadpoles, who the author is, can not be examined, record its two chapters, in order to correct the natural gentleman." One of the chapters, called the "Tuoxun", reads: "Filial piety to parents, respect for the elders." In the harmonious township, teach the children and grandchildren. Each is safe and physiological, and there is no wrongdoing. The kings of heaven and earth are great, and brothers and sisters are brothers. Filial piety is a hundred deeds of man, and loyalty lies in the heart of man. Farmers, industrialists, and merchants, each living in his own business. Etiquette and righteousness, honesty, and cut to the heart. The son can filial piety to the father, and turn winter into spring. If the subject is loyal, rui qi is full of doors. Loyalty and filial piety are exhausted, and the name is left in eternity. Husband and wife are harmonious, and family affairs will be accomplished. Brotherhood and peace in all things. Fortunately, Bigan, loyal and direct subjects. Guan Zhongbaozi is reluctant to share the gold. Tian's neighbors are good neighbors, and the trees are redbuds. The ancients are the Tao that always exists. The program is often positive, and the sun and moon are clear. Clean and beautiful, cosmic light. And can be adjusted soup, monarch celebration meeting. Dragons and tigers greet each other, eternal life, loyalty and filial piety are survival. The Miao Han chinese translation of the "Duo Xun" is as follows:
Miao-Chinese translation
In the early Qing Dynasty, the Miao people of Chengbu used the Miao script extensively in the armed uprising struggle
As a Miao concentration area, Chengbu was originally a "land outside the world", which was previously under the jurisdiction of Wugang, Wuqiang, Wuyou, Jingzhou, Lingang, Shizhu and other prefectures and counties. After the establishment of Chengbu County, the Miao people of Chengbu were still subjected to cruel political and economic oppression by the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and they constantly rebelled against national oppression. The largest of these was the Great Miao Uprising of Su Xianyu and Yang Qingbao, which broke out in July of the fourth year of Qianlong (1739 AD), which swept across the border of Xiangguiqian and the rebels fought bravely, repelling the enemy's rampant attacks one after another, and winning one victory after another. In June of the fifth leap year of Qianlong, the Qianlong Emperor issued a decree, appointed Zhang Guangsi, the governor of Guizhou, as the minister of Qincha, and mobilized more than 20,000 officers and soldiers and tens of thousands of township braves from five provinces, including Lianghu, Liangguang, and Guizhou, to launch a large-scale attack on the Miao rebel army in Chengbu. Due to their outdeclution, by February of the sixth year of Qianlong (1741 AD), the leaders of the Miaomin Uprising, Su Xianyu, Yang Qingbao, Wu Jinyin, and Zhang Laojin, were successively hunted down and killed by the enemy, and the Miaomin Uprising failed. In this great uprising of the Miao people on the border of Xiangguiqian centered on the city steps that shook the whole country, the Miao rebels used the Miao language extensively. In the course of the uprising, in order to escape the qing court's wanted and encircled and suppressed, the leaders of the uprising engraved letters, seals, and circulars, as well as letters and codexes, were all in Miao script. This kind of seal-like non-seal script is the "Miao script" carefully created by the ancestors of the Miao people in Chengbu. "Miao Wen" was first used in the area of Chengbu Hengling Ridge, and by the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, it had been widely circulated and used in the forty-eight villages of Chengbu Wuzhi, which in turn affected the Miao areas such as Suining, Tongdao, Longsheng, and Jinping on the border of Xiangguiqian, but the Han people who lived on the boundary with the Miao people did not know "Miao Wen", and the Qing court officers and soldiers who were high above regarded "Miao Wen" as the "Book of Heaven". After the "Suyang Uprising" was suppressed, the Qianlong Emperor, in order to strengthen his rule over the people of miaoyao in the Xiangguiqian border area, took the following six measures to rule the Miao region: First, he built a city and set up camps, and increased the number of troops and officials. In the sixth year of Qianlong (1741 AD), the city was built in Chang'an Ping, Hengling Cave, Chengbu. With the Baoqing Province Li Yao Tongzhi leading the department, a total of one member and a hundred soldiers were moved to Chang'an, "dividing the defense of Chengbu and Suining County Miao Yao" (Hunan Tongzhi, vol. 4). Set up a Chang'an camp, with one guerrilla member stationed in the Chang'an camp; two members of the garrison. The second is that there is no rebellion and the people are summoned to build forts. The fields of the Miao people were confiscated and returned to the officials, and a total of ten forts were built, and the forts reached 400 households, so that the nearby Miao people could be cultivated, and the government collected rents. The third is to install Miao Yao and compile armor protection. Establish a baojia system in the Miao-inhabited areas on the borders of Hunan, Guizhou, and Qian to replace the original Miao leaders and village chiefs. The fourth is to set up Miao Yao Yixue and implement the policy of ethnic assimilation. Fifth, the rent-free allowance of the silkworm is to reduce the burden on the Miao people. The sixth is to eliminate Miao Wen. In order to prevent the Miao people from using this kind of writing to cause trouble again, the Qianlong Emperor decreed: "The seal script that was fabricated in the past shall be destroyed and forever forbidden to study, and if there is any violation, the first report will not be carried out, and if there is a crime committed by one family in the card, nine families will sit in a row, and the chief of the village will be punished for the crime of negligence." (See "Zhu Fold", Feng Guangyu Fold, Qianlong 5, June 15. Therefore, the imperial court carried out a comprehensive search, inventory, and destruction of the Miao residents village by village, house by house, and it was forever strictly forbidden to study and inherit the use of Miao language.
After the founding of New China, some Miao characters are still circulating and used by the chengbu people
The writing of any nation is vital. Like the Chinese script, the Miao script also has a strong vitality. Although the Qing court adopted an extremely harsh and repressive policy towards the Miao script, the Miao script is still secretly transmitted in the folk, and some simple and commonly used Miao scripts have been passed down to this day. There was a Miao old man named Chen Xianyu (1902-1971) named Chen Xianyu (1902-1971) in Chengbuyuan PulpPing Township, who was illiterate, his memory and mental arithmetic ability was extremely strong, before liberation, he was mainly based on the tenant fields of the landlord Xiao Mou, and his wife Pi Shi was an expert in farming and steaming wine, so the couple also rented a four-row and three-room wooden house and opened a shop selling pork and rice wine. At that time, there were not many people doing wine and meat business, the local households were scattered, about 10 miles in radius, living in more than 100 households, buying wine and buying meat, a lot of credit accounts, must be accounted, Chen Xianyu is illiterate, how to keep accounts? Most of the local Yang surnames, he will draw a goat picture according to the age of the buyer, height and shortness, appearance image, etc., and add a size mark on the side of the sheep. There were two local families with the surname Su, and he drew two combs of size. There are more than 10 surnames in the local area, each of which has a symbol instead. Counting uses the Miao symbols that the Miao people have used, and an ordinary Miao illiterate can use the Miao symbols to keep accounts, which shows that the influence and vitality of the Miao script in the city are indeed very strong.
In the 1960s and 1970s, some elderly Miao people in Chengbu still commonly used some relatively simple Miao characters to record work points or numbers, and these commonly used Miao characters representing the number of Miao characters are shown in the following figure:
Represents the number of ancient Miao characters
During the Qingming Festival in April 2016, the author went back to his hometown of Bulanrong Township to visit the tomb, and deliberately took the time to visit Jiang Changqing, the inheritor of Miao Wen, in Baomuping Village, and the elderLy Jiang specially wrote a complete set of Miao number symbols from one to ninety for himself... Elder Jiang can still use Miao chinese to write couplets, horizontal batches and paper cuts, and every Spring Festival, the Miao compatriots in the village ask him for Miao couplets, horizontal batches and paper cuts.
In addition, to this day, some elderly Miao carpenters in Chengbu Miao Autonomous County, when they are doing carpentry, they write some Miao characters on the finished wood to make marks, these Miao characters and the meaning they represent are as follows:
Ancient Miao characters and the meaning they represent
The Family of Dong Yao in Chengbu Miao, eating and living in the same language and clothing, the text is the same. In the early 1970s, when Comrade Ding Zhongyan, a cadre of the Propaganda Department of Chengbu, was squatting in the Yellow Umbrella Brigade of Qingyuan Commune, he found that a crooked narrative that was popular among local Yao women that outsiders did not know. From 1986 to 1993, Dr. Zhao Liming, an associate professor of Tsinghua University who studied Nüshu, based on this clue, went deep into the Yao villages such as Huang Umbrella, Sumac Field and Zhai Zixi five times to investigate, and finally found Shen Zi'e, a septuagenarian old lady who could remember Yao characters, in the Yaozhai of The Lacquer Tree Field of Lanrong Commune, and she wrote more than 10 Yao chronicle symbols to Professor Zhao in one go. According to Professor Zhao's research, this kind of writing cannot correspond to the words in the language one by one, but a symbol represents a sentence, and each sentence is formed by a line to form a square block, which can be used for communication, litigation, sending information, etc., but can only be used for the internal inheritance of Yao women.
The discovery and excavation process of the ancient Miao script stone carvings of chengbu steep punch head in the new century confirms the true existence of the ancient Miao script of Chengbu
At the end of 2010, when I was collecting wind in The Steep Chongtou Village of Dankou Town, Chengbu Miao Autonomous County, I found 3 ancient Miao Wen Mo cliff carvings. In March 2012, the Shaoyang Municipal Bureau of Cultural Relics organized experts from inside and outside the province to investigate and study the characters on these stone carvings. Professor Li Qingfu, master tutor of folklore at South Central University for Nationalities, expert on ethnic minority characters in the south, and famous expert in the study of female calligraphy, Professor Li Shaoping of the School of History and Culture of Hunan Normal University, Professor Wu Shundong of the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Hunan Province, and director of the "Three Investigations Office" of Hunan Province, and other experts and scholars went deep into chengbu steep chongtou village, and after investigation and examination, and after comparative analysis with a small number of ancient Miao script materials existing in Chengbu, it was confirmed that the characters on the stone carvings were the ancient Miao characters of Chengbu that had been lost for two and a half centuries.
In 2014, the ancient Miao script stone carvings of Chengbu Steep Chong tou were included in the major archaeological excavation category of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. From June to December 2014, after six months of systematic investigation and archaeological test excavation by experts from the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, significant breakthroughs were made in the cultural connotation, burial nature, era span, distribution range and other aspects of the site. On the basis of the discovery and preliminary confirmation of the "three-body" Miaowen, the mysterious door of early rock painting and stone carving art was also opened. Through more than half a year of arduous excavation, the expected results have been achieved. In the book "Archaeological Excavation Report" of the Hunan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, it is mentioned that:
"The initial entry point of chengbu stone carving archaeology lies in the discovery of more Miaowen stone carvings and their nature, chronology and other aspects of the investigation, but the final harvest is not limited to this." According to incomplete statistics, the number of Miao wen stone carvings, Miao Related Text or Graphic Stone Carvings and other graphic stone carvings found at this stage, as well as various types of building foundation sites, has reached 92. The relationship between the ancient residential site and the near-body Miao, variant Miao, and Hanyi Chinese has also been gradually clarified.
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The surviving Miao wen stone carvings found at present are mainly the near-body Miao wen system. The total word count is about 140 words. The brush strokes are strong and powerful. There are relatively fixed basic elements of character creation, and it is common to add or subtract strokes on the prototype of Chinese characters to form a new character, but it is also often mixed with Chinese character prototypes without changing. It has been possible to form an independent chapter. Judging from the content that can be preliminarily interpreted at present, it may involve the settlements at that time, or indicate the legal owners of mountain property and real estate in various places; the latter is roughly equivalent to the stone tablet law of the Yao people. There are not many different miao texts, but they have the style of primitive religion. Or related to the spread of Taoism in the region. According to the prevalence of complete Han Chinese stone carvings such as 'broad daylight and full moon night' in the Baizhu Mountain and Dashuixi area, combined with the considerable chronology of the 'broad day' large character stone carvings engraved by the official of Daqiao Village, it is preliminarily presumed that the lower age limit of the surviving Miao wen stone carvings in this area is the time of Qing Qianjia. The upper limit of the age of the ancient Miao wen stone carving, the current reference to Jinji Bay, xinwubian exploration, test excavation found a number of Song Dynasty porcelain fragments, can be tentatively determined in the Southern Song Dynasty.
The discovery of petroglyphs is an important new harvest in the archaeological work of Chengbu stone carvings. Petroglyph images include aquatic and terrestrial creatures. The significance of this new discovery is that it not only fills the gap of this cultural heritage in the province, but also may become an important reference for the discussion of the source of the white pottery phoenix bird culture in the Yuanshui River Basin. The objects expressed in the rock paintings of aquatic organisms are mostly fish, and the carving techniques also integrate the process of flat carving and bas-relief. Another important component of the petroglyph theme is the authentic representation of fertility worship. There is also no shortage of instrument images and sports images based on real life, supernatural images derived from life but higher than life, and so on. ”
On November 19, 2016, the Hunan Provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics invited Jin Zegong, advisor of the Expert Committee of the Provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics, Liu Binwei, researcher of the Provincial Museum, Xu Daosheng, professor of Yuelu Academy of Hunan University, Tan Biyou, professor and doctoral supervisor of Hunan Normal University, professor Wu Shundong, researcher of the Archaeological Research Institute of the Provincial Bureau of Cultural Relics, and other experts to hold a special discussion meeting in Chengbu to evaluate and identify the value of the steep-headed stone carvings. It was unanimously agreed that the steep head stone carvings are rich in connotation, concentrated in distribution, and well-preserved, and are precious cultural heritage, and some are written in chapters, which are a relatively mature script, identified as Miao script, and have the historical, artistic, scientific and other important values of declaring cultural relics protection units at the provincial level and above, and must be highly valued and protected.
However, at present, there are still many difficulties and problems in the excavation of the physical protection of ancient Miao characters in Chengbu. It is mainly reflected in: (1) The geographical conditions of the ancient Miao script stone carving area of the steep punch head are harsh, and the natural damage phenomenon is serious. Steep Chongtou is located on the mountainside of Nanshan Mountain, with an average altitude of 1100 meters, the mountain is high and the water is cold, the wind and fog are heavy, so that the Miaowen stone carvings exposed to the wild for hundreds of years are subjected to sun and rain, weathering and microbial erosion are serious, and some old stone carvings have been damaged, and the handwriting is blurred and difficult to identify. (2) Villagers have a weak awareness of the protection of cultural relics, no protection facilities, and serious damage to human and material resources for stone carvings. After hundreds of years of war and looting, natural disasters and destruction of people and livestock, especially in major movements such as mountain reclamation in the last century, many stone carvings have been destroyed by lightning and artillery fire, landfilled, trampled by cattle and sheep, and flooded by streams, and only one-third of which can still be seen today. Since it was publicly reported and preliminarily excavated in 2010, the number of people going to archaeological excavations and visiting and admiring has increased year by year, and the protection facilities adopted are almost zero, and the human damage to the stone carvings is inevitable, and the safety hazards are extremely serious. (3) It is imperative to strengthen the rescue protection of the inheritors of the ancient Miao script. According to the preliminary excavations of cultural relics and archaeologists in Hunan Province, the ancient Miao Wenshi carvings of Steep Chongtou survived from the Southern Song Dynasty to the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, and the existence time was more than 600 years. Coupled with the harsh literary prison policy and ethnic oppression begun by the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty, the Miao script has not been passed on for more than 300 years, and even if the internal inheritance of the family can only be carried out in a small area in a secret state, so the ancient Miao script has been recognized, and only some simple numbers, weights and measures and directional characters can be recognized. Therefore, it is imperative to strengthen the rescue protection of the inheritors of the ancient Miao script. (4) The funds for the protection and excavation of ancient Miao scripts are quite scarce and dwarfed. Chengbu is a Miao Autonomous County, a remote and poor county, with extreme financial difficulties, which can be described as "mud bodhisattva crossing the river, it is difficult to protect itself". It is almost impossible to spend huge sums of money to protect and excavate the Miao script, establish a physical protection zone for ancient Miao scripts, and decipher the code of words. Therefore, in order to solve these problems and dilemmas and effectively protect and excavate this cultural treasure, it is still necessary to take the government department as the leader, experts and scholars and all sectors of society to fully participate.
About author:Lei Xuexue, a native of Chengbu Miao Autonomous County, Hunan Province, is a member of the Miao Studies Professional Committee of the Chinese Ethnology Research Association, a member of the Chinese Folklore Society, a member of the Hunan Ethnic Studies Society, and a member of the Hunan Miao Studies Society. His research interests include Hmong history, culture, folklore and ancient Hmong scripts.