Ren Jiang
In ancient times more than 4,000 years ago, after 4,000 years of dry and cold events (the geological history is called the 8200aBP event), the global climate warmed on a large scale. At this time, the Central Plains region was warm and humid, with lush vegetation, and the northern boundary of the subtropical region ran along the southern foothills of the Taihang Mountains to the foot of Yanshan Mountain, where wild animals such as elephants, rhinos, tigers, and leopards were widely distributed. Due to the development of agricultural civilization, the boundaries of human existence have gradually expanded outward, and elephants, as the largest individuals among land animals, have increasingly entered people's field of vision. During the Period of the Three Emperors and Five Emperors, according to the Rong Chengshi (written in the early Spring and Autumn Period, according to legend, Rong Chengshi served as a minister of the Yellow Emperor and invented the calendar) Jian Jian records that the core area of the Huaxia tribe was called "Xuzhou", and this geographical scope reached the Xia Dynasty, according to the "Shangshu Xia Shu Yugong" (written in the Warring States period) has been called "Yuzhou". "Yu" is interpreted as "Yu, the great elephant" in the "Explanation of Words", and can be named after the core area of civilization by elephants, which shows the status of elephants in the minds of people at that time. Many modern paleographers have also explained "Yu": Xu Zhongshu deduced that the "Yu" character in the side of the word "Yu" should be a false writing of "邑", "豫" is the place where the elephant is produced; Hu Houxuan believes that "Yu" from the elephant is the meaning of one person leading the elephant; Wen Huanran even believes that the lower reaches of the Yellow River in the Shang Dynasty used elephants as servant animals earlier than "serving cattle and riding horses", and in the Han Feizi Ten Passes, "The former Huang Emperor joined the ghost god on the West Taishan Mountain, driving an elephant car and six dragons". It is based on the earliest imagination of elephants as a means of transportation in daily travel at that time.
If the ancient historical legends before the emergence of the text have a certain factual archetype, then the history of the ancestors of the Central Plains on elephants will be even longer. The "Shang Shu Yao Dian" records the legend of Shun's "elephant cultivation", for the interpretation of "elephant cultivation", the Tang Dynasty tortoise Meng explained in the "Elephant Cultivation Bird Yun Discernment": "The beast-shaped leader is not in the elephant, the line must be ended, the foot must be deep, the law is deep, so it is known as elephant farming", it is precisely because the elephant is large, walking upright and calm, and roughly in line with the requirements of farming, can become the object of emulation. Shun also had a half-brother named "Xiang Ao", reminiscent of the Song Dynasty famous literary scholar Chen Zao's "Ciyun Hu Xuechang Xiyu" in the "Vientiane to Proud Eyes", it can be seen that the elephant was regarded as having an auspicious meaning at that time, and later the elephant pride was sealed to youyu ("庳" tong "nose", in the north of present-day Yingdao County, Yongzhou), obviously the name of this place is also related to elephants with proboscis characteristics.
Figure 1: The oracle bone records the word "to get the elephant"
During the Yin Shang period, with the emergence of oracle bones, the elephant herds in the Central Plains have since had a definite written record: Among the oracle bones found in the Yin Ruins, there is a piece of prophecy that says: "There is rain tonight, can the elephants be captured?" Another piece of prophecy said: "King Yin Hunted in Chudi and received two elephants." (See Figure 1) The Shang Dynasty people used part of the captured elephants for sacrifice, and elephant skeletons were found in the wangling district sacrifice pit at the Xiaoshuangqiao site in Zhengzhou in the middle of the Shang Dynasty; the other part of the elephant was domesticated by people; in 1935, an elephant pit with an adult elephant and an elephant tamer was found near tomb No. 1400 in the east area of the Yin Ruins, and in 1978, a baby elephant with a brass bell was found in the southeast sacrifice pit M35 of the west district of the Yin Tombs. After domestication, the elephant was thrown into the battlefield by the merchants, and according to the "Lü Shi Chunqiu Gule", "the merchants served the elephants in order to abuse Dongyi." Zhou Gong then expelled him from his teacher, and as for Jiangnan, it was "Three Elephants". "The Shang Dynasty army used war elephants in the process of conquest of the Dongyi rebellion, and was later driven to the south by the army led by the Zhou Gong, and also wrote poems to commemorate it. According to Ming Zhaochun's "Five Miscellaneous Tricks and Renbu II": "Elephant drama is said to have been made by the King of Wu when he was cutting silk", and elephant drama is also the originator of chess. The most famous scene of the elephant array attack is the "Fourth Year of Zuo Chuan Dinggong" recorded that "the king made the elephant to run to the Wu division", the king of Chu Zhao was forced by the army of the State of Wu, tied reeds on the elephant's tail and lit, the panicked elephant herd rushed to the Wu army, and many soldiers were suddenly reduced to meat at the feet of the elephant.
Figure 2: Comparison of shang dynasty motif elephant statue bronze (left) and Western Zhou bird pattern elephant statue (right).
The Duke of Zhou not only chased the main force of the Shang Dynasty army to Jiangnan, overthrew the rule of the Shang Dynasty, and eliminated the fifty small states attached to the Shang Dynasty, but also expelled the tigers, leopards, rhinos, and elephants that might cause harm to the safety of people's lives and property to remote places, and only then did they win the hearts of the people. This also reflects the reality that in the Shang generation, settled agriculture has made great progress, and as agricultural production continues to reclaim wasteland, as well as the building materials needed for urban construction and urban life, the habitat of wild animals is also constantly being destroyed and reduced, which has led to conflicts between humans and wild animals, especially large beasts at the top of the food chain, so they must be driven away. By the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the Central Plains people could no longer see elephants in the local area, and the Southern Tang Dynasty Xu Kai's "Biography of the Interpretation of Characters in The Sayings" had clouds under the word "like": "Elephant, the great beast of the south, Chinese do not know, but when they see their paintings, they say that the pictures are written as elephants'", which shows that at that time, it could only be imagined by relying on previous paintings. Not only that, but there were a large number of pictographic bronzes in the Yin Shang period. However, in the Western Zhou Dynasty, it is rare to see, and even a very small number of them are very different from real elephants in appearance (see Figure 2); at the same time, from the evolution of the text in this period, since the Shang Zhou, the word "elephant" has gradually become abstract and even difficult to identify from the initial figuration, all of which show that the Central Plains people are no longer familiar with elephants (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: "Elephant" glyph evolution diagram
Figure 4: Facsimile of the front of the portrait of the carriage and horse travel in the ancestral hall of The Xiaotang Mountain in Changqing, Shandong
Figure 5: Facsimile of copper car ornament images excavated from the Western Han Tomb in Dingxian County, Hebei Province
In the Han Dynasty, elephants returned to the Central Plains as a tribute of friendship to the Central Plains Dynasty by foreigners. As explained in the Shuowen Jiezi, "Elephant, the greater beast of The Greater Nanyue", a large part of which was paid tribute from the South Vietnamese state in Lingnan. According to the Commentary on the Interpretation of the Balance of Balance, Vol. XI: "In the summer of the second year of the Yuan Hunt (121 BC) ... The Nanyue sacrifices elephants and birds that can speak"; the Later Han Dynasty, vol. 86, The Biography of the Southwest Yilie of the Southern Barbarians records: "In the sixth year of the Yongyuan Dynasty (94), Mo Yanmu, the king of The Outer Dun Nin, sent envoys to translate rhinos and elephants." From the Han Dynasty onwards, elephants were no longer engaged in ploughing and fighting as in the pre-Qin period, but appeared in the parade of honors with their huge bodies (see Figure 4), and there were many such scenes on the decorations and portrait tiles of the Han Dynasty carriages, and sometimes with rare animals and camels from the Western Regions, which was quite exotic (see Figure 5). At the same time, under the concept of "death is like life", since the Han Dynasty, the elephants in the ceremonial queue have become the guardians of the tombs of emperors and heavy subjects in the form of stone statues (see Figure 6). In addition, the Han Dynasty people's desire for immortality brought about the worship of the West Queen Mother, and it is recorded in the "Art and Literature Gathering" that "in the summer of the fourth year of Emperor Jianping (3 BC), the people of Jingshi County, in the gathering, set up Zhang Bogu to sing and dance, and worship the Queen Mother of the West", people used the West Queen Mother's favorite bo opera, song and dance to sacrifice her, and even imagined the image of the anthropomorphic white elephant playing the piano in the West Queen Mother's Xianle class (see Figure 7).
Figure 6: The "lying elephant" stone statue in front of the tomb of Huo Go sick
Figure 7: Murals from Xinmang to Eastern Han Tombs in Haotan Township, Dingbian, Shaanxi (Partial)
During the Wei and Jin dynasties, elephants often appeared as the chariots of bands at festivals or in honor guards traveled by emperors, and according to the Book of Jin, after Emperor Taikang of the Jin Dynasty (280-289) pacified Eastern Wu, "South Vietnam offered to tame elephants, commanded them to be driven by large carts, and carried dozens of people to the Yellow Gate... In the "Chinese Dynasty Driving Book" of the emperor's travel, the elephant carried "one trumpet, thirteen people" as the leader of the central queue of the team. Due to the prosperity of Buddhism in Jiangnan in the Six Dynasties, the "Elephant Washing" began to appear, and since then it has become a major theme in Chinese painting to influence future generations, on the one hand, because the elephant is the mount of Manjushri Bodhisattva, which gradually became popular with the integration of Buddhist culture and traditional Chinese culture; on the other hand, "elephant" and "phase" are harmonious, and "washing elephant" is "washing", which is in line with the meaning of the Buddhist classic "Can't meet thirty-two people as they come" to break all the names. According to the Xuanhe Pictorial Notation, the earliest surviving works of this genre were created by the painter Zhang Shengxuan during the liangwu emperor's period.
Figure 8: Song Dynasty Su Hanchen's "Elephant Washing" Ming Dynasty Anon. Collection of the M. Sackler Museum
By the Tang Dynasty, elephants were still an integral part of court ceremonial guards, but they were no longer the drivers of bands. According to the Tang Hui Yao Vol. 11, in the first year of Wu Zetian's reign (696), "the cast bronze was jiuzhou dingcheng and placed in the court of the Ming Hall", and at that time, during the ceremony of welcoming Jiuding into the hall of fame, Wu Zetian "ordered the kings of the prime minister to lead more than 100,000 guards from the north and south, and the big bull white elephant in the battle was dragged in from outside the Yuanwu Gate, and the queen of heaven made his own dragging song tune, so that the trolls sang and Yan". Elephants' grasp of musical rhythms has been noticed as early as the Han Dynasty, if it was only a simple prostration as described in the Ancient Notes of Yan Shi in the Book of Han, Volume VI, "Teaching can worship Zhou Zhang, from human will", then in the Tang Dynasty, the elephant's song and dance performance changed from imagination to reality. The Records of the Ling Table records the performance of the dancing elephants when King Lin Yiguo entertained the envoys of the Tang Dynasty: "The music moves, advocates the introduction of an elephant, with a golden bondage, a brocade hanging down, a knee-high step, a head wagging tail, all in rhythm." Not only that, Lin Yiguo has paid tribute to the imperial court since the Tang Taizong, Gaozong, and Xuanzong dynasties, and according to the records in the Quan Tang Wen Vol. 406, when these elephants entered Chang'an City, "those who hear them will come to see them, and those who see them will be Xianji", which caused a sensation in the whole city. According to the Old Book of Tang, Vol. 28, Zhi No. 8, xuanzong dynasty (712-756) held a grand performance to celebrate Xuanzong's birthday every five days of the first month of August, and held a grand performance to celebrate Xuanzong's birthday, including "another five squares to attract elephants, or worship or dance, moving drums, and music rhythms", as the most popular program, elephant song and dance performance "even retreats from the sun". Du Fu, a great poet of the Tang Dynasty, also created "Yue People Sacrifice to Tame Elephants".
Later, the Anshi Rebellion broke out, and the tamed elephants in the imperial court suffered a catastrophe. According to the Zizhi Tongjian Vol. 218, An Lushan, who had witnessed the performance of rhinoceros and dancing horses with Xuanzong, "not only ke Chang'an, ordered the search for musicians, carried musical instruments and dance clothes, and drove dancing horses, rhinos, and elephants to Luoyang." According to the "Miscellaneous Records of the Ming Emperor in Ancient and Modern Times", An Lushan feasted on The King of Youyan Rong and the King of Fanyi, and deceived them, saying: "I should have the world, and the elephants will run from the South China Sea, and when they see me, they will worship and dance." But as a result, the elephant "stared angrily, and there was no worshipper", and An Lushan, annoyed and angry, "was placed in the sill (also known as the "sill", referring to the trap and cage), burned (burned) with fire, and used a knife and a hammer to take a knife and a hammer to throw in the hole, and the chest was bleeding for several feet", so cruelly killing all the elephants, "the eagle people and the happy workers all wept". After the Anshi rebellion was settled, the tang dynasty's national strength was weakening day by day, and the palace garden was no longer able to support elephants, and it was recorded in the Zizhi Tongjian Volume 225 that in the fourteenth year of the Gregorian calendar (799), Tang Dezong believed that "elephants were fed and violated the nature of things", so he "issued a single country to offer the dancing elephant thirty-two, so that the sun of Jingshan Mountain" was released; in the late Tang Dynasty, according to the "Records of the Ling Table", in the fourth year of Qianfu (877), the Champa State (former Lin Yiguo) paid tribute to the elephant three heads as usual, "when the temple is right, it can also worship and dance", but then released it back to its own country.
By the Song Dynasty, elephants were still seen as auspicious at first. According to the Seventeenth Examination of Literature Tongkao, in the fifth year of Jianlong (964), "there are elephants from the Capital Division, and the group of courtiers express their congratulations, thinking that the giant beast has come from afar, and the country should have the sign of Hainan." The arrival of the elephant heralded the imminent annexation of the central court to the place where it lived, "Not much, Guangnan Ping". According to the Song Shi Vol. II, Taizu Benji, in the fourth year of Qiande (966), "Gengzi, Champa offered to tame elephants"; in the ninth year of Kaibao (976), "King Wuyue offered to tame elephants", and the elephants as tributes represented the recognition of the local regime to the Central Plains Dynasty. During the Northern Song Dynasty, elephants were still an important part of tianzi's travel ceremonies, according to the "History of the Song Dynasty, Volume 146, Zhi 99": "Zhenghe (Song Huizong Era) Great Driving Halogen Book, elephant six, divided into about six. However, due to the large number of people in the north of the Song Dynasty, the population center of gravity shifted to Jiangnan, and many wastelands were gradually reclaimed, resulting in the human-elephant contradictions that had broken out in the Central Plains in history and re-staged in Jiangnan. According to the "Literature Tongkao Wuyi Kao XII", "In the third year of Jianlong (962), there were elephants to Huangpi County, Huangzhou, hiding in the woods, eating people's seedlings, and then to An, Fu, Xiang, and Tang Prefecture to practice the people's fields, which were quite troubled, and sent envoys to arrest them"; the Song Shi Zhi XIX records that in the seventh year of Qiandao (1171), "In the seventh year of Qiandao, the wild elephants in Chaozhou had hundreds of grains, and the agricultural trap fields were like no food, and they led their groups to surround the road with cars and horses, and they gathered grain to eat. The "Examination of the Granting of Time and Time" includes the "Persuasion to The Peasants' Text" promulgated by Zhu Xi when he was the prefect of Zhangzhou: "There are many barren fields in the jurisdiction of the prefecture, and there are tables sent by the Gaiyuan lawsuit, and the elephant beasts have the problem of stepping on food", and it is precisely because the wild elephants trample on the crops that "the state has also made a list to persuade every household to kill the elephant beasts", and "now do not set up a reward of thirty consecutive, if some household kills the elephant and comes to ask for a reward, it will be immediately paid", so that soon "the disaster will be removed, and the people will cultivate it." "It is precisely because of the prominent contradiction between humans and elephants that elephants were not very popular in the Song Dynasty compared to other periods in Chinese history.
Fig. 9: Western painters' imaginary image of Kublai Khan and his soldiers riding elephants
During the Yuan Dynasty, elephants appeared as emperors' cars for the first time in Chinese history. According to the "Continuation of the Zhizhi Tongjian", by the seventeenth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1280), "(October) Bingshen, the beginning of the production of elephant palanquins", the official Shangshu Liu Haoli said: "The elephant is very powerful, and the two capitals are returned upwards, and the elephant is driven by public opinion." There is no clear record of what the "elephant palanquin" looks like, and the Ming Shi Youfu only briefly mentions that "the Yuan Emperor used the elephant palanquin and drove the two elephants"; the Yuan Dynasty poet Zhang Yu said in his "Renxia Qu": "In that year, the great driver was lucky to luan jing (another name for Shangdu), and the elephant carried the front of the temple to the front." Kublai Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty, took an elephant car every year to and from Shangdu and Dadu, although the two places were separated by more than five hundred miles, but in fact, the elephant car was not slow, Yuan Xiong Mengxiang wrote in the "Analysis of Jinzhi": "Its behavior seems to be slow, the real step is wide and fast, and the horse can chase it." The reason why Kublai Khan adopted the elephant as a ride was precisely in the hope of using the elephant's colossal body to show the prestige of the empire and thus frighten the enemy, according to Zheng Yuanyou's "Yuanyuan Zhaowenguan University Scholar Ronglu Doctor Zhi Secretary Supervisor Zhen Taishi Yuansi Tiantai Shi Tang Yin Yue Xuan Zi Zhou Chen Second Line", by the twenty-fourth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1287), Nai Yan rebelled, Kublai Khan initially remembered the feelings of the Golden Family, and did not want to execute Nai Yan, "so he pro-Yu Xiang public opinion to supervise the battle, meaning that he saw that the car would inevitably fall", the result was that Nai Yan was not scared away, but instead "Attacked The Elephant Public Opinion", and eventually Kublai Khan had to order "annihilation of Nayan (Naiyan)". Marco Polo's Travels of Marco Polo describes Kublai Khan's elephant ride in more specific form: "The Great Khan stood on a wooden tower surrounded by many crossbowmen, and the wooden tower was carried by four elephants, each of which was dressed in armor made of sturdy leather, covered with a layer of fabrics made of gold and silk, and the imperial flag symbolizing the sun and the moon was flying high on the top of the wooden tower". Polo's description creates an imaginary image of Kublai Khan and his sergeants riding on elephants (see Figure 9). In addition, the elephants of the Yuan Dynasty continued the tradition of the Northern Song Dynasty and served as the honor guard for the travel of the Heavenly Son, according to the description in the "Yuan Shi Zhi 29 · Public Service", the "Dundian Team" located in the center of the honor guard was led by six elephants, and it was also equipped with "six guides and six people of the South Vietnamese Army".
Figure 10: Elephant car in the Map of the Police Entering the Foot (Partial), collection of the National Palace Museum in Taiwan
In the Ming Dynasty, unlike Kublai Khan's elephant palanquins and elephant trunks on the back of elephants, the Ming emperors rode in a car pulled by elephants. According to the Records of the Wanliye Ye Compilation, "(Great) Rue is driven by two elephants. Jade, also riding two elephants. What is even more interesting is that for the first time in Chinese history, elephants in the Ming Dynasty had the same grade as military attaches, and they would also be denigrated if they made mistakes: "The rank of Lu that is received on weekdays depends on the inferiority of Wu Ben (that is, military attaches), and in the case of guilt and demotion, that is, they retire from the degraded position and no longer dare to live in their hometown." It is precisely because these elephants are "arranged in order, in and out of the line, no less different from people", so they are lamented by the people of the time as "the most spiritual beings in the real thing". During the Ming and Qing dynasties, elephants also appeared as a member of the honor guard in major state events. According to the Ming Shi Vol. 64 Zhi 40, in October of the first year of Hongwu (1368), the imperial court set the highest ceremonies for the new year's day, winter solstice, holy day, worship, prince and envoy when they came to the dynasty, including "two tigers and leopards each, and six elephant taming". In addition, decorations depicting elephants also appear in the "Great Dragon" on which the emperor rides, "the interior green space depicts gold, paints six beasts, lin, fox, rhinoceros, elephant, pegasus, tianlu", elephants and rhinoceroses work together with other imaginary sacred beasts to protect the emperor's travels. In the historical documents of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the management of elephants in the imperial capital is also recorded in more detail: "When the elephant first arrived in Beijing, it was rumored that it preceded the archery exercise, so it was called the elephant house. The Jinyi guard had its own elephant taming house, specializing in elephant slaves and elephants, and specially ordered The Jinyi to command a member of the governor"; in the Qing Dynasty, the use and management of elephants basically followed the Ming Dynasty, according to the "Records of the Yanjing Dynasty", "The national dynasty was the same as its old, but the Jinyi guard was changed to Luan Yi Wei'er." "In the twenty-eighth year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1689), the Kangxi Emperor made his second southern tour, and in the "Kangxi Southern Tour Map" depicting this southern tour, from the Yongding Gate to the main gate of the Nanyuan Garden, the elephant's honor guard queue can be seen along the way.
Figure 11: The ceremonial guard outside the Yongding Gate in Wang Yi and Yang Jin's "Kangxi Southern Tour Map" (partial).
It is precisely because since the Han Dynasty, the elephants in the imperial capital have come from the tribute of the surrounding regimes of the empire, and only when the stability and prosperity of the central empire is enough to affect the surrounding tribes, they will drive the elephants from thousands of miles, so in a sense, the arrival of the elephants also means the stability and peace of the country. Since elephants have been basically extinct in the densely populated agricultural areas of Jiangnan during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the people do not reject elephants, but love them. According to the "Records of the Yanjing Dynasty", "In the last year of Tongzhi and the early years of Guangxu, the Vietnamese tribute elephants were twice, a total of six or seven, extremely fat. The people of the capital rejoiced in the march of peace and rejoiced. Every year on the sixth day of the sixth month of the lunar calendar, the elephants in the extreme heat will flush the water and cool off at the moat outside the Xuanwu Gate where the elephant house is located, which is called "washing elephants", when Yan Yunzhao has "Washing Elephants" to describe the scene at that time: "Chang'an June car dust, people fall in the city to see the elephant washing." The Yellow Gate advocates the leading line, and the Jade River rings and flows freely... The barbarian boy crosses the elephant's back naked, and the game waves awaken the god king. Whiskers pulled out of the water's edge, and the water nose sprayed snow waves. Because elephants are not easy to see, some people even paid a high price to charter a nearby restaurant, as described in Wang Shichen's "Bamboo Branch Words": "Thousands of dollars are more expensive to sit in the window of the building, and they all wash elephants by the river." In addition, as a traditional theme of the Six Dynasties, Tang, Yuan, Ming, and Qing Dynasties, the "Elephant Washing Map" also had new changes in the Qing Dynasty: the Qianlong Emperor, who was deeply influenced by the third Zhangjia Living Buddha, vigorously promoted Buddhism, and the role of the emperor appeared for the first time in the "Elephant Washing Map": the Qianlong Emperor disguised himself as a Puxian Bodhisattva, sitting there peacefully, silently looking at the white elephant who was washing the elephant. This painting is intended to show the personal image that Qianlong wanted to create: not only the emperor of the world, but also the important god of the Buddha's world.
Figure 12: Ding Guanpeng's "Hongli Wash Elephant Map" (partial), in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing
Editor-in-Charge: Zang Jixian
Proofreader: Liu Wei