Fourteen plump, rounded, and beautiful court dancers, dressed in gauze and painted with "slanted red" makeup, appeared in the spotlight flutteringly. Or laughing, or playing, or angry, everyone is playful and cute. This is not a crossover drama, but a dance program broadcast by Henan Television that netizens relish: "Tang Palace Night Banquet".
One of the prototypes of "Tang Palace Night Banquet" is the painted pottery sitting figurines in the collection of the Henan Museum. A group of 8 people, each with a rectangular face, a bun hair ornament, dressed in vermilion, a long skirt to the ground, a green color top, a skirt waist high corset, a skirt hanging in front of the abdomen or armpits, sitting on a rectangular seat, the skirt is laid on the floor, and each hand holds a musical instrument. The instruments held by the seven sitting figurines are the four-stringed lute with a curved neck, a five-string pipa with a straight neck, a horizontal flute, a flute, a pipe, a basket, and a cymbal, and a female figurine with a high-five and a very vivid posture.
△ Painted pottery sitting posture trick female figurine, excavated in 1959 in the tomb of Zhang Sheng in Anyang City. It is now in the collection of Henan Museum. The excavation of painted pottery sitting posture trick figurines indicates that the form of sitting posture trick music performance in the Tang Dynasty had already seen its rudimentary form in the Sui Dynasty.
Although cultural relics are a "dead" thing, behind it is a "living" culture. A dance performance made the cultural relics of the Henan Museum "live". "Living" artifacts are flesh and blood, stirring our nerves and thoughts. Behind every artifact is a story, or a character, or a magnificent dynasty, or the way of life of the ancients. Artifacts make history appear before us, it is a proof that our ancestors lived, it makes thousands of years of history no longer an abstract concept of time.
01
It's not just cultural relics that we need to protect
The Gansu Provincial Museum has a famous collection of cultural relics, a human head shaped vessel mouth colored pottery vase. The artifact may be related to primitive religious ancestor worship, or to the "ancestral gods" worshipped by matrilineal clans. This is the only faience vase of thousands of pottery pieces unearthed at the Dadiwan site in Gansu Province.
The human head shaped vessel mouth color pottery vase is a representative work in the early faience pottery of the Yangshao culture temple bottom ditch type, because of its rare prehistoric head three-dimensional sculpture image, it has a high artistic value, and has become a cultural relic with the highest outreach rate and citation rate in the Gansu Provincial Museum.
2021 marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Yangshao culture. 100 years ago, in 1921, the Swedish geologist Anderson found faience pottery in Yangshao Village, Henan, and he compared the faience pottery excavated from the Anno site in Central Asia, believing that Yangshao faience pottery and Western faience pottery had the same origin, so there was a hypothesis that Yangshao culture spread from Central Asia. In order to prove his point, Anderson went to Qinghai, Gansu and other places in 1923 to investigate. Over the next year or so, he and his assistants discovered 49 Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, named "Yangshao Culture in Gansu".
△ Human head shaped vessel mouth color pottery vase, now in the collection of gansu provincial museum, the pottery vase is the Yangshao culture temple bottom ditch type, dating back about 5500 years.
The faience pottery excavated in Gansu and Qinghai regions is more advanced than the faience pottery technology excavated in Yangshao, but it is rare to see pottery bristles, pottery dings and other artifacts representing the Central Plains culture, and there is no earlier faience pottery unearthed in China than Yangshao faience at that time. Anderson publicly published his findings and inferences, proposing "Chinese culture in the West". I don't know how many Chinese scholars' hearts have been stabbed by this statement, but because there is no strong evidence to refute it, it almost became a conclusive conclusion at that time.
The mystery of this so-called conclusive conclusion is lying quietly under the soil layer, waiting to be revealed. In 1945, Xia Nai, dressed in Zhongshan clothes, came to Gansu, and when he and Xiang Da were cleaning up the Ruins of Qijiaping in Xindian, they noticed that there were several pieces of black patterned faience in the topsoil and filled soil of the ash pit, and the pattern and pottery were very different from the Qijia faience. This excavation proved from the strata that the Qi family culture was later than the Yangshao culture. With this as the cornerstone, the correct chronological sequence of neolithic cultures in the Yellow River Basin was established. Xia Nai also renamed and renamed the "Gansu Yangshao Culture" defined by Anderson to "Majiayao Culture".
△ Neolithic Majiayao culture representative artifacts: deformed frog pattern faience pot
From 1956 to 1957, Henan excavated the ruins of Miaodigou and Sanliqiao, both of which were divided into two phases, and the first phase belonged to the yangshao culture. The second phase of Miaodigou has the characteristics of transition from Yangshao culture to Longshan culture, and the second phase of Sanliqiao belongs to Longshan culture. This proves that Yangshao culture is the predecessor of the Longshan culture in the Central Plains, and completely breaks Anderson's "Chinese culture in the West".
The pottery pieces of Yangshao culture are just a cut-out of many of China's cultural relics. These artifacts break the arrogance and prejudice of the Western archaeological community with conclusive evidence, and refute the hasty conclusions of Western scholars.
Artifacts are testimonies of history. We protect cultural relics, not only to protect traditional culture, but also to protect our history.
02
The life of the ancients was as colorful as that of today's people
When it comes to the significance of cultural relics, the topic seems serious and heavy, but in fact, cultural relics also have a fashionable side.
The trend is a reincarnation, take women's dress, Tang Dynasty women have wigs (yi buns), Ming Women wear high heels - archaeologists have excavated a large number of clothes and shoes in the tombs of Empress Xiaoduan and Empress Xiaojing in Dingling, Beijing, and 11 pairs of pointed phoenix-footed high heels out of 19 pairs of shoes. In the Dunhuang murals, you can see various styles of satchels, which are not outdated in today's style.
In the 1970s, a fine-necked glass bottle was also unearthed in the southern suburbs of Luoyang, which was tested as soda-lime glass, which researchers believe is a perfume bottle that is widely used on the Mediterranean coast and the Iranian plateau. Even today, perfumes are still a must-have item for hipsters, and it seems that our ancestors were at the forefront of the trend.
Through cultural relics, we can get a glimpse of the "clothes" of the ancients, and we will also find that the urban life of the ancients, even without the Internet, without modern dining and entertainment facilities, is equally colorful.
△ Tang Sancai dragged the Hu figurines, which are in the Collection of Luoyang Museum. The Hu people wear black heads, yellow robes with large green lapels, cloth sacs around their waists, and black boots on their feet. Thick eyebrows droop, the corners of the mouth droop, hands bent in front of the chest for traction, head and body slightly twisted to the right, eyes up to the right side of the tall horse or camel.
During the Tang Dynasty, Luoyang was the second largest city after Chang'an. Commerce and trade are developed, with south, north and west markets, especially the smooth and prosperous Silk Road, bringing merchants, culture and lifestyles from the western region. Those goods that the Tang Dynasty people had never seen appeared in the market were given the name "Hu": huqin, hufu, hu cake, pepper, walnut, walnut, walnut, carrot, flax... Luoyang people, who are tolerant of foreign cultures, love to wear beards, eat hu food, play Hu music, and dance Hu.
The many colorful Hu figurines with different shapes unearthed in Luoyang have witnessed the richness and diversification of the Tang Dynasty people's clothing, food, housing, entertainment and life under the fusion of Eastern and Western cultures.
In our traditional view, cultural relics should be simple and dignified. But as some cultural relics move from museum displays to online platforms, people find that cultural relics are not only "fashionable", but also have many interesting coincidences, and there is a connection with the lives of today's people.
△ 3200 years ago, the small pottery pig is now in the Sanxingdui Museum. The shape is pleasing, the eyes are seen first, the figure is round, the nostrils are round, the rough pottery tires do not reduce the state, and the mottled weathering grinds can not extinguish the smile of a thousand years ago.
In recent years, in the archaeological discoveries of the Sanxingdui Joint Site, there is a small pottery pig that has attracted the attention of many netizens. The shape of the little pottery pig resembles the image of the pig in a famous mobile game. What is even more coincidental is that another collection of cultural relics in the Sanxingdui Museum, the bronze big bird head, resembles the image of another big bird protagonist in the same game. Netizens quipped on Weibo: "Sanxingdui worked hard and gathered the protagonists to 'apply for heritage'." ”
The little pottery pig is just an interesting anecdote in the archaeology of Sanxingdui. Sanxingdui is a unique archaeological discovery in the world, and its excavations have displayed the brilliance of thousands of years ago in front of us, pushing forward the history of civilization in Sichuan for more than 2,000 years, and proving that the ancient civilization of Sichuan is not as barbaric, backward and closed as recorded in the history books. On the contrary, as early as the Western Zhou Dynasty, Sichuan and the Zhou Dynasty in Guanzhong had a very close connection, which broke the inherent concept of Shudi "not with Qin Saitong" written in the Shu Dao Difficulty.
△ Shang mid-century covered with gold-faced bronze human head. In 1986, the first and second sacrificial pits of Sanxingdui in Guanghan, Sichuan province were excavated. The excavation of bronze statues in Sanxingdui fills in the gaps in Chinese Shang Dynasty bronze figure sculptures and early Chinese idolatry.
Silkworm bushes, cypress shrubs, fish, Du Yu, Shu Wang, one after another legendary names appear in the ears. Those shapes that have never been seen in the Central Plains: bronze longitudinal masks, bronze portraits, bronze sacred trees, are all concerned by the world because of their exaggerated shapes, peculiar styles, and exotic mythological colors.
Some netizens posted and used four words to describe Sanxingdui: "Magnificent and romantic, elegant, sonorous and debatable, and not the same way." "The charm of the artifacts is evident.
03
Cultural creation, the museum's "alternative" exhibition area
In the past, museums have struggled to escape adjectives like "traditional," "clichéd," "old-fashioned," and "high-cold." In the modest display of the museum, if we are not professional visitors, all we see is a static exhibition of cultural relics, with names, places of origin, type of artifacts and other information marked next to the cultural relics. These dry materials do not allow us to understand the story behind the cultural relics more deeply, and it is difficult to generate interest, so most of them are visited in a sloppy manner. Nowadays, the emergence of various cultural creations has slowly dissolved such a concept. Novel cultural and creative products meet the needs of young people's spiritual and cultural life, and at the same time become a window for us to review, examine and understand our own nationality and traditional culture.
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△ Click to play the video "More than one side of the national treasure"
Nowadays, searching on Tmall, you can see the official flagship stores and special goods of many museums, such as the archaeological blind box of Henan Museum, the ancient Shu badge of Sanxingdui Museum, and so on. These cultural and creative products reproduce the traditional cultural image with the aesthetics of contemporary people, break down the barriers of traditional culture and modern life, and at the same time absorb and transform the symbolic value, humanistic value and aesthetic value of the collections of major museums, and take the cultural story behind the product as the selling point, which has won the recognition and love of a large number of young people.
Traditional is modern, beautiful is good. Ancient artifacts are the code of traditional culture and the carrier. In addition to its commercial purpose, the museum's various cultural and creative products produced by ancient artifacts are still the promotion and dissemination of culture. Cultural and creative products extend the function of the museum and become the "alternative" exhibition area of the museum.
△ Museum Fun Series Blind Box
In 2021, Tmall and the five major museums jointly launched the 15 fun series of archaeological relics blind boxes for the same purpose. At the same time, Tmall also cooperates with Li Jiaqi to jointly help the cultural inheritance of the museum, so that people can understand the culture through cultural creation, feel the beauty, and feel the temperature of cultural relics while entertaining. In addition, there are also anchors such as Chao Ran, Jin Ming, and Xing Zhaolin who jointly promote in the live broadcast room. The success of cultural and creative IP is the successful combination of traditional culture and aesthetics in the new era, which not only shows the marketing value of traditional culture, but also proves the long-term vitality of traditional culture.
Bibliographic reference:
[1] "Awakening Sleeping Cultural Relics", by Gao Xuemei, published in Oriental Weekly, 2017.05;
[2] "Research on the Excavation of Hu Figurines from Tang Tombs in Luoyang Area", by Yang Wei, this article is the professional dissertation of Master of Cultural Relics and Museum of Northwest Normal University, 2018;
[3] "Is the Bronze Man of Sanxingdui an Alien or Not", published in Sanlian Reading and Producing "The Scene of Great Civilization: Following the Captain of the First-Line Archaeology Team Through History"
(Image source: Henan Museum, Gansu Provincial Museum,
Luoyang Museum, Sanxingdui Museum, Tmall, Visual China)
Curated by: Triptych.creative
Producer: Shen Yichao
WeChat Editor/Design Typography: Xing Peng
Author: Yibu