1. Kunlun Mountain is a magic mountain. When the name Kunlun Mountain first appeared in the ancient books from the pre-Qin Dynasty to the Han Dynasty in the Central Plains, it not only represented a mountain, but also expressed a vast and distant fantasy space-it gave birth to the largest system of ancient myths in China: the Kunlun myth.
In the Kunlun myth, the most magnificent plot comes from the pre-Qin classic "The Legend of Mu": going west, climbing Kunlun Mountain, entering the kingdom of the western queen mother, and being entertained by the western queen mother in Yaochi. They had a drink, talked and laughed, and made an appointment to meet next time.
As representative works of ancient myths, Shan Hai Jing and Huai Nan Zi have repeatedly described Kunlun in several chapters. In these narratives, Kunlun Mountain is described as the highest and largest mountain in western China, the capital of the gods on the earth, and it is surrounded by several big rivers. There are many gods and gods living on the mountain, among which the most distinguished Yellow Emperor lives in Zengcheng, the highest level in Kunlun. The buildings in the city are gorgeous, and every gate is guarded by nine enlightened beasts. Everything on the mountain, especially jade, is magnificent and changeable, and plants and springs can make people live forever. ...
Not only the Yellow Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West in Xuanyuan, but also the ancestors of China's myth system, Gong and Yu, and even Sanmiao and Chu, are inextricably linked with Kunlun area.
When this fantastic space around Kunlun has been established over the years and has become increasingly complex and huge, all readers have raised the same question: where is Kunlun Mountain?
At the moment, I am sitting under the three peaks of the West Kunlun Mountain, by the lake Karakuli, watching Mustag's shadow reflected on the lake. Where is Kunlun Mountain?
Some people say that Kunlun Mountain and Olympus Mountain in China are the same holy mountain and the birthplace of the myth system. That's not true. People know where Mount Olympus is, but Kunlun Mountain in China's mythology has never really been found.
For more than two thousand years, people have been trying to answer this question in an endless stream. Until the present age, there are still countless people devoted to this. They searched all the ancient books that recorded the Kunlun Mountains, carefully studied every tiny feature of the mountains and rivers recorded in them and the textual research records of the ancients, which corresponded to countless mountains and rivers in China, and gave infinitely complicated answers. Taihang Mountain, the mountain on the northern edge of Ordos, the mountain at the source of the Qilian Mountain and the Yellow River in Qinghai, and now Kunlun Mountain have all been among the answers. Some people even say that Lake Karakuri is the Yaochi of the Queen Mother recorded in the book!
These answers and arguments, like all kinds of whispers floating on Lake Karakuri, can never penetrate this eternal silence.
The only cognitive tacit understanding that people reach in the changeable answers is almost an "unsolvable" compromise: the mythical space exists in the imaginary world, and it is not a level problem with the realistic geography after all. Even if they occasionally overlap in the mountains and rivers of reality, reality can't explain the mysterious fantasies in mythology-those fantasies are just a way for the ancients to express the known world by imagination.
Kunlun Mountain is a magic mountain.
2. Is there really such a big gap between the Kunlun Mountain myth on the map and the real world? If this gap cannot be bridged, then there should be no Kunlun Mountain in reality. However, at the moment, I am sitting on a mountain called Kunlun. There must be a way for people to escape from the complex fantasy of myth and enter the real world.
Regarding the illusion of Kunlun Mountain, if you change the way of asking questions, it may become a solution.
In the age of myth birth, what is the cognitive scope of writers living in the Yellow River basin on the surrounding geography? If we can know their cognitive boundary, Kunlun Mountain will appear within this boundary.
Taihang Mountain, the mountain on the northern edge of Ordos, Qilian Mountain ... These mountains near the Yellow River Basin can be used as the answer, because later generations think that if Mu (Zhou Muwang) really traveled around in the pre-Qin period, judging from the traffic conditions and his mobility at that time, his range of involvement was extremely limited and he could only travel in a small range. Therefore, the Kunlun Mountain he climbed won't be too far, and the Queen Mother of the West is also the embodiment of tribal leaders near the Yellow River Basin.
If Mu Travel Around the World is a fictional story, the geographical scenes recorded in the book will come from the world's cognition of the surrounding geography at that time-perhaps the places that the author has actually been to, and more content will come from the word-of-mouth of people around him-once word-of-mouth is used, this cognitive boundary will become blurred, and it is likely to go far beyond the Yellow River basin. For example, at that time, people heard that in the far west, there was a mountain called Kunlun, which produced jade and was the source of many rivers, but they didn't know where it was.
In that era of word-of-mouth geographical knowledge, someone needs to go out from myths and legends and book research and have a look at the real and rich west.
There really are such people.
This man's role in history is usually summed up in four words: "hollowing out the western regions." This is zhangqian.
In the 2nd century BC, Zhang Qian, the envoy of the Han Dynasty, sent a mission to the Western Regions, bringing back a lot of knowledge and products, so that people's cognitive boundary of the West at that time directly crossed Central Asia from Yumenguan to the west of Congling (Pamirs). Zhang Qian revealed a previously unknown external world to people, and in addition, he brought back an unknown thing: Kunlun Mountain.
Did Zhang Qian find the mythical Kunlun Mountain? This process is roughly described in Historical Records Biography of Dawan: "The Han Dynasty impoverished Heyuan, and Heyuan originated in Khotan. Its mountain is rich in jade, ancient books are collected, and the famous river comes out of the mountain, named Kunlun Cloud. " -Zhang Qian traced back to the source of the Yellow River and found that there was a mountain near Khotan (this was a mistake of Zhang Qian, the real source of the Yellow River was not here, but this mistake didn't matter), and jade was produced on this mountain. According to ancient records, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty named this mountain "Kunlun". Since then, Kunlun Mountain has officially appeared on the map of China.
At this moment, my mountain is Kunlun Mountain named after Liu Che, the emperor of the Han Dynasty.
How did the name "Kunlun Mountain" come from? Aside from myths and fantasies, is this mountain named by Liu Che the Kunlun Mountain that people have heard of in limited geographical cognition before?
A long time ago, people found that the word "Kunlun" was not a Chinese character, but a transliteration of a foreign word. Then, just as "Qilian" comes from Hun language and "Muztag" comes from Kirgiz language, the word "Kunlun" should come from the real name of Kunlun Mountain and has been spread to the Yellow River basin for a long time. Han people heard the name of this mountain and wrote it in ancient books.
Since the Han people had heard of this translation in the pre-Qin period, this ethnic group named Kunlun was even older than the Huns who appeared later.
What nationality is it? Which mountain do they live near? "Bo Wanghou" Zhang Qian lived not far from the pre-Qin era. When he hollowed out the western regions, did he meet this nation and pass through the real Kunlun Mountain?
If you ask this question to Xiongnu, the opponent of the Han Dynasty, the answer will probably come out. Zhangqian just didn't ask. This is not his concern, let alone his task against the Huns.
I don't know where Kunlun Mountain is because people are too strange to the world outside Yumenguan. It is precisely because of this "unfamiliarity" that Kunlun Mountain was rendered again and again until it became a huge imagination space divorced from reality, and the Kunlun myth system was completed.
After more than 2,000 years, some contemporary scholars have come to an unremarkable conclusion by piecing together and comparing ancient language fragments: we always thought that the name of "Qilian Mountain" came from Xiongnu language, meaning Tianshan Mountain, but it was not. The word "Qilian" probably comes from an older language. Later, the Huns used Xiongnu language and then translated it into Chinese. In ancient languages, "Qilian" and "Kunlun" are the same word, meaning "mountain".
The endless Kunlun conjecture is like a long night, and there seems to be a bright gap. If this tiny conclusion can be confirmed, there will be a huge reversal of countless doubts and speculations about "Kunlun Mountain" for more than two thousand years-Kunlun is not a specific mountain, and all the mountains are called "Kunlun" in an ancient western language.
God's place is hidden in the colorful imagination world of Central Plains people, and the real Kunlun Mountain and the real westworld begin to emerge in the land where people live.
This proven language is one of the oldest languages in Indo-European family: Northeastern.
Bow sound is a language that has long since disappeared. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that scholars discovered and sorted out the documents written in bow tones in the archaeology of Tarim Basin in Xinjiang. The ethnic groups who use Gongyin are distributed in the vast areas north and south of Tianshan Mountain, including Kuqa, Yanqi, Qiuci, Loulan and Turpan in Tarim Basin. This vast area, after traveling westward through Zhang Qian, entered the cognitive field of vision of Central Plains people, and was called "Western Regions" from now on.
Among the ethnic groups that use the Northeast, the most well-known one in the Central Plains is Dayue. The real purpose of Zhang Qian's hollowing out the Western Regions is to find the Dayue family.
During the pre-Qin period, the nomadic Vietnamese were driven away by the rising Huns in the west of Hexi Corridor, between Dunhuang and Qilian Mountains, and were forced to move westward for a long time. The Huns then took over Qilian Mountain instead of the Vietnamese, and most of the Vietnamese who left went west along the southern foot of Tianshan Mountain. After several twists and turns, he moved westward twice and finally settled in the western Pamirs and Hejian area of Central Asia. The Yue people who moved westward were later called Da Yue people. The few Ren Yue people left behind are called Xiaoyue people.
At the same time, the Han Dynasty was threatened by the rising Xiongnu, so it tried to find the Dayue family who was beaten away by the Xiongnu to fight against the Xiongnu together, which led to Zhang Qian's westward journey. By the time Zhang Qian found Dayue, the former nomads had settled in the western Pamirs and the fertile land of Amu Darya, unwilling to get involved in the war against Xiongnu. Zhang Qian's diplomatic goal of going west has not been achieved.
However, Zhang Qian's The Journey to the West was named by German geographer Richthofen in the 1970s of 19 more than two thousand years later. This name illuminates the history and civilization of the East and the West at the same time, and it will last for a long time-he called this road "Silk Road" in a book called China.
4. The Silk Road In fact, the real "Silk Road" is neither a road with very accurate starting point and ending point, nor a road that has been traveled since Zhang Qian. On the contrary, it is an ancient and vast passage, with many branches crossing and extending, and pedestrians choose the road according to different environment and times conditions.
Before Zhang Qian, the earliest east-west road started from the northern grassland. "Grassland is like an uncultivated ocean, which cannot provide living conditions for settled humans, but it provides greater convenience for travel and transportation than cultivated land." British historian Toynbee once described the convenience that grasslands provide for transportation. Compared with the self-sufficiency of farming people, nomadic tribes have a considerable number of items needed for survival, such as food or textiles, which need to be exchanged with settled societies. As a result, early trade activities were born on the migration road of nomadic tribes. As early as before the Han Dynasty, Skitai people who were active in Mongolian grassland, South Russian grassland, Central Asia and northern West Asia opened up the grassland road in the nomadic process. This broad Eurasian grassland corridor extends to Daxinganling in the east and the Black Sea grassland in the west.
However, in China's ancient books, the word "grassland" appeared later than the words "vast sea" and "quicksand" describing the western regions, because in the Yellow River basin, which is the center of civilization, the vision of the people in the Central Plains did not expand with the vision of the nomadic tribes in the north, but did not extend westward until Zhang Qian's time. Before Zhang Qian, the products of the Central Plains had appeared on the road of the Western Regions. After the "hollowing out of the western regions", in addition to expanding the scope of writers' records, a group of people engaged in commercial trade appeared on the passage between East and West. When this group of people started to walk, the Silk Road officially connected the civilization centers of the East and the West.