In the 26th year of Guangxu reign (1900), the Taoist King discovered the Tibetan scriptures cave, which contained more than 40,000 pieces of cultural relics such as scriptures and documents. 1907, 24 boxes of books and documents and 5 boxes of paintings and embroideries were looted by Stan in England. 19 14, Stein took away five boxes of manuscripts from Dunhuang again, and twice * * * took away 10000 pieces of suicide notes and manuscripts. 1908, the Frenchman Pelliot selected fine works from the Tibetan Sutra Cave and took away 5,000 pieces. 19 1 1 year, Japanese Zuichuan Lihua and Yoshikawa Koichiro took about 600 scrolls from the Taoist king. 19 14 Russian oldenburg took another batch of scriptures from Dunhuang, surveyed the grottoes, and stole the murals of Cave 263. 1924, Warner of America uncovered and stole 26 murals of Mogao Grottoes with a special chemical glue. These thefts and damages have caused great losses to Dunhuang cultural relics.
Most of these losses were related to Wang Daoshi, the host of Mogao Grottoes at that time. The Taoist King, Wang, was originally a farmer in Macheng, Hubei Province, and later fled to Gansu to become a Taoist. After many twists and turns, it became the seat of the Mogao Grottoes and dominated the most splendid culture in ancient China. He received little money from foreign adventurers and asked them to carry away countless boxes of Dunhuang cultural relics.
At that time, Taoist Wang did not cherish everything in Dunhuang. In the early morning of May 26th (1900), he discovered the Tibetan Sutra Cave! But he knows nothing about the value of the treasure in the cave of the Tibetan scriptures. Pick it up and give it away at will. Later, foreigners learned that they stole a lot of treasures from Taoist Wang with very little money.
The author is deeply saddened by the loss of these treasures! Reflect on the social roots that led to that terrible national cultural tragedy. The author wrote according to this idea. related data
A story about Dunhuang studies
1. Gengzinian (1900) On May 26th of the lunar calendar, Taoist King discovered a complex cave (now numbered 17) on the north wall of the cave in Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes, which was filled with scrolls and documents from the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Northern Song Dynasty. The total number of these ancient documents is more than 50 thousand, most of which are handwritten, and there are also a few blocks and rubbings; Its forms are paper, folded books (including pleated leaves, cyclones and butterflies), leaf books and single-leaf paper. Most of its characters are in Chinese, but there are also many documents in ancient Tibetan, Uighur, Khotan, Sogdian, Sanskrit and Turkic. Its content is extremely rich, involving religion, history, geography, language, literature, art, music, astronomy, calendar, mathematics, medicine and many other disciplines, but mainly Buddhist classics and temple documents. Dunhuang documents mainly refer to these ancient documents. No matter in quantity or cultural connotation, the unearthed Dunhuang documents can be said to be the most important cultural discovery in China in the 20th century.
However, these precious cultural relics, which later shocked the academic circles in the world, were not properly protected at that time, leading to most of them being scattered to Britain, France, Russia, Japan and other countries. China academic circles began to sort out and study Dunhuang documents from 1909. With the joint efforts of China scholars and Japanese, French and British scholars, the field of academic research, which started with sorting out and studying Dunhuang documents, has gradually expanded, forming a new discipline-Dunhuang studies. Now, Dunhuang studies have become an internationally renowned school, and the study of historical issues by using Dunhuang documents has always been an important part of Dunhuang studies. (Hao Wenchun's Review and Prospect of Dunhuang Literature and Historical Research)
2. Dunhuang studies is a comprehensive frontier discipline. The research objects of Dunhuang studies are: first, Dunhuang Grottoes, where colorful sculptures and murals from the Sixteen Countries to the Yuan Dynasty are displayed, are magnificent and unparalleled art museums; Second, there are 40,000 to 50,000 books unearthed in the Tibetan Sutra Cave. As far as art is concerned, there are a large number of paintings, architecture, sculptures, decorative patterns, calligraphy, literature and other cultural relics, which are precious historical materials for the history of art, architecture, literature, calligraphy, music and dance in China. As far as history is concerned, it involves politics, military affairs, philosophy, religion, nationality, language, science and technology, folk customs, and cultural exchanges between China and the West. Therefore, the study of Dunhuang studies can be divided into two parts: one is the study of Dunhuang grottoes, and the other is the study of Dunhuang suicide notes. (Zhu, Three Trends in the Development of Dunhuang Studies ── Research on the Trend of Contemporary China History (III))
3. The research objects of Dunhuang studies generally include Dunhuang grottoes, Dunhuang suicide notes and Dunhuang monuments (in fact, the Silk Road monuments).
Dunhuang grottoes include all the grottoes in ancient Dunhuang with Mogao Grottoes as the main body, with more than 550 grottoes and murals of about 50,000 square meters. From the Sixteen Kingdoms to the Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties, it lasted 1600 years, and its scale was unparalleled in the world. As far as the mural content is concerned, it depicts the activities of various nationalities, classes and aspects in China. There are about 40,000 or 50,000 documents unearthed from the Tibetan Sutra Cave, which lasted for more than 1,000 years from the Three Kingdoms and the Jin Dynasty to the Northern Song Dynasty. The content includes politics, economy, military and so on. The British call it "the great treasure house of China's literary remains". In a word, the study of Dunhuang studies has been involved in Wan Li for two thousand years, and the so-called "Dunhuang studies" is actually "Chinese studies". (Duan Wenjie's "Dunhuang Studies Return to Hometown")
4. According to statistics, China Peking Library currently has the largest collection of Dunhuang suicide notes, exceeding 1000 suicide notes, and 9803 have been catalogued; The Oriental Writing Headquarters of the British Library has 1 1297, of which 9 172 has been catalogued. There are 6,000 papers in the National Library of Paris, France, 4,038 papers in Chinese have been catalogued, and about 2,000 papers in Tibetan have not been catalogued. The Asian Institute for Nationalities in Leningrad, the former Soviet Union, collected a copy. 1 1050, catalog number 2954; No.429, the most fashionable Japanese flower collection. In addition, China Lushun Museum has a volume189; Gansu Provincial Library has more than 0/00 books/kloc; Gansu Provincial Museum 137 pieces; Dunhuang Research Institute 367 pieces; Dunhuang County Museum has 78 pieces in Chinese and 226 volumes in Tibetan. 22 cultural relics rooms in the history department of Northwest Normal University; Shanghai Museum 182 pieces; More than 300 pieces of Tianjin Art Museum; Taiwan Province Central Library153; There are more than 20 pieces in the National History Museum of Taiwan Province Province. Some foreign libraries and museums also have some suicide notes. For example, the library of Indian Affairs in Britain has 765 Tibetan documents. 38 volumes of Daiwa University, Japan; 7 volumes of Gulong University; Japanese private collector Nakamura Buzhe 163 pieces; Other * * * has 28 volumes; Oriental Department of Royal Danish Library Volume 14; The French Ji Mei Museum also has 220 silk paintings. There are also some libraries with unknown collections, such as Hexi Museum in Gansu, China, Institute of History and Language of Taiwan Academia Sinica, and some private collectors in Taiwan Province Province. The Kindley Library of Oxford University, the Library of the Royal Society of Asia and the Berlin Academy of Sciences in West Germany have more than 6,000 documents of China, the Seoul Museum in South Korea has more than 2,000 documents of former governors of North Korea, and there are about 3,000 documents of Otani in Japan. The Delhi Museum in India also has some Tibetan literature. Sweden, Austria, the former East Germany and other countries also have their own treasures. (Lu Xiuwen, "How much do you know about Dunhuang suicide notes", "Knowledge of literature and history")
Evaluation of Yu prose
1. Yu's essays, Taoist Temple Building, Snow in Yangguan, Shanghainese and Chaohou, are really a kind of "perceptual experience" and contain his rational speculation. His "perceptual experience" stems from his appreciation and understanding of emperors and generals, talented people and beautiful women, classics, mountains and rivers and secular human feelings. He pays attention to them with dual cultural personality. He is not only a university professor who is deeply influenced by China's cultural tradition and has accumulated the genes of cultural tradition, but also a modern man who is collided by western cultural thoughts and embraced by the current tide of reform and commodity. So he introduced his own aesthetic view with the paradox of inheriting and criticizing the cultural tradition, resulting in some cultural and philosophical anxiety, a sense of historical vicissitudes, and a sense of mission to get out of the predicament. He himself called it a "cultural journey". In fact, this is exactly the "collision" between Yu Thought and history and reality, and he wants to get out of the "difficult journey" of history and reality. (Wu, 1990s: The Present Tense of China's Prose)
2. The transcendence of Yu's prose over contemporary prose is not only manifested in the ideological and cultural field, but also in the strong subjective consciousness. The reason why Yu's prose has a strong appeal lies in the writer's integration of his vivid cultural life into his works, and this specific cultural life is accumulated by profound and heavy realistic history. The heavy pressure of reality and history makes the writer's cultural life like "the source of welcoming the Spring", so a series of humanistic landscapes become the condensation of history, and then history reveals culture, and finally culture reveals the existence state of the nation. In this way, Yu's prose finally got rid of the barriers of prose in the past 40 years, walked out of petty aesthetic norms such as "small experience", "small decoration" and "small philosophy", and established a truly tall and independent subject image. ..... The distinct subject consciousness in Yu's prose certainly comes from the writer's profound knowledge of literature and history and good literary talent, but if we only rely on these, we can only write a book of mourning, and we will never lay a "spiritual Dojo" between heaven and earth. Therefore, a truly pure subjective consciousness needs insight into history, anxiety about reality, persistence in the future, certainty about life and understanding of the whole human culture. To borrow the words of the sages is to get rid of "small Confucianism" and reach the realm of "gentleman Confucianism". Yu's prose does not pay attention to secular life or even social and political level, but pays attention to real history from a higher level. Among them, happiness, worry, liberation and distress are closely related to history, reality and future, and are closely related to the lofty and humble, profound and vain in the current situation, thus forming the multi-dimensional subjective consciousness of prose, which makes contemporary prose rich, tall and pure. (On the Cultural Orientation of Yu Prose, Journal of China Renmin University)
3. If Yu has endowed culture with rich and vivid image connotation from the perspective of life and micro, then the attention from the perspective of nationality and nationality is the macro-framework of culture.
This concern is reflected in the author's integration of the motherland's landscape, national feelings and China culture. He regards culture as the soul of the nation and places his feelings for the nation on mountains and rivers. In Daota, the author associates the cultural relics left by Mogao Grottoes with foreign invasion and national disaster. "A young poet wrote that that night, when the adventurer Stan was ready to start with a team of ox carts full of boxes, he looked back at the gloomy sunset in the western sky. There, the wound of an ancient nation is bleeding. " Not only boxes of cultural relics were carried away, but the author clearly saw a national spirit-culture, scarred and bleeding under the bayonet of the great powers, and a tall cultural giant groaned in pain before the times.
Through Yu's prose, we can see that there is a deeper cultural significance, that is, the essence and core of China culture-nationalism and patriotism. "I even want to kneel down to him and beg him in a low voice." "Please wait a minute, wait a minute …" "It's difficult here and there, so I can only let him cry in the desert." … We seem to see the author's innocent heart, full of cherishing national culture and deep affection for the motherland, and his sad begging and calling should not only be retained.
Yu's "cultural journey" not only has a strong sense of life and nationality, but also has a sense of history. Yu's profound thoughts and rich prose connotation all stem from his profound and exquisite historian accomplishment. The rich sense of history in his Culture is not a dead sketch of the past, but regards history as an endless river and closely links the past and the present with culture. In his view, culture is like a dynamic rolling wave, which pushes the Chinese nation forward bravely.
The author looks at culture from a broad perspective of human history. Culture has become the accumulation of history, and culture and history have become an inseparable whole. His "landscape" is "humanistic landscape". "This is the long-standing charm of China's history and culture and its long-term influence on me, and I can't get rid of it. Everywhere I go, there is always a heavy historical pressure hanging over my whole body, which makes me inexplicably moved and sighed "(Preface). The description in the article Mogao Grottoes is more typical. "The historical sites that have been blown up so far always have a unique gift of endless life." "The place where the Mogao Grottoes can make foreign monuments proud lies in its 1000 years of accumulation. Looking at the Mogao Grottoes is not about specimens that have been dead for a thousand years, but about life that has lived for a thousand years. What a magnificent life it is to live for a thousand years with smooth blood flow and even breathing! " The charm of history can be described as powerful! The article "Mogao Grottoes" is not an appreciation of cultural relics, but a vivid representation of thousands of years of historical vicissitudes in China. From the color flow of portraits, he saw thousands of years of civilization in detail. When history and culture are combined, there is no indifference and harshness. The vitality of history drives away the monotony and dryness of the "cultural journey" and presents us with liveliness and freedom. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the "cultural journey" has attracted much attention! (Zhang Zhaojun et al. "Coagulation, Elf and Accumulation-Cultural View of Cultural Journey" and "Exploration of Social Science")
4. I walked out of my study and the bustling city. Silently, from the autumn wind to the spring rain in the south, the dust from the sandstorm in the Tang Dynasty and the Song Dynasty was dark and thin, exploring the fresh blood of our ancient nation's Su Sheng strength and cultural renewal, sighing the natural landscape, and facing the piles of cultural broken walls, I made a desolate life. This is really great sorrow, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is a splash of ink in history. Look at the whole "cultural journey", starting from Dunhuang in the northwest, to Wuhou Temple and Dujiangyan in the southwest, to Wuyue Spring and Autumn Period in the southeast, and finally to the fortress hill in Nanyang. At first, you will feel proud and gratified, because after all, we have a prosperous Tang Dynasty and a splendid Dunhuang civilization created by the prosperous Tang Dynasty, even though later generations destroyed her. Then you feel cold, because the ghost of the literati appears, slowly you will be silent, you will be sad, you will sob, and finally you will face a group of China people with dark hair and yellow skin who no longer speak Chinese in a foreign land. Will you stop moaning? China's culture, are you really ruined here? Are you really as civilized as ancient Egypt and Greece in the end? No, it won't!
Taoist Pagoda and Mogao Grottoes should be the awakening after robbery. "Snow in Yangguan" has already jumped out of the circle of "people leave Yangguan in the West for no reason". Shanghainese pay homage to the ancient Shanghai civilization and fully affirm the present Shanghai civilization, and put forward the concepts of "ordinary citizen" and "big citizen".
Yu is the kind of scholar who is willing to immerse his pen in the vicissitudes of history, but his eyes are always fixed on today and looking forward to tomorrow. He has experienced ups and downs of mountains and rivers, and he has suffered from snow and cold. How can there be no vicissitudes? Past shabby and mottled archways, past broken temples with scarlet peeling, and past abandoned ships eroded by wind and frost, with scabbed scars of years along the coast, are silent but cruel iron hoofs of years, which is unbearable helplessness for human beings. Here, the vicissitudes of life have become a human landscape, which requires a high-grade aesthetic state of mind! Tian Chongxue's Prose Style in Greater China ── Impression of Yu's Prose from "Cultural Journey" to "Notes on Mountain Residence")
In the Taoist Temple Tower, when we rushed up with the author's resentment and tried to stand in the desert with the author to stop the western cultural robbers from escorting Dunhuang cultural relics and classics, we were suddenly asked by the author, "What should we do if the escort is stopped?" Emotional pain suddenly turned into ideological pain.
Taoist Pagoda was written in the morning at the turn of the last century. "Taoist Wang gets up early every day and likes to walk around the cave ... and start painting". We can even read black humor here, because Wang Daochang painted Dunhuang murals that have been circulating for thousands of years! This vivid and ever-changing description of emotional connotation is full of all Yu's essays, and it is often written more brilliantly.
(China Sentence) Such words of worry and indignation show the author's love for China culture and helplessness for cultural destiny, and are full of historical vicissitudes. "Taoist Temple Building" just confirms a passage of Lu Xun: "It is really difficult to preserve China's public property. If the authorities are amateurs, they will do things badly; If they were experts, they would finish what was stolen. In fact, it is not just for books or antiques. " ("Gang Ji Tan so-called" ouchi document "")
"Story+poetic language+cultural exclamation" is obviously an effective assembly line.
(The above paragraph is excerpted from "Feeling in Yu Qiu" edited by Xiao Pu. )