Kozlov
Prior to this, kozlov's team had been digging in the ancient city of Halahaot for several days, but most of them were in vain, so kozlov turned his attention to the city.
The ancient city of Harahaote during kozlov's inspection tour.
As the stupa was opened bit by bit, everyone was shocked. Shown in front of everyone is a cultural relic warehouse. A large number of manuscripts, scrolls, books, scrolls and Buddha statues are piled together, and a female skeleton sits cross-legged in the center of the tower.
Pagoda excavation site
After later research, most of these materials belong to the cultural relics of Xixia period, which has uncovered the veil of Xixia history that has been missing in the history of China. Because the information is too detailed, it has attracted the attention and research of a large number of experts and scholars, and Xixia studies have also formed and become a prominent school.
Unearthed cultural relics in Black City
Xixia Double-headed Buddha (Unearthed from Black City)
Thangka (Unearthed from Black City)
Silk Painting of Amitabha Sage (Unearthed in Black City)
This ancient city, called Halahuaote, is now the location of the Black City (Halahuaote is its Mongolian transliteration), also known as the Black Water City, which is located on the Heishui River, 20 kilometers south of Ejina Banner in Inner Mongolia.
Heihe River originated in the middle part of the northern foot of Qilian Mountain and passed through Qinghai, Gansu and Inner Mongolia provinces successively. After arriving at Huxi New Village, Jinta County, Gansu Province, it is divided into two branches, the west branch is called Xihe and Mu Ren Gaole, and flows northward into Gashunnaoer (West Juyanhai). The east branch is called Donghe, also known as Munagole, and flows northward into Supor (East Juyanhai). After the black water flows to Ding Xin Town, Jinta County, the terrain along the way tends to be flat, the rivers often change, and the rivers flood everywhere, so the water surface looks wide and flat, but it is too shallow to sail, so it is named "weak water", which is called weak water quicksand because it washes and carries a lot of sediment when it flows through a large desert Gobi. The Liusha River in The Journey to the West is based on weak water: "800 quicksand boundary, 3,000 weak water depth, goose feathers can't float, reed flowers sink to the bottom."
The area flowing through the lower reaches of Heihe River was called Juyan in ancient times, which is the main passage from Hexi Corridor to Mobei. The word "Juyan" is a Hun language, which means weak water and quicksand in Zhu. During the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, after Huo Qubing defeated the Xiongnu, the Han Dynasty began to station troops in Juyan, building roadblocks, beacon towers and other military facilities. One of the routes of the Silk Road, which began in the Han Dynasty, is to transit from Gansu to the north via Juyan area, and then to Mobei from here. Passers-by and caravans have to replenish here before they can continue to March into the Gobi, into the depths of the vast grassland, and then into Central Asia and Europe. There are still a large number of historical sites in this area, which are collectively called Juyan Site, including the famous Han bamboo slips of Juyan, and Heicheng Site is also one of the outstanding representatives of Juyan culture.
Populus euphratica forest with weak water and quicksand
Xixia to Yuan Dynasty is another important development period in Juyan area after Han Dynasty. In the early days of Li Yuanhao's founding, Xixia set up the Army Division of Heishui Town in Juyan area, which was one of the Twelve Army Divisions of Xixia, and its organization was located in Heicheng. It was also at this time that the Black City began to build a city. Although the city is small in scale, it is the only road and transportation hub leading to Mobei in Hexi Corridor, and its strategic position is extremely important. In the heyday of Xixia, Black City was no longer a simple military castle, but gradually became a prosperous city with developed economy and culture, which lasted for nearly 200 years.
In A.D. 1226, Genghis Khan led a great army to conquer Xixia. He first conquered the Black City, then went south and went straight to Zhongxing House (now Yinchuan, Ningxia), the capital of Xixia. The following year, Xixia perished. After the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, Black City was an important transportation hub for Mobei to the mainland. 1286, Yuan Shizu established the "General Government of Iginai Road" here. The rulers of the Yuan Dynasty not only sent a large number of troops to Black City, but also moved many Han and Mongolian people from all over the country to develop agriculture and animal husbandry production with the local people.
With the development of economy and the increase of population, the original black cities can no longer meet the needs. The Yuan government then expanded and rebuilt the original city in Xixia.
The expanded Black City is about 420 meters wide from east to west and 375 meters long from north to south, which is three times the area of Xixia City. The city has four east-west main roads and six north-south main roads. The wall is as high as 10 meter. There are seven boarding roads in the city, one at the east gate and one at the west gate, and there are urns outside the gate. The four corners of the city are built with rounded tables protruding outward, and there are 19 horse faces around the outer wall of the city wall.
Plan of Heicheng Site
There are markets, government offices, post offices, universities, monasteries and other areas in the city, as well as residential areas for people, officials and classes. On both sides of the street, there are all kinds of shops, including restaurants, inns, money houses, grocery stores, clothing and silk shops, harness workshops and so on. As well as horse market, firewood market and agricultural and livestock products trading market. Not only is the city very prosperous, but there are also residential areas and bustling markets outside the city. At that time, there were about seven or eight thousand people living in the Black City area.
There are different buildings such as Buddhism, Taoism and Islam inside and outside the city, among which Buddhism has the largest number and the largest area. On the wall in the northwest corner, there are still five bowl-covered white pagodas, the highest of which is 13 meters. This pagoda, made of adobe, still stands in the clouds after hundreds of years of sandstorms and becomes a landmark building of the Black City. There are 12 rows of white pagodas in the northwest corner of the city, 1 Muslim worship hall in the southwest corner, and 1 white pagodas outside the south wall.
Black city satellite map
Muslim worship temple in the southwest corner outside the city
Black City in Yuan Dynasty is not only a prosperous city with a large population and developed economy, but also a traffic fortress connecting Mobei in the north, the western regions, Hexi in the south and Hetao in the east. It is the military, political and cultural center of the western regions in Yuan Dynasty. It was during this period that the famous Italian traveler Kyle Polo arrived in the upper capital of the Yuan Dynasty from the western regions via the Black City, and the Travels of Marco Polo also called the Black City "Iginai" (.
The good times didn't last long. In the fifth year of Hongwu in the Ming Dynasty (1372), the Black City was attacked by Sheng Feng, the general of the Western Expedition in the Ming Dynasty, and the Mongolian army retreated to the depths of Mobei. Because the Black City is too far away from the Ming Great Wall and too close to the Mongolian Plateau, and there is no water near the city after the diversion of the Heishui River, the Ming Dynasty immediately abandoned this area and moved the border people inward. Since then, this black city has been sleeping in the dusty history for more than 500 years, and sandstorms in the desert gradually buried this once noisy ancient city until the arrival of the kozlov Expedition.
Kozlov called this stupa, which brought him great surprises, "brilliant stupa". In this "splendid stupa", 24,000 volumes of books and scriptures were unearthed. The great surprise made them get carried away, so that they did not record the excavation process in detail according to the archaeological operation norms, but mixed all the cultural relics together, which also caused many difficulties for future research.
Kozlov eventually used 40 camels, but it was still unable to transport all the excavated documents and cultural relics. Kozlov immediately decided to bury the remaining items, including a giant Buddha statue, in a secret place. He intends to dig them up and take them away when he comes back in the future. 17 years later, kozlov came to the Black City again. To his great regret, sandstorms and quicksand destroyed all traces left at that time, and he never found the statue of the giant Buddha and other buried objects during his last excavation. They may still be buried there, covered with thick sand, waiting for future generations to discover and study.
Buddha statue (unearthed in Black City)
There are more than 8,000 world-renowned Xixia documents published and written by kozlov, as well as a large number of books and scrolls in Chinese, Tibetan, Uygur, Mongolian and Persian languages, as well as precious cultural relics such as pottery, iron, textiles, sculptures and paintings. A large number of these cultural relics, most of which are well preserved, are "priceless treasures" for studying the history of the Xixia Dynasty and even the Song, Liao, Jin and Yuan Dynasties at the same time as the Xixia Dynasty. Among the piles of documents, there is a very important document, namely "Pearl in the palm of your hand when Fanhan is synchronized", which is a dictionary with double interpretations in Xixia language and Chinese, and has also become the most important tool to decipher Xixia characters and history.
Fan Han palm pearl
The number of these documents is rare in the world. It took Russian scholars more than half a century to sort out the rough catalogue of these cultural relics, and it was not until 1996 after the disintegration of the Soviet Union that Russia initially completed the document sorting work. Russia has only published more than ten volumes of literature so far, which is of relatively small value. A large number of precious documents in Heishui City have not been published so far, which also leads to the slow progress in the further study of Xixia history.
The site of Black City is also the most complete and grand site of an ancient city on the northern line of the ancient Silk Road. Wall, turret, horse face, urn and other buildings are well preserved, but outside the wall, sand dunes have been completely integrated with the wall, and the yellow sand has climbed to the top of the city ten meters high.
The interior of the city is almost submerged by yellow sand, which can be seen everywhere, but you can still see all the streets and buildings in the city. The most obvious are various pagodas. Above the city wall in the northwest corner, five earth towers are simple, harmonious and serene. Despite hundreds of years of sandstorms, they still stand in the clouds today and become a unique symbol of Heishui city.
As for the female skeleton sitting in the stupa, Russian anthropologist volkov identified it as a woman in her fifties. According to the Buddhist sutras in the stupa and other materials, historians speculate that this skeleton is probably the Empress Dowager Renzong Luo of Xixia.
Queen Luo believed in Buddhism all her life and was an extremely devout Buddhist. She has spared no expense in organizing the copying and printing of a large number of Buddhist scriptures.
In 1206, an unusual palace coup took place in Xixia. After Renzong's death, Xia Huanzong, the son of Queen Luo, succeeded to the throne. But a few years later, he was overthrown by his cousin Li Anquan and died suddenly after three months in prison. Incredibly, the behind-the-scenes manipulator of the coup was not only Xia Hengzong's mother, Queen Luo. Why did Queen Luo join hands with my nephew to abolish her son? Later, Queen Luo didn't know what to do, and it was not recorded in the historical materials.
Some historians speculate that Li Anquan probably won the support of Queen Luo by deception before and after the mutiny, and then put Queen Luo in a stupa and killed her.
But I think there is another possibility. This stupa was originally the place where Queen Luo personally meditated. Tired of the troubles in the world, she volunteered to spend her life in the green light of the ancient Buddha, and finally died in the stupa in this special way of practice. Among many Buddhist scriptures in the stupa, the name of Queen Luo was found in the postscript or the application seal, so there was obviously no hurry. If the speculation is correct, the Queen Mother Luo had been quietly guarding the stupa for 700 years before being excavated by kozlov.