1402, after three years of hard fighting, Judy, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, successfully conquered Nanjing. His whereabouts were unknown, and he was able to ascend to the coveted throne. As an ambitious emperor, after the world is stable, he wants to do an unprecedented project-to build an encyclopedia containing written records. This is the historical background of Yongle Grand Ceremony.
Judy ordered the compilation of Yongle Dadian for a purpose: "As for astronomy, geography, Yin and Yang, medical divination, Buddhism and Taoism, there is no need to list them!" In other words, as long as there are written books, no matter what kind, they should be included in the ceremony. Don't slack off because there are many projects. He ordered Jie Jin, a famous genius of the Ming Dynasty, to be president, and began to prepare the ceremony. When this book was written for the first time and sent to Yu Lan, Judy felt very dissatisfied after reading it, thinking that it was far from meeting his own requirements. So he ordered Yao to lead the army, and the whole dynasty used 2 169 people. It was not until the sixth year of Yongle that this wonderful book was compiled.
In terms of academic value, most people think that Yongle Dadian is more valuable than Sikuquanshu in Qing Dynasty. This is because in the process of revising the book Yongle Dadian, no changes were made to the included books, and the original contents were well preserved, which is a sign of a dynasty's self-confidence. However, in the process of revising Sikuquanshu, in order to emphasize the orthodoxy of the Qing Dynasty, a lot of changes were made to the ancient books.
Unfortunately, there are less than 800 volumes of such masterpieces, and only one remains. You know, when Yongle Dadian was written, 22,877 volumes were written in one volume, that is to say, 800 volumes handed down only accounted for 4% of the original book. Where did 96% of Yongle Grand Ceremony go?
When the ceremony was completed, Emperor Yongle did not copy the ceremony. Emperor Jiajing of Shizong of the Ming Dynasty, after he succeeded to the throne, grew up in the palace and had a good literary accomplishment, so he loved Yongle Dadian very much. According to historical records, Emperor Jiajing often carried several volumes of Yongle Dadian with him for reading at any time. In 4 1 year, Jiajing ordered a copy of Yongle Dadian to be hidden in the imperial history. K alto. In the historical materials after Jiajing, the original figure no longer appears. In other words, with the death of Emperor Jiajing, the whereabouts of the original ceremony became a mystery. This is also the main reason why many people think that the original work was buried in Yongling with Emperor Jiajing.
However, this is just a statement. Some people think that the original Yongle Grand Ceremony was destroyed by the war in the late Ming and early Qing Dynasties, while others think that the original Yongle Grand Ceremony was destroyed by the fire in Gan Qing Palace during Jiaqing period of Qing Dynasty.
Many copies of this ceremony were lost in the Ming Dynasty. Mainly because there are many kinds of books collected in the ceremony, most of which are out of print and rare, and all dynasties have followed the imperial history? The phenomenon of not returning books in K.
During the Qianlong period, when compiling Sikuquanshu, a lot of reference was needed to Yongle Dadian. However, at this time, after statistics, the ceremony has lost more than 2000 copies. During the Second Opium War, the British and French allied forces ransacked the capital, and the ceremony was greatly damaged, and some remnants were swept into other countries by invaders. But by the first year of Guangxu, there were still 5,000 copies of Gift in the Qing Palace. After that, another disaster of the ceremony came.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty were crushed by the great powers and could not protect the ceremony well. During this period, the people who watched the Yongle ceremony stole a lot of books. Wen Yi, an important figure of the imperial party in the late Qing Dynasty, stole more than 100 copies of the Grand Ceremony, and later generations of literati once asked for the Grand Ceremony in the market. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, Liu Shengmu once recorded a scene of stealing the Yongle Grand Ceremony: when the book thief went in the morning, he was carrying a bag with a cotton-padded jacket in it, which was as big as two volumes of the Grand Ceremony. When I left the hospital at night, I put on my jacket, put two gifts in my bag, and stole the book.
Today, after many negotiations and donations from the people, the National Library of China has 16 1 book "Ritual". In the world, the United States, Britain, Germany, Japan and other countries have hidden rituals.
As for whether the Yongle Grand Ceremony, which is called "the largest encyclopedia in the history of the world" by the British Encyclopedia, can let the world see the whole picture, and whether the Grand Ceremony was really buried in the Yongling Mausoleum of Emperor Jiajing remains to be answered by future generations.
References: Records of Ming Shizong (Volume 5 12), Dream of Ming Spring (Volume 12) and Essays on Li Chu Zhai written by B. Chou in the forty-first year of Jiajing (Volume 3).