If you travel to Nanjing, the Ming Tombs are definitely a must. As the tomb of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, and his empress Ma Xiuying, it represents the highest achievement of architecture and stone carving art in the early Ming Dynasty and is known as the first royal mausoleum in the Ming and Qing Dynasties.
In the Ming tombs, there are two very famous stone tablets. One is a merit monument standing in Sifang City, with a height of 8.78 meters. It was built by Judy and engraved with nine characters: "Shengde Monument of Daming Imperial Tomb".
The other is a tombstone standing next to the top of Zhu Yuanzhang's mausoleum, engraved with seven characters: the tomb of this great ancestor, in which the word "Ming" is added with a horizontal line next to the word "day".
Many people naturally wonder why there are two different ways to write the same word "Ming". In particular, why do you want to add horizontal characters to Ming characters? What's the story? Many busybodies can't help but speculate.
At present, there are two popular sayings: First, in order to prevent people from missing Daming, Kangxi launched a literary inquisition and severely cracked down on people who used the word "Ming", so that the people had to add a horizontal line to the word "Ming" to avoid it.
Over time, "Bi" also represents Ming, so later generations adopted the word "Bi" when rebuilding this tombstone.
Objectively speaking, this situation is quite common. In order to avoid using the word "scholar", people changed the word "scholar" to "thirty" and "people" to "Hu". Now there are still these two words in many documents and historical sites of the Tang Dynasty, so it is reasonable for Kangxi to do so.
There is also a saying that Kangxi (also known as Qianlong) deliberately wrote when he paid homage to the Ming Tombs, which was intended to satirize the "sun and moon without light" in the Ming Dynasty. Because the word "Ming" itself represents the sun and the moon, now adding a line in the middle of the sun can play a very good role in isolating the sun and the moon, from now on. In other words, it was Feng Shui that made the Ming Dynasty have no place to stand.
There is some truth in this statement, but the problem is that, according to historical records, Kangxi visited the South six times and went to the Ming Tombs for worship five times. It's wonderful to go to the Ming Tombs again and again and kneel and knock three times when you worship. Their purpose is to gather the hearts and minds of the Han people.
In this case, Kangxi or Qianlong came up with such a thing as "the sun and the moon have no light", didn't he hit himself in the face? Do they still need to do their best to worship the Ming tombs and give Zhu Yuanzhang three kneels and nine knocks? On the one hand, he did not hesitate to kneel in the Ming Tombs to win the hearts of the people. On the other hand, he belittled the Ming Dynasty in various ways and deliberately took out an "insidious" stone tablet. Is this sick? What exactly do they want?
In this sense, the second statement is obviously untenable; As for the first statement, it is actually not very accurate, because in many documents and historical sites left by Kangxi or Qianlong years, the word "Ming" is still used when referring to the Ming Dynasty, and this horizontal line is not deliberately added, so the so-called literary inquisition is also worthy of scrutiny.
Finally, there is another saying that the word "Fu" is a variant of "Ming". The two words have exactly the same meaning and can be replaced with each other. In this regard, according to the development of Chinese characters in China, the word "Ming" was originally written as "Yi", in which "East" is the shape of a window, which symbolizes that moonlight shines into the room through the window to achieve the effect of lighting.
Later, after the simplification of Chinese characters, the words "Ming" and "Bi" appeared, both of which are shorthand for "Bi".
The word "Ming" is more used in daily life, while the word "pen" is more used in calligraphy, especially when some famous artists write calligraphy, they will deliberately choose to use the word "pen" because it is easier to write and more enjoyable.
For example, the great calligrapher Wang Xianzhi's "Luo Shen Fu" sticker is written as "Fu" in clear words; There is also the calligraphy work "Jiuchenggong Liquan Ming" with calligrapher Shu Dan, and the Ming character is also written as "Bi". Zhuge in Chengdu Wuhou Temple also has a plaque: Liang Ming Eternity, and there are many characters in it.
Even after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the word "Ming" in the "Symbol Monument of National Key Cultural Relics Protection Units of Ming Tombs" set up by the Nanjing Municipal Government has an additional horizontal "country". In this sense, it is also reasonable that people choose to use the word "fu" when writing "the tomb of this mountain".