There are many national treasure-level cultural relics in China, most of which are ancient bronzes, jades, calligraphy, paintings and ceramics. Stoneware occupies a small proportion. Among the three batches of cultural relics banned from overseas exhibitions, Only the Maoling stone carvings and the Zhaoling Six Horses carvings are stone tools. In addition, there is another piece of "Warring States Stone Drum" that was also selected for this list. The Warring States Period Stone Drum? It’s not a stone drum that can be beaten, but ten stones that look like drums. The texture is ordinary, just ordinary granite. There are some words engraved on it, describing a certain king's hunting and the scenery he saw. It does not record any major historical events.
The origin of these stone drums has not yet been fully confirmed. I don’t know who carved them, when they were carved, and which king they described. Anyway, these stone drums are full of mysteries. I'm afraid it will be difficult to figure it out again.
But these ten stone drums, which look inconspicuous, are praised as "treasures of the country". The words on them have reached the point where "one word is worth ten thousand gold", and were praised by Du Fu and Su Shi. Why is this so sought after by literati of all ages?
The reason is actually not complicated. The characters on the stone drum are large seal scripts that are older than the small seal scripts used by Qin Shihuang. They are the only surviving examples. Therefore, they are highly respected and are considered by later generations to be the ancestors of seal scripts. Calligraphers of all ages have taken pride in obtaining rubbings of these characters.
In 627 AD, the first year of Zhenguan in the Tang Dynasty, in Chencang Mountain, Shaanxi Province, an old shepherd found ten strange large stones in the mountains, each two feet high and more than one foot in diameter. It looks like a drum. What's even more strange is that there are many ancient characters engraved on the stone, and the readers don't know what characters they are.
Local wealthy families offered huge rewards for people to decipher the stone drum characters, but to no avail. Folks gradually regarded these stone drums as miracles and burned incense to worship them, adding a bit of mystery to the stone drums. People call these stone drums found in Chencang "Chencang Stone Drums".
Due to the remote location of Chencang, Shigu’s reputation was limited to the local area for more than a hundred years. It was not until the arrival of an emperor that Shigu began to wander around for thousands of years, and Shigu began to wander around. It earned its reputation as a national treasure.
The emperor was Tang Suzong, the son of Tang Xuanzong Li Longji. At that time, he was in Yongcheng near Chencang. After hearing about the stone drums, he ordered people to move them to the city for the enjoyment of civil and military officials. , This made Shigu famous all over the world. But within a few months, the Anshi rebels approached Yongcheng. They couldn't take away such heavy stone drums, so Tang Suzong had to bury them in the wilderness.
When the Anshi Rebellion was over, Han Yu, one of the Eight Great Masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties, wrote to the emperor requesting that the stone drum be dug out and moved to the local Confucius Temple for safekeeping. After the imperial court approved it, they found that only nine of the ten sides of the stone drum were left, and many of the characters were incomplete. Everyone felt sorry for this.
During the war in the late Tang Dynasty, the local Confucius Temple was burned down and the Chencang stone drum was stolen and disappeared. But no one could care about them at this time. After the fall of the Tang Dynasty, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms followed, and the world was in chaos.
After the establishment of the Song Dynasty, Song Renzong accidentally saw the Chencang stone drums from the Tang Dynasty documents and issued a large reward to the world to find these stone drums. Not to mention, Shi Gu was really found, and the person who accomplished this was Sima Guang’s father, Sima Chi.
However, this Sima Chi was so eager to achieve great results that he felt that finding the nine-sided stone drum was not enough. He actually asked a craftsman to imitate the missing stone drum in order to please Song Renzong. Probably because the level of imitation was not good enough, Sima Chi's trick was exposed. Not only did he not receive any meritorious service, but he was convicted of deceiving the emperor. Fortunately, Song Renzong was lenient and the punishment was not too severe, otherwise nothing would have happened to Sima Guang later.
The person who actually found the tenth stone drum was Xiang Chuanshi, a famous collector of gold and stones. When he discovered the stone drum, it had become a butcher's whetstone. The rice-pounding groove had been dug out in the middle of the stone drum, and most of the writing was damaged. The ten-sided stone drum was finally reunited and preserved in the imperial palace.
Song Huizong also loved Chencang Shigu very much, but this emperor who cheated his son also wanted to cheat Shigu. He ordered people to fill the words with gold and installed a golden body on them. When the Jurchens invaded Bianliang City, they mistakenly thought that the ten-sided stone drum was a treasure and transported it all the way to Yanjin. After removing the gold, the Jurchens would of course not recognize the value of these stones and throw them away in the wilderness.
It was not until the fall of the Jin Dynasty that the ministers of the Southern Song Dynasty recovered the stone drum in Yanjing and kept it in Beijing since then. After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, the stone drum was transported to Chongqing.
On the eve of liberation, because the stone drum was too heavy, it was saved from being transported to Taiwan by air and finally stayed in the mainland of the motherland.
The Chencang Stone Drum has gone through many hardships, being lost and found three times, and many of the words on it have been damaged. Therefore, the earlier the writing rubbings are, the more valuable they are. During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, rare rubbings could be sold for tens of thousands of yuan, which shows how precious these writings are.
Experts speculate based on the stone drum text that the king described may be King Huiwen of Qin, and the production time was around the fourth or fifth century BC. Perhaps it is precisely because of the mystery of the stone drum that it has become China's first ancient relic and a national treasure.