The territory of our country has been a mystery in the long course of history. During the well-known Yuan Dynasty, China's territory once spanned the Eurasian continent, and the vast land area can be described as unique in the world. During the Tang Empire, ethnic minorities in the north and west came to pay tribute, and the Tang Dynasty fought fierce wars with Persia and other countries, and its territory expanded to Central Asia and other places.
However, the question of how large the Tang Dynasty was is still the direction of exploration by historians.
Today, our northern neighbor is the city of Tokmak in the former Soviet Union (the actual location doesn't seem to be well known, but that's not critical), and an old farmer stumbles upon a hard rock while plowing.
At first, he didn't care, but then he realized that the stone was extraordinary, it was an ancient statue. The statue dates back more than a thousand years. Identification by archaeological experts indicates that this is the base of a Tang Dynasty Buddha statue with some inscriptions engraved on it.
After research, it was found that this was a statue commissioned by Du Huaibao, the deputy capital of Anxi in the Tang Dynasty. At that time, Du Huaibao was in a high position, and in order to pray for the gods to protect the court, and at the same time to remember his deceased parents, he specially made this statue, which is the origin of this stone statue. Among them, the key words are Anxi, broken leaves, and Du Huaibao.
By consulting the history books, all the historical clues became clear, and the final results showed that the northern end of the Broken Leaf Castle, the ruins of the Broken Leaf Castle, which had long puzzled the historiography, extended at least to the territory of the former Soviet Union, that is, the location of the peasants' feet.
This discovery meant that Shattered Leaf City had been incorporated into the territory of the Tang Dynasty at that time.
This discovery added 1 million square kilometers to the Tang Dynasty's land area. Regarding Broken Leaf City, it is worth mentioning that it is one of the farthest cities established in the northwest region in Chinese history. Under his wise rule, the Tang monarch conquered the northwestern countries in one fell swoop. Broken Leaf is one of them, but the exact location of the Broken Leaf Castle site is unclear, although there is a direction.
The accidental discovery of the old farmers in the former Soviet Union has, to a certain extent, added another touch to the land area of the Tang Dynasty.
There is also a historical-level literary giant in Broken Leaf City, according to the research of scholars, the great poet Li Taibai is a person from Broken Leaves.
It is amazing that an old Soviet farmer was able to discover and decipher such an important historical issue while farming in the field. It seems that we should pay attention to the stones under our feet when we work in the fields, and maybe you and I will be the next person to lift the veil of history.