What is the wooden ox flowing horse invented by Zhuge Liang in the Three Kingdoms? Does it really exist?
It is not difficult for friends who have read "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" to find that the very famous one at that time can be said to be the wooden ox and flowing horse designed by Zhuge Liang himself, and he is one of the greatest inventions in Zhuge Liang's life. Romance of the Three Kingdoms - The Biography of Zhuge Liang contains:"Brilliant nature, good at creation, bows, crossbows, wooden oxen and horses, the gains and losses, are all from his heart. "So, what exactly does the wooden ox and flowing horse mentioned in the "Notes on the Three Kingdoms" mean?
* Luo Guanzhong, the author of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", once described the wooden ox and flowing horse as follows:"Curved cow head, double cow leg, horizontal cow ring, rotating cow leg, covered cow back, square cow tripe, hanging cow tongue, curved cow tendon, carved cow teeth, vertical horn, beautiful cow armor, row cow, autumn axle. Double wolf bow, six steps for people and four steps for oxen. Each ox packs the equivalent of a month's worth of food for ten people"。It is true that the real wooden ox and flowing horse in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" may not have such an exaggerated description, but in "Three Kingdoms - The Continuation of the Ninth Year of Jianxing", the wooden ox and flowing horse retreated from Liang Qishan to transport grain. In the spring of the twelfth year, after Sima Xuanwang's martial arts Wuzhangyuan and Weinan, Lu Mingyao traveled horses from the sloping valley. "We all know that "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is **, and there are many exaggerated elements in it, but the later "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is recorded according to the official history, so according to the "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", it confirms the authenticity of the existence of the wooden cow and the horse.
Zhuge Liang used wooden oxen and flowing horses during the Northern Expedition, and transported more than 400 catties of grain every year, every day"Dozens of miles in private, thirty miles in groups", transporting food for 100,000 Shu Han troops. At that time, the transportation of grain in Sichuan had to be carried out on rugged mountain roads, because of the difficult and dangerous road, the Shu army relied on the grain transport machine of the four-wheel movement to transport grain, which was very difficult and the degree of automation was very high, which was indeed a great innovation. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms both mention the important role of the wooden ox flowing horse in the military grain transportation in the cold weapon era, this invention is undoubtedly great, but with the development of the times, the wooden ox flowing horse no longer exists, and scholars and experts have not been able to unravel the road construction based on the wooden ox flowing horse until today.
Although it has not been deciphered, various hypotheses have been put forward by later generations about the structure of the wooden ox and flowing horse. Gao Cheng of the Song Dynasty wrote in "The Story of the Era"."The wooden oxen, the convertible of today; The galloper, and now the wheelbarrow"。Chen Shidao of the Northern Song Dynasty wrote about the wooden ox and the flowing horse and said:"The earth-wheeled people are also stable in their transportation"。Shu Zhuge Liang went on an expedition and began to build wooden cattle and horses. Today, the system left by Zhuge Liang is still just a cart.
According to the above two theories, many people believe that the wooden ox flowing horse is a wheelbarrow with a yoke, while the flowing horse is a single-seater car without a yoke. There is also a theory that the wooden ox flowing horse is a kind of wheelbarrow, the wooden ox is a kind of wooden car used by Sichuan miners at that time, and the flowing horse is a narrow boat called a fast horse sedan chair. The history books say that the wooden ox has a square belly, and the sleigh has a leg, which obviously shows that the wooden ox is a four-wheeled vehicle, and it can be braked by a special mechanism when crossing the mountains, and it is impossible to see that the horse is actually just a small boat carrying grain. Of course, these are the speculations of our descendants on the wooden ox and flowing horse, in the long river of history, we may not be able to verify the landscape and posture of the wooden ox and flowing horse, but we can still remember it with the exquisite and novel design of the ancients.