Qu Chang. Before accompanying his wife to watch "The Legend of Zhen Huan", there was a plot of Concubine Hua admiring Xia Chang in the imperial garden "Yizhang Red", Concubine Hua asked Xia Chang to water the maple tree in the blood on the grounds that the maple leaves in the palace were not red enough.
Seeing this, I smiled inwardly, not to mention the Imperial Garden, even if there is not a single maple tree in the entire Forbidden City. If there were really maple trees in the Forbidden City, wouldn't this season have already become an Internet celebrity check-in point for Xiaohongshu. I can't help but secretly laugh at the ignorance of the screenwriter.
Recently, however, I found myself slapping myself in the face. It turned out that when Yongzheng was in Yongzheng, there should really be maple trees in the Forbidden City, and it was likely to be in the imperial garden where Concubine Hua rewarded "one zhang red".
In the autumn of the first year of Qianlong, the new emperor had been busy arranging the funeral of his deceased father, and he only wrote two poems in the whole autumn. One is written on the Yongzheng Festival, and the other is written on the maple leaf.
This poem is entitled "The Red Leaves in the Forbidden Season Are Endowed with Frost Leaves Red in February Flowers", which is titled to the famous sentence of the maple leaf inscribed by Du Mu, which shows his great ambition.
The sky is refreshing to Fengchen, and there are frost branches to decorate the new.
The color is dyed red by the flower bar, and the shadow is cold and even.
Yu Sen was not allowed to swim in the bee collection, and he also taught the birds to tame.
I like the West into the Nim New Year, and the rain and dew of thousands of homes are in spring.
There is nothing to decipher in the text of this poem, but the whole poem really tells us that in the first year of Qianlong, there were maple trees in the Forbidden City. And judging from the abbreviation "Yu Yu Sensen", it should have been a maple forest at that time.
According to the information available, this maple forest is surrounded by trellises or flower beds, with stone carved steps. It is possible that the poem was composed during the Chung Yeung Festival that year.
There is a Duxiu Mountain in the Imperial Garden of the Forbidden City, which is said to be the place where the emperor and queen climb high during the Double Ninth Festival, there are steps between the mountains and rocks to go up the mountain, and there should be flower beds around the area. After climbing to the top of Duxiu Mountain, you can also see the grand scenery of the capital, which is in line with the scene of "Ten Thousand Homes of Rain and Dew and Muyang Spring" that Qianlong saw at the end of the poem "Red Leaves".
Today's Duixiu Mountain, there are two ancient cypresses in the east and a whitebark pine in the west, and there is no shadow of any maple tree. But perhaps hundreds of years ago, there was a maple forest here, and in autumn the red leaves are gorgeous, and together with the red walls and yellow tiles, they form a unique scenery in the deep palace, but unfortunately this scenery only exists in the imagination now.
Over the centuries, more than a few maple trees have changed. Today, the Jiangxue Pavilion in the southeast corner of the Imperial Garden is said to be named after the fact that there used to be five begonia trees outside its door, and whenever the petals fall, it is like a snowflake falling colorfully. Now the tree has disappeared into time, and only the name still tells the beautiful scenery of the past.
Having said that, in the play, Concubine Hua admired Xia Chang in the "one zhang red" place, only more than ten meters away from Duxiu Mountain, so it seems that Xia Changzai almost didn't have time to struggle, he was beaten into a waste, and the blood was also taken to water the maple tree.
Fortunately, Qianlong didn't know this story, otherwise the poem "borrowed the flower column and dyed red", and it would taste bloody when it was read.