The young King of Chu Huai was powerless to resist the huge power of the elite group, and Qu Yuan's reform career was interrupted.
Qin Prime Minister Zhang Yi deceived King Chu Huai into severing diplomatic relations with Qi with the promise of 600 miles of land, and King Chu Huai was furious and hastily sent troops. In the battle of Danyang, the Chu division was defeated.
The soldiers pressed the border, and King Chu Huai personally went to Qin to negotiate peace, but was imprisoned. Three years later, King Chu Huai died in Xianyang. In desperation, Qu Yuan jumped into the Miluo River.
The Qin division went south, Shouying fell, and the state of Chu was declared extinct. The 800-year-old Chu State was buried in the ground in the war, how will the ancient Chu culture continue its life?
Episode 8 Nirvana.
In the late Warring States period, as the annexation wars intensified, only seven major states remained in the land of China - Qin, Chu, Qi, Wei, Zhao, Han, and Yan. Countries are joining forces and staging wonderful and fierce battles.
In 329 B.C., two major events occurred in Chinese history. King Chu Wei, the male lord of a generation, died, and his son King Chu Huai ascended the throne. It was also in this year that Zhang Yi, a native of Wei, came to Qin and soon became Xiangguo. These two events profoundly affected the direction of the history of the Chu State.
In the year of his accession to the throne, King Chu Huai was thirty-one years old. This king, who grew up smoothly under the wing of King Chuzhuang, has a generous, straightforward and naïve personality. He has the usual patriotism and sense of responsibility of the monarch of Chu, but he lacks the cunning and city government necessary to survive in this harsh era.
Shortly before King Chu Huai ascended the throne, his father, King Chu Wei, had just destroyed the Yue Kingdom, which became the largest country in the world. King Chu Huai inherited an inheritance that was the envy of everyone at that time, with a vast territory, abundant products, and a full treasury. The young King of Chu Huai was ambitious and tried to make a difference.
With the support of King Huai of Chu, Qu Yuan launched a vigorous change in the state of Chu. The key to the rise and fall of a country lies in talent, so Qu Yuan made every effort to establish strict laws and formulate open employment standards, so as to ensure that those outflow talents can return to Chu and rejuvenate Chu again.
Qu Yuan's reforms were bound to affect the interests of the magnates, so they met with unhesitating resistance from the nobles. They began to use skillful means to slander and slander Qu Yuan, and King Chu Huai, who had listened to the slander, gradually alienated Qu Yuan.
The young and inexperienced King Chu Huai was unable to resist the entrenched power of the elite clique, and Qu Yuan, who had a weak foundation in officialdom, was pushed out of the center of power, and the reform cause was interrupted.
Qu Yuan, who was dedicated to serving the country, was confused, and he resented King Chuhuai's doubts about his loyalty, and wrote this poem with sadness: "What is not loyal is wrong, and it is right to refer to the sky." Qu Yuan looked up to the sky and howled angrily: If my words are not out of loyalty, I can let the heavens testify for me.
However, no one heard his cries. While countries are vying to be the first to change the law and change with each passing day, the politics of Chu are slowly moving along the old rhythm. The inertia and internal strife of the elite group ruined the last chance for the Chu State to save itself.
As early as the reign of King Chu Wei, the new term "vertical and horizontal" began to appear in the mouths of politicians in various countries. The emergence of "vertical and horizontal" originated from the increasingly fierce annexation wars between countries in the late Warring States period. Since Qin was located in the west, the way to stop Qin's eastward advance was to build a vertical barrier from north to south. With Yan and Zhao as the northern end, Han Wei as the middle end, and Chu as the southern end, the countries united to resist the Qin state. Faced with this strategy of counterbalancing the Qin state, the Qin state's countermeasure was to establish a horizontal alliance and form an alliance with Han and Wei to cut off this north-south barrier.
Fudan University, Ph.D. in History, Zhang Hongjie:
The theoretical basis of the anti-Qin alliance is very similar to the balance of power theory in Europe today, and international peace is based on the premise that the balance of power between countries is roughly balanced, and if one country is too strong, then it is bound to destroy this balance and inevitably lead to war.
As a result, during the Warring States Period, a struggle was waged on the diplomatic battlefield between the Lian Heng faction led by Zhang Yi and the Hezong faction represented by Gongsun Yan and Su Qin.
In 318 BC, after the lobbying of Su Qin, several countries such as Chu, Zhao, Qi, and Yan formed an alliance to jointly attack Qin. Because the state of Chu was the most powerful, King Huai of Chu was promoted to the commander.
Far-sighted politicians such as Qu Yuan unanimously supported the strategy of confluence, because the greatest threat to Chu undoubtedly came from Qin, and although its strength was comparable to that of Chu, Qin's desire for expansion was the strongest of the six kingdoms. For the state of Chu, uniting the six countries and resisting Qin together was the only way to survive.
However, King Chu Huai was not resolute in his will to join forces. Qin and Chu had a friendly relationship for hundreds of years, and the kind-hearted King Huai of Chu was reluctant to take the initiative to lead troops to attack his former allies. The generals of Chu repeatedly asked for troops, but King Huai always hesitated. After hesitating back and forth, King Chu Huai finally decided to send a small number of troops to symbolically deal with this anti-Qin alliance war.
Professor Xu Shaohua, School of History, Wuhan University:
The six countries of the Kwantung should be far superior to the Qin State in the Kwantung in terms of numbers, troops, and equipment. The key problem is that everyone has different aspirations and ghosts.
Liu Yutang, Vice President of Hubei Academy of Social Sciences:
Everyone plays their own calculations. As the longitudinal chief, King Huai is also making a show. He said at the time, I can still command the princes, that's all. He didn't have a well-thought-out plan, and he didn't even have the courage and confidence to defeat the Qin state. Other countries also felt that this was a temporary rabble, not enough to compete with Qin. Everyone can't go if they don't go, and they can't win if they go.
Professor Xu Shaohua, School of History, Wuhan University:
Therefore, each of them did not want to fight, and they did not dare to fight the Qin people seriously, so they were stationed outside Hangu Pass for a long time, and finally had to retreat. Later, the Qin people pursued the soldiers behind, and the division collapsed, divide and rule.
The vigorous anti-Qin alliance war ended hastily, and King Chu Huai's international prestige suffered a great loss. After this battle, the Qin state realized more deeply that the union of the Chu and Qi states would be the biggest obstacle for the Qin state to advance eastward.
In 313 BC, Qin Prime Minister Zhang Yi sent an envoy to the state of Chu with the task of breaking up the Qi-Chu alliance with all his might. During the Warring States Period, a type of specialized talent appeared in the world, called the Zonghengjia. They are characterized by the study of eloquence as the foundation of their lives, and they rely exclusively on lobbying for success.
Zhang Yi, a seasoned international statesman, and King Huai of Chu, who lacked a city government, held a meeting in the Chu palace, and although it was the first time to come to Chu, Zhang Yi was confident in destroying the anti-Qin Lianheng alliance.
Zhang Yi first mentioned the war in which King Huai of Chu led his army to attack Qin. He said that Qin and Chu had been friends for three hundred years, but King Huai united the six countries to attack his former ally Qin, but the king of Qin did not blame King Huai. Qin and Chu wanted to restore the friendly relations of the past, on the condition that Chu severed diplomatic relations with Qin's enemy, Qi.
In order to make King Huai of Chu tempted, Zhang Yi presented a map, saying that as long as Chu no longer befriended Qi, Qin was willing to return to Chu the six hundred li of land that had been taken from Chu in the past. Recovering the 600-mile homeland has been the wish of the monarchs and ministers of Chu for many years, and King Huai of Chu is quite tempted, and Zhang Yi's plan has worked. In order to obtain six hundred li of Chu land, King Huai of Chu made the decision to sever relations with the State of Qi.
Professor Xu Wenwu, Jingchu Culture Research Center, Yangtze University:
When the ministers learned about this, everyone came to congratulate King Chu Huai and congratulate him on getting back the "six hundred miles of the land of Shangyu". But at this time, there was a minister named Chen Zhen.
Liu Yutang, Vice President of Hubei Academy of Social Sciences:
He felt that it was okay if you wanted to destroy the Qichu Alliance, but you couldn't be tricked by Zhang Yi, after you got the land, it would be good for you to destroy the alliance.
Professor Xu Wenwu, Jingchu Culture Research Center, Yangtze University:
But it's a pity that King Chu Huai didn't listen to Chen Zhen's advice.
Liu Yutang, Vice President of Hubei Academy of Social Sciences:
King Chu Huai felt that the Qin people would not lie to me, and Zhang Yi would not lie to me.
King Chu Huai, who had received a strict aristocratic education, still adhered to the tradition of honesty of the nobles of the Spring and Autumn Period, and he did not expect that the Qin State had already thrown this tradition out of the clouds. After the state of Chu announced the severance of diplomatic relations with the state of Qi, King Huai sent an envoy to the state of Qin to receive the land, but Zhang Yi flatly denied his promise, and the land of six hundred li became six li.
Professor Yan Changgui, School of History, Wuhan University:
Then what is recorded in the "Historical Records" is very dramatic. (Chu State) said that after going to break off diplomatic relations, Zhang Yi closed the door, and when he went back, he closed the door, saying that he pretended to fall in the car and injured his leg, and did not receive the (Chu State) envoy. Then King Chu Huai thought that he had not completely broken off diplomatic relations, and sent another warrior to scold this Qi countryman, so at this time, Qi State broke off diplomatic relations with him. Then wait until the State of Chu, after King Huai of Chu breaks off diplomatic relations with the State of Qi, at this time, he will send an envoy to get the land.
Professor Xu Wenwu, Jingchu Culture Research Center, Yangtze University:
At this time, Zhang Yi reversed his word and did not believe it, saying that what I told you at the beginning was "six miles of business in the land". What do you want a country to do with six miles of land? He (Zhang Yi) is to deceive King Chu Huai.
King Chu Huai, who found out that he had been deceived, was furious, and the Qin people felt deeply insulted by their use of tricks and untrustworthy words. In a fit of rage, he decided to immediately raise an army to attack Qin. King Huai of Chu's rash decision was opposed by his generals, but he insisted on sending the poorly prepared Chu army to the border to fight the Qin army at Danyang.
The state of Chu hurriedly sent troops, the Qin army was prepared, and in the battle of Danyang, the Chu division was defeated. Not only did the state of Chu not regain the land promised by the state of Qin, but it also lost a large amount of its territory and two strategically located cities. After the Battle of Danyang, the border gateway of Chu was opened, and Qin finally opened the channel for eastward development.
After the Battle of Danyang, the state of Chu was defeated in several wars. In 299 BC, the Qin state captured eight more cities of the Chu state. The army pressed the border, and the state of Chu had to endure humiliation and seek peace. The condition set by the Qin State was that the Qin State could only consider peace if the King of Chu Huai personally went to the Qin State to negotiate peace. The Qin State is unpredictable, and King Chu Huai's appointment is like a sheep entering the mouth of a tiger, and the Chu State is full of worries.
Professor Xu Wenwu, Jingchu Culture Research Center, Yangtze University:
Qin once again proposed the marriage between Qin and Chu, that is, Qin married the princess of Qin to King Chu Huai to tie the "best of the best" between the two countries. The proposed condition was that King Chu Huai must go to Qin in person to marry the princess of Qin. When this matter spread in the state of Chu, there were two completely different voices in the state of Chu, one was against King Chu Huai going to Qin to marry the princess, but the other faction was Zilan, the youngest son of King Chu Huai, and he advocated that King Chu Huai go to Qin. The reason is that once the princess of Qin State is married back, Qin and Chu will marry, then Chu State will have no threat from Qin State.
As the king of a country, his sense of responsibility made King Chu Huai have no choice to escape in front of danger. Although he was deceived so badly by Zhang Yi a few years ago, the kind-hearted and naïve king still thinks that it is just the personal behavior of Zhang Yi, who was from a humble background, and does not pay attention to aristocratic principles. He believed that as a generation of nobles, King Qin would never openly distrust in front of all the countries under heaven. King Chu Huai, who was deeply bound by the rules of etiquette and aristocratic traditions, still did not learn the lesson of being deceived before, and insisted on embarking on the road to Qin.
Liu Yutang, Vice President of Hubei Academy of Social Sciences:
In the Spring and Autumn Period, when everyone else followed the Zhou rites, the Chu people were in the ascending period. In essence, he often did not follow the Zhou etiquette, "I am a barbarian, and I don't have a relationship with China", from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Spring and Autumn Period, it was like this, and he didn't even take Zhou Tianzi and other vassal states into account. But on the contrary, after the Warring States Period, the Chu people may have more and more contacts with the Central Plains, so the Chu people also have a culture, and the absorption of the Central Plains culture is getting stronger and stronger, and he is gradually influenced by the Chinese civilization more and more. He followed the example of those countries in the Central Plains and gave up the original observances, but the state of Chu, on the contrary, picked it up very carefully.
In the Warring States Period, which advocated power and fraud, the ruling group of Chu still retained the simplicity and elegance cultivated by the ritual and music civilization of the Spring and Autumn Period, and their words and deeds still had to find a basis in the "Book of Songs" and "Book of Songs".
In international relations, they instinctively emphasize honesty and trustworthiness, but they have not realized for a long time that honesty is no longer the foundation of the country's survival, but has become a rope and shackles on the body of politicians.
King Chu Huai could never have imagined that the price of going to Qin would be a complete loss of freedom. After arriving at Wuguan, King Zhaoxiang of Qin did not go to the appointment to meet him as scheduled, on the contrary, King Huai of Chu was abducted by the Qin people to Xianyang. King Zhaoxiang of Qin proposed that the state of Chu must cede two extremely important counties, otherwise the king of Chu Huai would be imprisoned.
Professor Xu Shaohua, School of History, Wuhan University:
But King Chu Huai felt that he had been deceived, he was very angry, but he wanted to cut the land, of course, King Chu Huai felt that I couldn't stand this, after all, I was still the king of a big country, how could I be abducted by a pit like you, he felt very humiliated.
Qin's wishful thinking was to capture the monarch of Chu State, and he could manipulate it at will, and easily obtain benefits that could not be obtained on the battlefield. Unexpectedly, no matter how threatened, King Chu Huai would not back down.
King Chu Huai's actions puzzled King Qin Zhaoxiang, and the Legalist works he had read since he was a child had long told him that human nature is to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages. In the face of the two choices of being a prisoner in a foreign country and returning to China as a king, the answer is so simple. The King of Qin, who grew up in an atmosphere of pragmatism, could not understand why King Chu Huai would rather die than give in, and in desperation, he had no choice but to order King Chu Huai to continue to be imprisoned.
In 296 BC, after three years of captivity, King Huai of Chu died in Xianyang, the capital of Qin. In the Warring States Period, King Chu Huai was the last generation of monarchs cultivated by the Lile civilization, and he used his life to die for the Lile civilization.
It turns out that in the brutal late Warring States period, any bit of innocence and innocence was an unbearable luxury, and only the flower of pragmatism, which was as cold and hard as iron, could bloom in this cold season.
Liu Yutang, Vice President of Hubei Academy of Social Sciences:
In the end, King Huai still has a backbone, he still has his own bottom line, he will not sacrifice his land because of the gains and losses of his life, so King Huai He is a collection of contradictions, and there is mediocrity and simplicity in him.
Professor Gu Jiuxing, Institute of Chu Studies, Central China Normal University:
On the one hand, he loves Chu Guo, but he doesn't know how to love. On the one hand, I hate Qin Guo, or Zhang Yi, but I don't know what way to deal with them.
In the end, the Qin people were unable to use King Chu Huai to gain any benefits, so they had to send King Chu Huai's body back to the state of Chu. On the day of King Chu Huai's resurrection, the state of Chu was immersed in sorrow. This untimely monarch experienced failures in his life, but at the last moment, he defended the interests of the Chu State with his life and did not cede an inch of land to the Qin State.
In troubled times, morality often defeats injustice. In the early days of the struggle for hegemony, the Chu State once crushed the gullible Song Xianggong under the wheel. Now history repeats itself again, but the roles have been reversed, and the state of Chu has become the party that is martyred for the civilization of etiquette and righteousness.
In 278 BC, the Qin State successfully captured half of the western part of the Chu State, including the Yingdu capital, and the capital of the Chu State was forced to move to Huaiyang, Henan, known as Chen Ying. Later, under the pressure of the Qin State step by step, the Chu State moved its capital to Shouchun, Anhui, which was known as Shouying in history.
The destruction of the Chu capital by the Qin army was not only out of greed for wealth, but also to demonstrate its conquest power, and ultimately destroy the possibility of the revival of the Chu state. After the Qin army evacuated, Yingdu was devastated and lifeless.
After being banished by King Chu Huai, Qu Yuan could have gone away, but he wandered in the land of exile and did not leave for a long time. He has not given up on the Chu State, and is still looking forward to the rebirth of this phoenix. The fall of Yingdu completely shattered Qu Yuan's last hope for the Chu State, and he realized that the day of the Chu State was not far from its destruction. In desperation, Qu Yuan jumped into the Miluo River.
The suicide of this great poet became an ominous prelude to the destruction of Chu culture. Although in the end, several of Qu Yuan's poems escaped the fire of the Qin Dynasty and became eternal classics of Chinese culture, the countless brilliant cultural achievements accumulated by this ancient country in the past 800 years have disappeared forever in the darkness of history.
After the fall of Yingdu, the state of Chu lost half of its country. In the state of Chu, which was struggling to survive, there was an obvious regression in process technology. The bronze ware excavated in the tombs after the eastward migration of the Chu State was simply cast, and the complex skills and exquisite shapes of the bronzes before the Chu State were completely missing. The most noteworthy thing is that among these bronzes, there are 26 bronzes with inscriptions, of which 19 bronzes were cast by the "casters".
Fudan University, Ph.D. in History, Zhang Hongjie:
As for the casters, they refer to those foreign craftsmen who worked in the handicraft workshops of the Chu State. The casting technology of the Chu State was originally extremely developed, and now it actually hires foreign craftsmen to cast artifacts for the royal family, and the level of casting is not necessarily very high, which shows how heavy and far-reaching the impact of the fall of Yingdu on the Chu State is.
Some of the lacquerware in the Han Tomb of Phoenix Mountain, the hometown of Yingdu, although the style is somewhat similar to the Chu-style lacquerware, is clearly marked with the words "Chengshi grass" and "Chengshi full". "Chengshi" is the abbreviation of Chengdu Municipal Government, which means that these lacquerware are not produced in Yingdu at all, but are transported from the distant Chengdu Municipal Government. That is to say, from the Qin Dynasty to the early Western Han Dynasty, there were very few people in the Yingdu area, where the lacquer industry was very developed, and few people could make lacquerware.
Since the eighties of the twentieth century, people have found a large number of Chu gold coins in Jiangsu and Anhui, and the number is as much as more than 30,000 grams. From the Chu tomb in the middle and late Warring States period, a number of scales and weights specially used to weigh *** were also unearthed. Among the many vassal states, only the state of Chu was able to produce ** currency, which reflected the economic prosperity of the state of Chu. This is also the reason why the state of Chu was still able to continue to fight against the state of Qin for more than a hundred years after being defeated by the state of Qin in the two major battles of Danyang and Lantian.
The whole country moved eastward and rebuilt the national capital, and the Chu people longed for a comeback. At this time, the Qin State ushered in another eloquent monarch - King Yingzheng of Qin, all of which doomed the Chu people to make all their efforts, and they could not change the fate of the Chu State falling into the abyss.
In 224 BC, the commander of the Qin state, Wang Jian, led an army of 600,000 troops into the state of Chu, and they broke the Chu army in Suzhou, Anhui, and the last elite of the Chu army was lost. This army, which is famous for its martial arts, ended in a tragic collective destruction.
The corpses were all over the field, the north wind was bleak, and Xiang Yan, the last general of the Chu State, committed suicide with a sword in despair, and used his own blood to draw a final badge for the Xiang family, which was a succession of famous generals.
In 223 BC, the Qin division went south and attacked Shouying, the last capital of the Chu state. In 223 BC, the last king of Chu was taken as a prisoner and transported to the state of Qin.
On the day he left, heavy snow covered Chudu. Heaven seems to have written a sad ending to the history of Chu in this way. The prisoner car slowly left the Chu Palace, the palace wall was inch by inch away, and the King of Chu lost his land, his own people and his own country, and the history of an ancient country ended forever in his hands.
The conquest of Chu brought unprecedented confidence to the Qin king, and the destruction of the most powerful enemy meant that there was no suspense about the direction of history.
Han Wei, Associate Professor, Department of History, Peking University:
In a situation of strife in the world like the Warring States, only the strong can survive to the end, which is an iron law. So among the Seven Heroes of the Warring States, only the Qin State has completely established this kind of centralized militaristic system, so the six Eastern Kingdoms are more or less bound by the aristocratic political traditions left by Zhou Li, so their changes are not so thorough, so they gradually fail in the competition in the end, which is also an inevitable outcome.
The last monarch of the state of Chu prostrated on the ground and saluted his courtiers to the king of Qin. At this point, the 800-year-old state of Chu was declared extinct.
Destroy the state of Chu, the general trend has been decided. In the first year of the destruction of Chu, the Qin State swept away the remnants of Yan Zhao. In 221 BC, the state of Qi surrendered without a fight. The East Friday has been unresolved and chaotic for a hundred years, and it only took ten years for Yingzheng to completely end it.
The originally unknown Qin State finally unified the world, and the Legalist culture achieved the final victory in this land. Facts have proved that the Legalist culture is the most suitable for the international environment of the jungle, and the Legalist culture has assembled the entire Qin state into a sophisticated and sturdy war machine. The greed for military merit and wealth, and the fear of harsh punishment and strict laws, became the two wheels of the chariot of the Qin State. In a short period of time, this war machine exploded with unimaginable efficiency and power.
Fudan University, Ph.D. in History, Zhang Hongjie:
As for the Legalist culture, it only relies on material stimulation and punishment by the sword, while the Central Plains civilization attaches more importance to humanities, education, and spiritual pursuit. The Central Plains Lile Civilization is more suitable for an era of peace, but it is not conducive to a country to protect itself in the midst of war.
Han Wei, Associate Professor, Department of History, Peking University:
Legalist culture, on the other hand, can quickly unite the strength of the whole society and make a country strong in such a social environment of fierce competition and drastic changes.
Win the world immediately, you can't rule it immediately, but unfortunately it was Liu Bang's adviser who said this, not Qin Shi Huang's minister. The rapid success made Qin Shi Huang even more superstitious about the power of the Legalists. After unifying the world, Qin Shi Huang maximized the potential of Legalist culture. He used severe punishment to tame the people of the six countries that had just been conquered, and anyone who dared to resist was immediately imprisoned.
Qin Shi Huang had no respect for cultural heritage that could not be turned into food and weapons. He burned all the books of the princes and countries, including the historical classics and countless exquisite poetry works of the Chu State. In order to completely block the brains of the common people, he buried alive the intellectuals who dared to express discontent.
However, success is also a Legalist, and defeat is also a Legalist. Giants who lack self-control will always end up falling because they abuse their power. Less than a year after the death of Qin Shi Huang, the Chu people Chen Sheng and Wu Guang sounded the death knell of the Qin Dynasty. Because of the heavy rain encountered during the labor service, the deadline was missed, and the peasants who were to be executed decided to launch an uprising, and this small accident soon ignited the fire of anti-Qin in the hometown of Chu.
Professor Xu Shaohua, School of History, Wuhan University:
Their rebel army soon captured the original capital of the Chu State, which was Chencheng. With Chen County as the center, they established the Chu regime, and this regime was called "Zhang Chu". The so-called "Zhang Chu", Zhang Da Chu State, or carry forward the Chu State, from another meaning, can carry forward such a spirit of the Chu nation and Chu culture, and use this to call on the people of the whole country to rise up and overthrow the tyrannical Qin.
Although Chu has three households, it can die in Qin. Although this undertaking was not completed by Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, it was completed by another Chu person, Xiang Yu. Led the descendants of the Chu family as the core of the eight thousand Jiangdong disciples, Xiang Yu entered Xianyang and burned down the magnificent palace that Qin Shi Huang had worked so hard to build.
The results of the efforts of dozens of generations of monarchs of the Qin State, the Qin Dynasty, which cost millions of lives to establish, was as short-lived as this short-lived palace. The only legacy left by the Qin Dynasty was the political pattern of great unification.
The inhumanity of Qin culture makes it a culture that cannot last. Jia Yi of the Han Dynasty wrote in the "Treatise on the Passage of Qin": In the stage of conquest, the ruler can rely on force and cunning, but when governing the world, it is necessary to adjust the ruling policy according to the will of the people, and absorb the advantages of the Central Plains ritual and music civilization.
Unfortunately, as the first great unified dynasty, the Qin Dynasty did not have time to learn this and collapsed. Qin culture is like fire, although it is magnificent and gorgeous, but it quickly burns everything out; The Chu culture is like water, weak on the surface, but actually durable, and its soul is like a nine-headed bird, which quickly comes back from the dead.
In 202 BC, Liu Bang, a former commoner of Chu and a native of Peixian, ascended the throne of the emperor, and most of his comrades-in-arms who overthrew the Qin Dynasty with him were also from Chu. The establishment of the Han Dynasty can be called the rebirth of the Chu State to some extent.
Professor Xu Wenwu, Jingchu Culture Research Center, Yangtze University:
After Liu Bang established the Han Dynasty, it (the Han Dynasty) was the Han Dynasty and the Qin Dynasty in this political system, that is, like laws, rules and regulations, and like the state system, it was used by the Qin Dynasty. But culturally, it is the Han Dynasty and the Chu system, like its costumes, like its songs and dances, like its literature, like its philosophy, all inherited from the Chu people.
However, the Han Dynasty was not a continuation of the Chu State after all, and the car of history could not be turned back. Although the calendar of the Qin Dynasty and the songs and dances of the Qin Dynasty were abandoned, the most important political legacy of the Qin Dynasty, the emperor system, was inherited by the Han Dynasty. It can be said that the Han Dynasty was a mixture of Chu culture and Qin culture, however, Qin culture is bone, and Chu culture is just meat.
An ancient country with a history of 800 years was buried forever in the ground in the flames of war, but only the body died, and the soul was always alive. Those ancient and glorious cultures will always have extraordinary vitality, and they will always tenaciously pass on their excellent genes in various ways.
Today, in the hometown of Chu, we can still identify a large number of genes of Chu culture. The enterprising spirit of the Chu people, the enterprising spirit of hard work, the innovative consciousness of innovation and continuous development, the open-mindedness of being eclectic and tolerant of all rivers and the tradition of advocating martial arts and patriotism, have passed through more than 2,000 years of time and are still flowing in the blood of the people in the hometown of Chu.
People are accustomed to calling Hubei people "nine-headed birds", which fully expresses the character characteristics of Hubei people's spiritual motivation and creativity. The ancients said, "Although Chu has three households, the death of Qin will be Chu";Yang Du, a close friend, said, "If the Chinese country dies, unless the people of Hunan die." Hubei has become the "first righteous area" of the Xinhai Revolution, which is not unrelated to the hot, hot, and persistent character of the land of Jingchu.
Professor Wang Ran, School of History, Wuhan University:
There is a dialect in Wuhan, which is called "Disobedience Zhou". This dialect is very interesting, we started children, you are "not convinced by Zhou", this Wuhan dialect. What do you mean by "disobedience to Zhou"?In fact, it was the kind of resistance he (Chu people) had against the Zhou people. He never believed in authority, did not abide by the established etiquette, and dared to innovate independently.
The inheritance of Chu culture is not only the transmission of spirit, but also the inheritance of material culture. In Enshi, Hubei, there are still a group of people who survive by cutting paint. Just as the genes of these lacquer trees still come from seeds from 2,000 years ago, the ancient lacquer technique of the Chu State relies on these people to pass it down to this day.
Similarly, after years of exploration, the artists in Jingzhou have completely restored the production techniques of Chu bronzes, and the exquisite bronze art of Chu thousands of years ago has been reborn.
After the fall of the Chu State, the weavers and embroiderers in the palace were scattered all over the world, and the Chu embroidery needle method that was originally only seen in the palace spread in the land of Jing and Chu. Today, between these dexterous fingers, there is still the rhythm of the embroiderers of the Chu State two thousand years ago.
In today's western Hubei region, the folk spread the legacy of the Chu country's bud thatched wine. In order to pray for a bountiful harvest, the shamans lit fires and sprinkled cups of wine on the thatch. Through the scorching flames, we can still see the soul of Chu culture beating among the flames.
The state of Chu, this ancient country has become history, but its soul has gained immortality. Having defeated time and history, Chu culture has become a phoenix reborn from the ashes, soaring forever between heaven and earth.
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