A rethinking of the logic of the continental margin.
Hello everyone, I haven't written a book review for a long time, and in the past two days, I have read a new book "This is the Silk Road" written by Professor Hou Yangfang of the Dan Institute of History and Geography, and I think it is very interesting, so I will share it with you.
As the name suggests, this book talks about the Silk Road, but Mr. Hou put forward a very bold statement at the beginning of the book, he said that we often talk about the Silk Road, but most ordinary Chinese people may not understand what the real Silk Road is, and many people's understanding of the Silk Road is based on a fragmentary imagination.
For example, there is a mural at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda Station of Xi'an Metro, which depicts the story of Xuanzang (Tang monk) who set off from Chang'an and went to India along the Silk Road to learn scriptures. The meaning is very beautiful, but many of the things painted in it are wrong, such as the image of Master Xuanzang, you will find that he carries a particularly large basket that can cover the rain, but the problem is that we all know that the places along the Silk Road are dry and rainless. If Tang Seng wore such a bulky and useless outfit, would he really be able to finish this journey?
So where did this outfit come about? Mr. Hou researched that the original image of this Tang monk is now in the Tokyo National Museum in Japan, and the painting is a walking monk in the Kamakura period, and it was not said that it was a Tang monk at first, but after the image came from Japan, after a misunderstanding, it was somehow defaulted to the standard image of Tang Seng by many people. However, in that part of Japan, the climate is rainy, and the distance between villages is very short, so the monks need to think more about sheltering from the rain than the convenience of long journeys. Therefore, although they are both "foot monks", the images of foot monks and Tang monks in the Kamakura period of Japan are almost certainly different.
How so? Thanks to the fact that some time ago in a subway station in Guangxi, he held an advertising painting in a fan and said that he was not as knowledgeable as Mr. Hou, and he didn't like to read, otherwise wouldn't there be another wave on the Internet, saying that this is "replacing China with the Japanese"?
Jokes aside, this simple example vividly illustrates that much of our understanding of the ancient Silk Road today is actually filled with imagination, and many of this imagination is misplaced.
So why does the concept of the Silk Roads feel both familiar and alien to us?
Speaking of which, although the existence of the Silk Road is very ancient, the discovery or "self-realization" of this route by historians is actually a very shallow thing, and it is only more than 100 years old.
In 1877, the German historical geographer Richthofen published a book entitled "China: Personal Travels and the Results of Research Based on It", in which on page 499 Richthofen drew a beautiful color map linking China's Henan, Shaanxi, and the Persian Gulf by land with two lines.
See the watermark and then there is a text in the lower right corner of the map that says that this is the ** route between China and the West from 128 BC to 150 AD, because he guessed that the general equivalent of this road was silk, so he called it the Silk Road (Seidenstrasse).
Why did Richthofen come up with the concept of the Silk Road? I think it had something to do with the world environment in his native Germany at the time. After the Franco-Prussian War ended in 1871, Prussia consolidated the German states to form the Second German Reich, and a new power emerged on the continent. However, as soon as Germany was reunified, it was surrounded by other European powers, especially Britain, the maritime hegemon, because of its too strong strength. That generation of German elites was actually thinking about the same question: What is the way out for Germany's future development? Are we heading to the ocean, developing the ocean**, or reviving land power and colluding with the mainland?
In this context, there was indeed a school of thought at that time, which believed that Germany could connect the East and West by land by rail, in order to compete with the British-dominated maritime system. Germany even plans to build a "3B railway" to connect Berlin, Byzantium (Constantinople), and Baghdad, and project ** forces directly to the Persian Gulf.
So from the Persian Gulf further east, is there a feasible ** route to China? Richthofen actually came to China with this question in mind, so he eventually became the originator of the concept of the "Silk Road".
However, although Richthofen proposed the concept of the Silk Road, he did not give a more appropriate explanation for the concept.
In fact, if we put aside the Germans' thinking of "finding a way to break through" at that time, the "Silk Road" may be more appropriately named "Silk Road Network" - it is not a planned communication road that is known in advance to be able to go, but is based on the free and spontaneous formation of various towns along the way, each node is connected to each other, and "one step at a time" ** network.
And the most important driving force in this process is freedom** - the reason why the Han court wanted to transport silk (silk silk) to the Western Regions was not to do business, but to pay for military expenses. Due to the lack of copper coins and too heavy for long-distance transportation, it is necessary to use silk silk to reward the soldiers who "pass through the Western Regions". After the soldiers got the silk reward, they would be exchanged as currency in the local area, so the silk went to the hands of the merchants of the Western Regions, and the merchants of the Western Regions carried out island-hopping short-distance business transactions between towns and towns, and then sold high and bought low, and followed the commercial instinct to transport these silks to more western towns and towns, in exchange for precious stones, gold and silverware and other goods that were lower in Western towns. So gradually, the entire "silk road network" was connected in this short-distance "relay".
This is very different from the way in which da Gama transported a shipload of spices from India in the Age of Discovery, and directly obtained dozens of times the profits, which is the essence of the ancient Silk Road. To put it mildly, it even has a hint of modern "internet thinking". Its advantage is that it has a super anti-strike ability, and if any node on the road network is broken in the event of war, the entire network can be maintained because of the existence of short-distance profits. The disadvantage is that in fact, everyone in the whole process is not aware of what they are doing - whether it is the Central Plains Dynasty that is eager to reward its soldiers, every merchant in the Western Regions who does short-distance **, or the Roman nobles who finally buy "silk from Seris" in the Roman market, they don't know that the two worlds of the East and the West are connected to each other in this way, and even interdependent.
This is the great power of freedom in the classical era, and it is also its covering. From the first day of its actual existence, the ancient Silk Road was not the product of subjective construction or imagination, but the free growth of all ordinary people along the way based on their own survival and demands.
So,"This is the Silk Road", and it is ultimately a child of freedom and development.
Of course, because he is a serious researcher of history and geography, in the spirit of rigorous study, Mr. Hou Yangfang did not say many concepts so arbitrarily and accurately in the writing process - Mr. Hou Yangfang said that he originally wanted to name the book "The Silk Road You Have Never Seen", because only after combining historical and geographical research, you can construct what the ancient Silk Road was like through reasonable imagination.
For example, when many people see the relics of today's Silk Road, they think that the ancient Silk Road should be a camel bell on the sand sea, but as Mr. Hou said: First of all, the image of the desert camel bell is often seen on the ancient Sahara-Arab trade route, and many deserts in China are actually the Gobi Desert, with few stones, let alone sand dunes. Secondly, even if it is these dry Gobi, the ancient Silk Road caravans are also around, the so-called "living by water and grass", the ancient Silk Road along should be a flourishing scene of abundant water and grass and the south of the Yangtze River, and he even thinks that Xuanzang should not have crossed the sand dunes and walked through the desert.
In fact, when you first read This is the Silk Road, you probably feel that it is more like a "travel diary" written by a scholar. After Mr. Hou put forward the proposition of re-understanding the Silk Road at the beginning and narrated the historical changes of the Silk Road, he immediately entered the detailed research of "Traveling Ten Thousand Miles", and made detailed historical research on each important node on the Silk Road - Hexi Corridor, Lop Nur, Loulan, Yumen Pass, Jianmo Valley, Big Stone Cliff, Princess Fort, Green Ridge, Xuanzang once had the "Iron Gate" of Central Asia, etc., etc., and a large number of restored maps and scenes. This is not a simple investigation that can be done, but the result of the author's 10 years, more than 20 times, and a total of 30,000 kilometers of travel, constantly revisiting the Silk Road for field investigations, and with a large number of desk research.
And because this book belongs to the "Dafang" series of books of CITIC Publishing House, the illustrations in the book can be called exquisite and exquisite. This point is ***.
Mr. Hou also recorded an extended audio program for the book, which can be listened to for free on the Himalayas.
To say more, I have been in contact with a lot of friends who have been to Xinjiang for self-driving tours, all the way down, spending a lot of time and money, but all the way down, a question about the travel feelings, in addition to some historical sites along the way that I don't know whether they are true or false, that is, all of them are Internet celebrity attractions waiting to be cut leeks, and then the rest is some vague memories of the long yellow sand or the magnificent mountains and rivers. ”
In fact, it is very wasteful to travel to the "Western Regions" in this way, because it is obviously the birthplace of our civilization and the exchange between the East and the West, and it is the place where "Qinghai Changyun Dark Snow Mountain, Lonely City Looking at Yumen Pass", "The Desert is Lonely, and the Sunset on the Long River" is located. It's too boiled to burn the harp.
Therefore, if you ask me to recommend a book that can make you re-understand the Silk Road that you have never seen before, and have the most perfect experience and spiritual gain when you have the heart to re-walk this ancient road, then I would recommend this book "This is the Silk Road", which is a rigorous historical and geographical monograph, but it is also a wonderful and interesting to read, scattered with countless refreshing knowledge points of the "travel book".
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