Thoughts on the Great Wall from Jiayuguan to Jiuquan

After leaving the Jiayuguan Gate Tower, we stayed at a little-known hotel in Jiayuguan City. Looking from a distance through the window, in the night, the city walls of Jiayuguan are shadowy, the buildings in the city are towering, and the streets are busy with cars and pedestrians.

The emerging city of Jiayuguan was founded in the 1950s as a derivative of the "Jiuquan Iron and Steel Company". It was established as a city in 1965 and became a municipality directly under the Central Government of Gansu Province with the approval of the State Council in 1971. Historically, Jiayuguan was a city dominated by immigrants, with residents coming from all over, mostly from Northeast China and Shandong.

Jiayuguan is a city where the Great Wall culture and Silk Road culture blend. It has profound cultural heritage, rich tourism resources and rapid economic development. In just a few years, it has won the titles of "National Sanitary City", "National Excellent City for Comprehensive Environmental Improvement", "China's Excellent Tourism City", "National Environmental Protection Model City", "National Advanced City for Landscaping and Greening", " National Double Support City", "National Drug-Free City" and other honors.

Walking in today's Jiayuguan City, it is difficult to imagine that this place was once a barren land where "the wind blew stones away, and no grass grew everywhere". There is a red stainless steel sculpture in the city center that rotates day and night. This is the urban sculpture named after "Rise", which symbolizes that Xiongguan Steel City is like a sail that will always stand on the tide, riding the wind and waves, and moving forward bravely.

Visiting tourist souvenir shops is a curse that is difficult for people traveling in domestic tour groups to get rid of. It depends on the exquisite design of the tour group and the tourists themselves. There are a dazzling array of tourist souvenirs in Jiayuguan, among which the luminous cups, wind and rain sculptures, Gobi stone paintings, camel hair paintings, and Jiayu stone inkstones are the most famous.
Jiayuguan Jiuquan Luminous Cup Arts and Crafts Co., Ltd. is the last product promotion point on this trip to the North Silk Road. "The luminous cup of grape wine will remind you immediately if you want to drink the pipa. Don't laugh when you are lying drunk on the battlefield. How many people have fought in ancient times." For thousands of years, this kind of poem has fascinated many men. !

The author of this poem, Wang Han, was a famous drunkard. He drank alcohol willfully, was unruly in his talents, and behaved wildly. However, there is an indisputable fact that his eternal song has inadvertently made a super commercial advertisement that travels through time and space for Jiuquan’s luminous cup today.
According to legend, there is a wine spring in the Gobi desert that is fragrant all year round. Two immortals, the Big Dipper and the South Dipper, travel here. Since God has given you fine wine, why not drink it? How could it be difficult for an immortal to have wine but not a cup? The two immortals pointed their fingers, and the two stones beside the wine fountain immediately turned into wine cups, exquisite and clear, as bright as beads.
The wine cup used by the two immortals subsequently became popular among the people. It can not only hold wine, but also contain eternal pride. After being slightly modified by literati, it became a well-known luminous cup. Therefore, the people of Jiayuguan, who are good at dealing with money, developed the luminous cup into a special tourist product without paying any advertising fees. Its advertising has been infinitely amplified by poets of all ages.
Jiayuguan's luminous cup is crystal clear and expensive. The material is sourced from the purely natural and fine-textured Qilian Mountain snake-pattern jade, and is crafted using traditional craftsmanship. The cup wall is as thin as an eggshell, has a natural texture, is smooth and transparent, and can be used in four sections. Using it in midsummer can also yield unexpected effects. The wine it contains will feel like ice in the cup.

I don’t like smoking or drinking, so I brought a few luminous cup souvenirs that I didn’t care about the material to bring a perfect end to the ten-day journey. As we board the train from Jiayuguan to Beijing, the desert landscape between Jiayuguan and Jiuquan comes into view one by one. The Tiansheng Bridge, the Tuolai River, the Ming Great Wall, the ancient beacons, and the beacons where ancient women had been stationed were like stars in the distance, flickering in and out before my eyes.
 

Tianshengqiao

 

Yuxiu snake pattern flower brocade robe,

Zhang Qian rode his horse to create the bridge.

The Silk Road is dug up and climbed higher and higher,

The Buddha's shadow is painted blue and embroidered with peach.

The tiger leaps over the three mountains and the Qilin Garden,

Dragons soar all over the world and Phoenix nest.

Lai Shui Huan snake pattern jade,

When will China return to Shun Yao?

 

Note: On the Tuolai River outside Jiayuguan,

There was a time when Zhang Qian was on an envoy to the Western Regions

Walking over the Tiansheng Bridge.

 

 

Women and beacons

 

Men wear brocade belts and Wu hooks,

The woman was bleeding in the beacon.

It is common for a corpse to be wrapped in horse leather.

The sword picks up the blue silk knife and hangs over the head.

Looking across the green mountains and flying geese,

The farm cattle are abandoned and hidden in the streets.

It is sad to leave home and hear the joy of joining the army,

Returning to the embroidered building with white hair.

 

Note: On the beacon embankment of the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty,

Women were often recruited to guard them.

 

 

From Jiayuguan to Jiuquan

 

The ruins of the pier were defeated and flooded the wilderness;

Suddenly I passed the wine country from Qilian.

The yellow wind monster is invisible to ordinary eyes,

Mistakenly put the destiny into the Rubik's Cube.

The gluttony devours the dream of sangzi,

A feast to celebrate the new chapter.

Dantaiqiu is full of smoke and green,

How can it be compared to a puddle of water in a peach forest?

 

  
From Xincheng Township, 20 kilometers northeast of Jiayuguan City, to the east of Dingjiazha, 8 kilometers away from Jiuquan City, there are more than 1,700 Wei and Jin Dynasty (220-149) scattered on the Gobi Desert with a radius of more than ten kilometers. year) large group of ancient tombs. Most of the tomb chambers in these ancient tombs are made of portrait bricks. If these tomb chambers are connected together, they will look like an "underground gallery."
Why are there so many ancient tombs in the vast Gobi Desert? Some experts believe that this was during the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. After Wei Qing and Huo Qubing defeated the Xiongnu with their troops, many small countries in the Western Regions fell into the arms of the Han Dynasty. In order to strengthen the defense power of border counties, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty moved more than one million people to settle in the Hetao area and the Hexi Corridor. This is the historical background for the appearance of thousands of ancient tombs in the Gobi Desert.

Even under the bright sun, the bone-chilling emptiness and loneliness are still suffocating. The decadent Great Wall is like a thousand-year-old mummy, remaining in pieces in the boundless desert. There is always a feeling that with my writing skills, it is really difficult to convey the past and present life of the Ming Great Wall between Jiayuguan and Jiuquan on paper. Looking back and thinking about the Great Wall almost always accompanied my next trip.
Qin Shihuang, the one emperor throughout the ages, was so cruel in his killings that swept through the six kingdoms, and built the Ying family's "eternal empire" on numerous bones. After unifying the world, he spent all the power of the country to build himself a unique mausoleum in the imperial capital Chang'an, built the Great Wall on the northern border, and built an imperial highway between Chang'an and the Great Wall.
It is said that the Great Wall was built for the safety of the family and the country, but whose home is that home? Whose country is that country? Whose bones are buried under the foundation of the Great Wall? Whose blood and tears are sprinkled beside the crenellations on the Great Wall? On the top of the Great Wall, whose ancestor’s soul can’t rest in peace is lingering?
In the late 1980s, a banned TV series became a precursor to people's ideological liberation. The reflection on loess civilization and the analysis of the "Great Wall" and "Dragon" culture triggered the yearning for blue civilization in that era. Although that film was imprisoned, its spark of thinking has illuminated the once dark conscience of our generation.

On the road from Jiayuguan to Jiuquan, standing by the window, facing the ruined sections of the Great Wall in the rolling yellow sand, I remembered the wonderful words in that film: "In the eyes of the wise, the majestic Great Wall is no longer the eternal symbol of a nation." Pride is a closed and conservative symbol, a huge tragic memory."
Traveling through time and space, we arrived at a time when construction of the Great Wall had not yet begun. The Spring and Autumn Period was a great era when hundreds of schools of thought contended, including Confucius, Laozi, Mozi, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, etc., hundreds of schools of thought, and the stars were shining brightly for thousands of years. In the great era, sages and great philosophers appeared in both the East and the West. While Confucius was traveling around the world, on the other side of the Himalayas, Gautama Buddha founded Buddhism. When King Xuan of Qi founded Jixia Academy to bring together scholars from various schools, Plato established an academy in Athens on the Mediterranean, where Aristotle studied.
Today's philosophers call that era the Axial Age of world culture. The various ideas produced in that era affected the development trajectory of all mankind. Western civilization was flowing freely in an unenclosed space, but Qin Shihuang not only built a city wall, but also dug pits to bury independent thinking literati, set fire to the works of his predecessors, and made thinkers curl up and groan under butcher knives and sticks.
Under the guidance of Dong Zhongshu, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty abandoned hundreds of schools of thought and only respected Confucianism, which set the precedent for subsequent emperors to regard Confucianism as their god. The prosperous Tang Dynasty, with its ambitions to embrace the world, inadvertently fell into the strange circle of the Five Hus and Sixteen Kingdoms. The weak Song Dynasty, the ferocious Ming Dynasty, and the violent conquests of ethnic groups outside the Great Wall of the Yuan and Qing Dynasties, caused the openness and tolerance of the pre-Qin era to gradually become incomplete in our genetic inheritance.
My thoughts are still wandering in the long river of ancient civilization, and the train I am riding has entered the realm of Beijing. The most famous section of the Great Wall of China is on the outskirts of this northern imperial capital of the Six Dynasties. Juyongguan, Badaling, Mutianyu, Gubeikou, and Simatai are all the highlights of the Great Wall. It is a household name that "if you don't see the Great Wall, you are not a true man." The "great ancient architectural miracles" make the people of the world yearn for it. Standing on the top of the Great Wall, many people will feel that their bodies are immediately lifted six feet higher. But I, for some reason, was so shocked that when I faced the wonders of the world that I had climbed many times, I felt a little desolate, tragic, and even helpless. Yan's confusion.

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