Chapter 11 Section 3 When Human Stars Shine

Liang Siyong returned to China after receiving a master's degree from Harvard University in the summer of 1930. At this time, Liang Qichao had passed away for more than a year, and the Tsinghua Research Institute had also been disintegrated for a year. The love is beyond words.Li Ji, who was in Beiping, was grateful for the friendship between the Liang family and himself, and took the initiative to introduce Liang Siyong to Fu Sinian.From then on, Liang Siyong officially joined the ranks of the archaeological group of the Institute of History and Language, Academia Sinica, and began the archaeological academic journey in the second half of his life.

Not long after Liang Siyong entered the Institute, the famous geologist Ding Wenjiang got clues from the French missionary and paleontologist Father De Rijin who was visiting China, saying that someone discovered a Neolithic site near Angangxi, Heilongjiang, along the line of the Northeast and Middle East Railway in China.This clue reached the ears of Cai Yuanpei and Fu Sinian. Cai and Fu immediately realized the significance of the site in history and real politics, so they had the desire to send people to investigate.At that time, Fu Sinian was planning to organize his forces to write the "Compendium of Northeast History". The reason was just as Fu said: "China has had the Northeast issue for decades. Before the European War, Japan and Russia competed, and I was the fish. After the Russian Revolution, in the Beijing established the "Sino-Russian Agreement", and the Russian incident has changed in one face, while the Japanese aggression has become more violent... The Japanese have recently promoted the current world with the false claim that "Manchuria and Mongolia were not the territory of China in history". , It is not worth arguing, but the Japanese use it as a reason for their invasion of the Northeast, and they have to argue."

At this juncture, seeing Liang Siyong returning home after studying, Cai Yuanpei and Fu Sinian immediately decided to send Liang to conduct on-the-spot investigation and excavation before the Japanese launched a full-scale war of aggression against China. Historical objects are used to write history, so as to stop the evil mouths of the Japanese and dispel the lies of "the territory of Mongolia and Africa" ​​that they crazily clamored to attack and occupy China. On September 19th of this year, Liang Siyong packed his bags and left for the northeast. Braving the plague that was spreading in the Heilongjiang area and braving intermittent wars, he and his assistants calmly came to the remote and desolate Angangxi Wufu site on the 28th. Start investigating and digging.At this time, the weather in the area was very cold. Liang Siyong arrived at Angang River, inspected the first, second, third, and fourth sand hills, and soon discovered the ancient ruins, and carried out field archaeological excavations with his assistants carrying excavation tools.Due to the remoteness of the terrain, every time you go back and forth between the rural resident and the ruins, you have to take off your shoes and socks, roll your trousers to the root of your thighs, and walk barefoot in the cold stagnant water.Following the excavation of a tomb in the third sand hill on September 30, they dug pits in various sand hills to find ruins and tomb clues, and successively excavated four sand hills and a tomb in Shuidianli, the Wufu ruins, and found 300 graves. Multiple pieces of stone, bone, pottery. On October 3, the excavation work had to be suspended due to sudden heavy snowfall and freezing weather.

Liang Siyong made a preliminary study of the excavated artifacts, handed them over to the local government for partial preservation, and returned to Beiping via Rehe, so that he could inspect prehistoric sites in other places along the way. On October 21, the Liang family set off from Tongliao, passed through Kailu, Tianshan, Lindong, Linxi, Jingpeng, Chifeng, and Weichang, and arrived in Rehe. It took 38 days and traveled thousands of miles.Among them, the ruins of Chabugan Temple were discovered in Tianshan, and the ruins of Linxi, Shuangjing and Chenjiayingzi were discovered in Linxi.The Chifeng ruins were discovered in the northeast of Chifeng City.Liang Siyong collected a large number of cultural relics such as pottery sherds and stone tools at five Neolithic sites outside the Great Wall, inspected the geographical environment along the way from the perspective of an archaeologist, and returned to Peiping on November 27.

After comparing and studying the materials excavated in Rehe and the three northeastern provinces, Liang Siyong, based on the characteristics of the unearthed stone tools and printed pottery (at least in Rehe), compared Rehe to the north of the West Liaohe River with the three eastern provinces to the north of the Songhua River. It is divided into one area; the Liaohe River Basin (in a broad sense) is one area (which is characterized by the production of polished stone tools), and a clear division of cultural regions has been carried out.With the identification, comparison and understanding of prehistoric cultural materials in Hei and Re, the conclusion that "the Neolithic culture of Ang'angxi is only the eastern branch of the Neolithic culture of Rehe, Mongolia" was preliminarily drawn.

One year later, in October 1932, Liang Siyong published a 44-page, nearly 70,000-word large-scale archaeological excavation report in the first volume of the fourth volume of the Journal of the Institute of Historical and Linguistics, plus 36 editions of illustrations and sketches. The Prehistoric Site of Ang'ang Stream".Since then, the primitive cultural type mainly distributed in the middle and lower reaches of the Nenjiang River in the Songnen Plain, mainly small stone-pressed stone tools, has been called the "Ang'angxi Culture", and has played an important role in the ancient history of China and the world.The publication of Liang Siyong's scientific archaeological excavation and research report has laid a theoretical foundation and scientific basis for the study of ancient culture in the Nen River Basin.Especially in the study of stone tools, the concepts and classification standards of fine stone tools (called unitary stone tools at that time), stone core tools, and pottery fragments collected in Rehe, especially Chabuganmiao, Linxi, and Chifeng, etc. were studied. It created an innovative era division and set a scientific model for later research.At the same time, the first volume of "Compendium of History of Northeast China" written by Fu Sinian was published in Beiping in November 1932, and the four reasons listed with a large number of facts denied the nonsense of Japanese heretics.The first article in the "Outline of History" is "In recent years, the efforts of archaeologists and anthropologists in northern China and Northeast China have proved that the prehistoric era of northern China and Northeast China is the same thing in terms of race and culture." Species, history, and geography are all sufficient to show that the Northeast was a part of China in ancient times." Based on this factual basis, the Japanese theory that "Manchuria and Mongolia were not Chinese territory in history" was refuted, and the use of "ethnology, language From the perspective of learning and the knowledge of history and geography from old books, we can prove that Northeast China was originally our county; It’s also related. If historians can’t name white as black, and turn a deer into a horse, then they can’t say that the Northeast is not China in history.” The voice of the sea tide.Fu Sinian’s voice echoed Liang Siyong’s excavation report, giving the Japanese “pointing a deer into a horse” a blow to the head, and giving the Chinese people a big boost of ambition. lie.

After the fourth excavation of the Yin Ruins presided over by Li Ji began, Liang Siyong, who was resting in Beiping, received an order to bid farewell to his beloved wife Li Fuman who had just been married for just three months, and came to Anyang in high spirits. Previously, there were many sites full of pottery sherds near the Yin Ruins, but they were ignored because of the absence of oracle bone inscriptions. When Li Ji presided over the fourth excavation, he felt the need to excavate these nearby sites.So it was decided to excavate in the southeast of the Yinxu ruins, near Pinghan Road, a place called Hougang, which obviously protruded from the ground, and divided this area into the fifth area. The excavation work was independently presided over by Liang Siyong, who had just joined.

Since Liang Siyong was the only unique "sea turtle" who was truly trained in archaeology in the Chinese academic circle at that time, he was superior to other "sea turtles" and "bumps" scholars in field archaeological excavations, both in terms of thinking mode and technical skills. Even Li Ji couldn't compete with him. During the excavation, Liang Siyong led several young scholars including Wu Jinding, Liu Yao, and Yin Huanzhang, and adopted the most advanced scientific archaeological methods in the West to divide the cultural layers according to the different soil properties, soil colors, and inclusions accumulated by different cultures at the Hougang site. , succeeded in distinguishing the accumulation of ancient cultures in different eras, and discovered that painted pottery-black pottery-Yinxu culture overlapped in a certain order with extraordinary talents.This peculiar phenomenon aroused Liang Siyong's high vigilance. He realized with a scientific way of thinking and unique academic vision: since the painted pottery culture represents the Yangshao culture discovered by Andersen, does the black pottery culture represent the Longshan culture of Chengziya? ?If the assumption is true, it means that the Longshan culture is not limited to Chengziya, but should involve a wider range and represent a common prehistoric culture.This scientific insight has undoubtedly found a key to unlocking the mystery of Chinese prehistoric culture.In the face of the "unexpected discovery that is dreamed of every day" by colleagues at the Institute of History and Philology, Li Ji and other archaeologists feel that the Chengziya site is the key to obtaining this key, and it is really necessary to excavate it again to examine the content in detail and enrich the materials.Therefore, Fu Sinian decided to suspend the compilation of the Yin Ruins excavation report, and sent Liang Siyong to lead some archaeologists to the Chengziya site to carry out excavations again to verify whether the black pottery here and the black pottery from the Yin Ruins in Anyang belong to the same culture.

In the autumn of 1931, Liang Siyong led Wu Jinding, Wang Xiang and others from Anyang to Chengziya, Shandong, and started the second excavation after Li Ji.The results of the excavation proved once again that the black pottery cultures of Yin Ruins and Chengziya were basically the same. This cultural paradigm proved the correctness of Liang Siyong's previous genius inference. ——It is precisely because of this extraordinary excavation that, with clear and brilliant factual evidence, the Swedish scholar Andersen corrected the confusion of Yangshao and Longshan cultures, and rashly concluded that "stone pottery is earlier than colored pottery" erroneous conclusions, which in turn promoted the application of the advanced archaeological method of "stratigraphy" in the excavation of the Yin Ruins, and made scholars at that time and later generations realize the important principle of comparing and analyzing the Yin Ruins culture with other cultures, thus laying a solid foundation for the development of Chinese archaeology. The scientization and standardization set up a milestone coordinate.

After the excavation of Chengziya was completed, Liang Siyong led his team back to Anyang.In subsequent excavations, a pure black pottery cultural site was found in Tongle Village in the west of Yin Ruins.This discovery made Liang Siyong firmly believe in the scientific basis for the division of Yangshao culture-Longshan culture-Shang (Xiaotun) culture in Hougang according to the time of existence.This great discovery "proves that Yin Shang culture was built on Chengziya-style black pottery culture".Liang Siyong's division of the three layers of Hougang successfully constructed the basic framework of the development history of ancient Chinese civilization, which brought about an epoch-making leap in the study of Chinese archeology and ancient history.Since then, the dry river of history began to flow again along the veins of time, and Liang Siyong also became famous in one fell swoop because of this epoch-making discovery, establishing the status of a generation of masters in the history of Chinese archaeology. The wish of the year.It's just that the ill-fated Liang Rengong had already gone to Huangquan, so he couldn't raise a glass to celebrate with him. In the spring of 1932, during the sixth Yin Ruins excavation presided over by Li Ji, the foundation site of the Yin Ruins palace was discovered. This discovery undoubtedly has more scientific and archaeological value and significance than the simple discovery of oracle bones.From the autumn of 1932 to the spring of 1934, archaeologists with Dong Zuobin, Guo Baojun, Li Guangyu, Liu Yao, and Shi Zhangru as the main team members carried out the seventh, eighth, and ninth consecutive excavations in Yin Ruins, and shifted their attention from Xiaotun At Hougang and Houjiazhuang Nandi and Nantai on the north bank of the Huan River, the coveted Wangling area was discovered, and the location of the Shang Dynasty royal tombs has never been recorded in historical records before.

In the autumn of 1934 and the autumn of 1935, the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth excavations of the Yin Ruins presided over by Liang Siyong followed closely the signs of the found royal tombs and continued to expand the results.At this time, almost all the main force of the archaeological team of the Institute of History and Philology was transferred to this excavation ranks at the forefront of advancing historical knowledge. , Liu Yao, Qi Yanpei, Hu Fulin (Housuan), Yin Huanzhang, Li Guangyu, Wang Xiang, Li Jingdan, Gao Quxun (Xiaomei), Pan Cui and other archaeological groups "Ten King Kongs" (South Press: also known as "Ten Brothers" ), as well as temporary staff and interns Ma Yuancai, Xia Nai (Zuo Ming), Wang Jianxun, Dong Peixian, Li Chunyan, Sun Wenqing, plus veterans of the Institute of History and Philology Fu Sinian, Li Ji, and Dong Zuobin.Fu, Li, and Dong came to Anyang from Nanjing as senior inspectors, shuttled around the archaeological excavation site, and assisted Liang Siyong in dealing with various difficult issues and affairs.During the period, Huang Wenbi and other inspectors participated in the twelfth excavation, French sinologist Pelliot, Chinese scholars Xu Zhongshu, Teng Gu, Wang Xiantang, Wen Yiduo of Tsinghua University, Chen Mengjia of Yenching University, and teachers and students of Henan University Visited the construction site one after another.All of a sudden, on the excavation site of Yin Ruins, which is dozens of square kilometers, masters gathered, shining like a rainbow.The confident Liang Siyong fully demonstrated the grandeur of a strategist, with careful planning and firm command, employing more than 550 people every day. If including researchers and visiting scholars, the number reached nearly 600 at most.According to Shi Zhangru, who participated in the excavation, there are five most excavations in Xibeigang, namely: the most participating staff; the most workers; the most money; the most land occupation; and the most harvest.Among them, "In terms of wages alone, each person is paid 40 cents a day, paid once every five days, and two yuan per person. Five hundred people will be paid 1,000 yuan in five days. This work is 102 days, except for Sundays and afternoons. The actual number of work stoppages in rainy days is about 85 days, and wages need to be paid 17 times, which is 17,000 yuan. This figure sounds like nothing now, but it sounded really appalling at the time. 17,000 Yuan, that’s not bad!” In addition to the oracle bone inscriptions, the results of this excavation can only be seen from the general description of the catalog of exhibits that participated in the Second National Art Exhibition of the Ministry of Education. One out of ten of the northwest hills of Houjiazhuang comes from the north of Xiaotun Village, seven miles west of the city. Houjiazhuang is the remnant of the mausoleum of the Yin Dynasty, and Xiaotun Village is the site of the palace of the Yin Dynasty." Three large-scale excavations of the Yin Ruins revealed a large area of ​​ancient ruins that had been buried underground for thousands of years. Archaeologists excavated a total of 10 royal tombs and more than 1,200 small tombs around the royal tombs, as well as bird pits, animal pits, chariot pits, and other sacrificial offerings. pit.The large-scale and majestic tombs of the Shang Dynasty that were revealed were plundered and excavated. Thousands of rich and exquisite bronze wares, jade wares, bone wares, stone carvings and other unearthed cultural relics were astonishing and shocked the world. In 1936, following the thirteenth excavation presided over by Guo Baojun, the fourteenth excavation presided over by Liang Siyong made another breakthrough in the search for oracle bones.In the famous ash pit of the Shang Dynasty numbered YH127, 17,096 oracle bones with words were found at one time, of which more than 300 were undamaged full-page oracle bones with oracle inscriptions.More importantly, these oracle bones came from the same pit, indicating that there is some kind of internal connection between them, which is of higher academic value than the scattered oracle bone fragments handed down from generation to generation.This major discovery made scholars ecstatic. In the spring of 1937, the fifteenth larger-scale excavation of the Yin Ruins, presided over by Shi Zhangru, started again.The excavation began on March 16 and continued until June.At this time, the North China region is already covered with clouds of war, and the situation is getting tighter day by day.In the face of the imminent Sino-Japanese war, take precautions.The Yin Ruins excavation had to be hastily concluded on the 19th—this was the last excavation before the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, and it was also the last farewell between the archaeologists of the Academia Sinica and the Yin Ruins archaeological work during the Kuomintang rule. So far, under the auspices of the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, excavations at the Yin Ruins have been carried out for nine years and fifteen times since 1928, and 24,918 pieces of oracle bones with characters have been unearthed, as well as a large number of skulls, pottery, jade, bronze and other artifacts.The scale of the excavation, the number of people involved, and the abundance of harvest are unprecedented, and rare in the world's archaeological history.This great achievement of Genesis, "Only the research of Zhoukoudian can be compared with it in terms of scale and importance, but the importance of Yin Ruins in the study of Chinese history is unparalleled." When the excavators packed the unearthed artifacts in a hurry and escorted them to the building of the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica in Beiji Pavilion, Qintian Mountain, Nanjing, they were still panting, and the sweat on their foreheads had not been wiped off. The Lugou Bridge Incident, which shocked China and the world, broke out.