Blue and white porcelain has an early history of development in my country. The most original prototype of blue and white porcelain appeared in the Tang Dynasty.
In the Yuan Dynasty, Jingzhen Kiln successfully fired blue and white porcelain, ushering in the era of Chinese porcelain from plain porcelain to colored porcelain.
The porcelain jar with the silver bowl buckled in it, the decoration, and the painting style give people a bold and bold feeling at first glance.
This kind of porcelain with many layers of paintings was very popular in the Yuan Dynasty.
It is precisely because of this kind of popularity that the production technology of blue and white porcelain has gradually become mature.
The Ming and Qing dynasties were the peak period of popularity of blue and white porcelain.
So for the blue and white Yunlong jar now placed in front of the team members, it is obvious which dynasty it was made in!
The blue and white Yunlong jar and the silverware inside were brought to the rear soon after.
The action team entered the desert, and the support volunteer team behind them contained some knowledgeable professionals.
These experts have inferred from history that the time when the blue and white Yunlong jar was buried underground should be the late Yuan Dynasty.
As for how they inferred it, they have to start with the reasons for the storage.
There are generally two reasons for the creation of cellars. One is the remains of sacrifices or ceremonial activities;
Second, due to reasons such as reserve wars and wars, people temporarily buried their belongings underground, but later left them without a chance to take them out.
When war comes, many people are likely to choose to move to other places to avoid disaster, and their belongings that cannot be taken away have to be buried on the spot.
If the owner of the property died during the war, or had no chance to return to his hometown, then the buried property would remain underground for a long time, becoming what we now call a hoard.
The place where the blue and white Yunlong jar was discovered is on the northwest bank of a dry lake.
This lake is about fifteen kilometers away from an ancient city in the desert.
Obviously, because of this lake, this place used to be a traffic artery.
This geographical location was particularly advantageous in ancient northwest China.
According to research, wealthy businessmen and residents have gathered here since the Six Dynasties.
By the late Yuan Dynasty, the ruling class, dominated by Mongolian nobles, was too cruel to enslave other ethnic groups.
In addition, the Yellow River dams have been in disrepair for years, bursting many times, and successive natural and man-made disasters have led to the tragic situation of people starving to death everywhere.
At that time, there were people who broke away from their hometowns. People in the inland areas naturally fled to the south, while people in the western areas naturally fled to the west.
Unfortunately, the Mongolian Expedition started at the very beginning, and they had no way to escape.
This is probably how this cave in the desert was formed.
In the Yuan Dynasty, there were still many such cellars, especially in the Central Plains region.
For example, in 1351 AD, in order to open up the north-south waterway, the ruling class of the Yuan Dynasty forced 150,000 peasants to build canals and embankments. There were widespread complaints and the people's anger reached its peak.
At this time, a man named Han Shantong and his friend Liu Futong believed that the time had come for an uprising.
The two made up a folk song, "The stone man with one eye stirs up rebellion in the Yellow River" and spread it everywhere, and then quietly buried a one-eyed stone man in the course of the Yellow River.
On the back of the stone man is also engraved "The stone man has one eye, and the whole world will turn upside down when this thing appears."
Just when the farmers were building canals and embankments full of resentment, the stone man was dug out as predicted by Han and Liu, and people's hearts suddenly moved.
Han and Liu took the opportunity to gather farmers to launch an uprising. This uprising army was called the Red Turban Army in history.
Zhu Yuanzhang, who later established the Ming Dynasty regime, joined this rebel army.
In the twelfth year of Zhizheng, that is, 1352 AD, the Red Scarf Army captured Hangzhou, and the storm of peasant uprisings began to sweep across Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
When the peasant uprising army arrived, the wealthy people fled in order to save their lives, and their belongings that could not be taken away had to be buried underground.
According to inference, the time when the cave discovered by Gao Qijing and others should have been buried after the Western Expedition in the early Yuan Dynasty.
This provides an important basis for judging the firing time of the blue and white Yunlong jar.
In addition to judging the silverware in the jar based on the reasons for the storage, it also helps a lot in determining the age of the blue and white Yunlong jar.
In addition to the large silver bowl that covered the mouth of the jar when it was unearthed, there are more than fifty pieces of exquisite and elegant silverware of various shapes hidden in the blue and white Yunlong jar.
Among them is a silver plate with an inscription of the year 714 of the Arabic Hijri calendar.
The Hijri calendar is also called the Hijri calendar. The year 714 of the Hijri calendar is 1314 AD, which belongs to the middle of the Yuan Dynasty.
This also proves that the Yunlong jar could not have been buried earlier than 1314.
The embossed character story silver plate unearthed at the same time is exquisitely crafted and highly ingenious. The complexity of its production is very rare among the Yuan Dynasty silverware unearthed in the past.
The edge of the cloud plate is engraved with a circular cloud pattern, and the embossed characters and stories on the bottom of the plate are like reliefs.
The whole picture is based on fine cloud patterns, with osmanthus trees and jade rabbits depicted on it.
In the picture, three people are standing on the clouds, and six people are standing on the pavilion on the right, two of them are holding fans, and the other four are holding wine vessels or fruits.
After preliminary identification, it is believed that this is a picture of the Moon Palace of Emperor Ming of the Tang Dynasty, and the middle one among the three people standing in the clouds is the Emperor Ming of the Tang Dynasty.
The story of Tang Minghuang and Yang Guifei was popular in Yuan Dynasty operas and among the people.
The content of the story presented on this silver plate is consistent with the popular style of the Yuan Dynasty.
The production time of the silverware also proves that the blue and white Yunlong jar used as a container should be a product of the Yuan Dynasty.
In addition to exquisite silver vessels, many silver ingots and bars used as currency at that time were also unearthed in the blue and white Yunlong jar cellar.
However, the shape of these silver ingots is not quite the same as the round and cute silver ingots we often see in movies and television works.
In fact, in the third year of the Yuan Dynasty, that is, 1335 AD, the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty melted the silver from the treasury at that time into silver ingots weighing fifty taels, which was called Yuanbao, which means "treasure of the Yuan Dynasty".
This title continued into the Ming Dynasty and Qing Dynasty, and Yuanbao gradually became the collective name for silver ingots.
In today's common paintings such as the God of Wealth, most of the ingots have the shape of a bulging belly on both sides.
In fact, the real shape of Yuanbao in history is not like this. The shape of Yuanbao originated in the Tang Dynasty.
By the Yuan Dynasty, the shape of the ingot developed into a relatively standard girdle, with a flat bottom and upward sloping sides, facing inwards.
By the Ming and Qing dynasties, the shapes of Yuanbao became diverse.
But most of them are still horseshoe-shaped with rounded corners, a slightly convex bottom, slightly upturned sides, and basically no round belly.
It turns out that the shape of the real ingot is somewhat similar to that of a coffin.
In the past, out of taboo, people modified the image of Yuanbao to be more rounded and plump in their artistic creations.
This painting method gradually became a strange continuation, and of course it also became a characteristic of the times. This is the origin of Yuanbao.