On the first day of February, the fourteenth year of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty.
Somewhere in Jiangyin, in a seemingly well-to-do house, an old man with a vicissitudes of life and a sick look on his face picked up a rat-whisker pen with his skinny hands, and lightly dipped a little on the inkstone.
Ink, sighing at the blank book in front of me.
No matter how many times he picked up the pen, he could not put it down to write what was in his heart, so he had to put down the pen and close his eyes to meditate.
After a while, a smile slowly appeared on his face, as if he was recalling the happiest and most satisfying thing in his life. No one knew that at this moment, the beautiful scenery, vigor and danger in most places in the Ming Dynasty were all in his mind
Emerge slowly.
In the end, the picture in his mind was frozen in a vast expanse of snow. He had been to that place before, but he had destroyed all the diary records about that place. However, he had recorded all the records he had traveled across this great river and mountain.
After coming down, would it be a huge regret to miss out on the place that he admired the most?
Finally, he slowly opened his eyes. His tired eyes became extremely energetic for some reason.
The pen is lifted and the words are dropped.
After the five small characters of "Xu Hongzu's Notes" appeared on the cover, he paused for a moment, and then wrote several smaller annotations below: "Recalling the First Exploration of Buzhou Mountain."
Looking at the writing on the cover, Xu Hongzu let out a breath, as if he had released all the pressure.
"In the spring of the eleventh year of Chongzhen, I traveled to Yunnan and heard that in the far west, north of Kunlun, there was Mount Buzhou. The Gonggong clan fought with the emperor in the past and was defeated and touched the pillar of heaven. Because of this, it became Mount Buzhou. It has been iced all year round.
Covered with snow, there is the Qiong Yao Heavenly Palace and the Queen Mother's Yao Pond. I initially thought it was a talk about gods and monsters, but I didn't agree. My friend invited me to go with him to find this desperate situation. I didn't believe it was wrong. Later my friend showed him the evidence, and I was very surprised.
Fascinated. Then I went west with my friends, from Yunnan and Guizhou to Shu, then turned north, crossed the West Sea, entered Tibet, passed through the desert and arrived at Congling. I slept on a thatch pillow, soaked in the wind and snow, and narrowly escaped death. Ten and nine people traveling with me, only
Eight people have been saved..." With a flourish of pen, the handwriting, like a beautiful landscape, began to appear on the blank page, but from the continuous line of handwriting, the lines of handwriting revealed endless heaviness.
His body was very weak, so after writing for a while, he would stop and rest for a while. It was like this intermittently, as if every word was the footprints he had stepped on in the past, turned into words, and engraved in the book.
Passed down through the ages.
…
This is not a thick book, and it took him more than twenty days to write it. In addition to the text, he also drew what he saw along the way, including a map of this trip.
In the process of writing, his mind was greatly exhausted. After writing the book, he realized that his life had come to an end. Within a few days, he called his relatives to his side and gave some funeral instructions.
The first thing is that I hope that my relatives can compile his life and travel notes into a book and publish it all over the world.
The second thing is to ask his family to hide the last volume he wrote so that it cannot be circulated outside.
Not long after the funeral arrangements were made, Xu Hongzu passed away.
A few years later, Qing troops entered the pass and war broke out.
The more than two million words of travel notes written by Xu Hongzu during his lifetime were destroyed by the war, and only a few hundred thousand words of fragments remain in the world. This is the "Travel Notes of Xu Xiake" published by later generations.
But the last text he wrote in his life is unknown. No one knows what kind of stunning scenery the most impressive trip in the life of the great Ming Dynasty traveler was.